Grief's Invitation

Discovering the wholeness of a broken heart

Image by Kevin McIver from Pixabay

A few weeks ago, when meeting my writing partner Lucinda Pepper for a check-in over tea, we began with personal updates before reporting on our writing goals. Usually our personal check-in is brief, but this time was different. As each of us revealed unique and significant grief we were carrying that day, we instinctively shifted and devoted our time to exchanging the stories of loss that were weighing on our hearts – friends who had recently died, a friend living with debilitating illness, a cherished relationship frayed at the seams, violence in the news, near and far. We shared tears and comfort both.

As our time was almost up, I said, “I suppose the only thing we might ask about our writing today is ‘How does one write with a broken heart?’”

To which Lucinda wisely responded, “I know the answer to that. It’s the only way I’ve ever written.”

Recalling their words now, I realize it is an answer that might have been spoken by any of my favorite writers. Because to write with a broken heart is to draw from one’s own experiences of love and loss, to approach the open page in a posture of vulnerability and relationship, as aware of life’s impermanence as of its beauty. The writers who do this are creating the literature I like to read. As the poet Mary Oliver put it:

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

My book Trusting Change, names “Grieving” as the second threshold skill because grief is not just important for writers but for all of us living in a changing world. Because change will deliver grief to our doorstep as surely as the daily mail. And, in doing so, it offers an important gift for our own transformation and the world’s. Because grief is essentially an opening, an invitation to let ourselves be changed and reconnected, by our loss, to community and the wider world.

The problem is, who, truthfully, really wants a broken heart? We can reframe it, as adrienne maree brown admirably does, saying “The broken heart can cover more territory.” I like that. But I have also felt grief’s impact as a sledgehammer, not just breaking my heart open but shattering it into pieces, some of them irretrievably lost. How do I write or live with grief that breaks my heart apart and sends me scurrying after the shards?

The poet Andrea Gibson asks “What if we don’t have to be healed / to be whole?” Conversely, I wonder, what if we don’t have to be whole to be healed? (The latter question is beautifully explored by Susan Raffo in her book, Liberated to the Bone.) Maybe the transformative healing made possible by grief is neither meant to close the heart that has been broken open nor to reassemble all of its broken pieces in the same form as before. Maybe grief’s healing doesn’t happen within an individual heart, but is made possible by reconnecting us to the larger heart of community where wholeness is found and shared in an ecology of relationship and interdependence.

It's true. Grief does sometimes arrive in our lives as a private experience with a personal burden of sorrow. But whether grief is personal or collective, I have only experienced or witnessed its powers of transformation and healing when it has been shared. When I have looked, unsuccessfully, for the shards of my own broken heart, it has been my encounters with the broken hearts of others that have offered me healing. When my grieving reconnects me to community, and to nature, I am granted a greater wholeness and a deeper belonging, healing so much more than I ever knew was broken.

How do you write — and live — with a broken heart? Have you answered grief’s invitation into a wholeness that reaches beyond your individual pain? Have you experienced the healing of sorrow that comes from being reconnected to others?

Wishing you well in these times of change,

Karen