Grief

My son is moving away from home next weekend. He is the only child we have, and very dear to us. Recently I have been quite "restless, irritable, and discontented", and didn't have any very clear idea why this should be. But this morning I realized I am feeling grief for the passing of the relationship my son and I have had.

Which is not to say it's not time. He is 24 years old, through college and a post-graduate certificate course, has job skills, and is just plain ready. He had good friends where he is moving, and is looking forward to beginning this phase of this life. And I am ready to begin a life with my wife, just the two of us. I am also ready to have the extra room to make into an office, to move our bedroom to the back of the house to avoid the street noise and the morning light. And all that. Of course, this also adds a component of guilt to the whole thing, since while I am sad he is leaving, I am eager for him to be gone. What a bad father I must be.

I recognize too that, as grief goes, this is a fairly minor one. He's only moving 150 miles away, and he's always been pretty good about keeping in touch when he was away. And, for heaven sakes, it's not like he's dead or something. I have noticed, though, that these relative comparisons really aren't very helpful. The pain I am feeling is the only pain I have at the moment, and there's nothing relative about it. That others may be feeling more grief than I am now is entirely irrelevant to the fact that I really don't want to be feeling this, and it hurts more than I want it to. What I need to strive for is acceptance.

The funny thing about acceptance is that, as far as I can tell, I need to know what it is I am accepting, what it is I am asking God to relieve me from before I get any measure of release from the pain. Which means that to the degree I am in denial, I am that much further away from feeling any better. I can ask to have revealed to me what is causing me pain, but until that revelation comes, I am pretty much stuck with what I am feeling. I have come to believe that this is as it should be, that I will be given the insight when it is time for me to have it, and until then, sitting with my undefined pain is precisely what I am supposed to be doing. Of course, this may sound self-serving to those who don't believe in the song of the universe which is always in perfect harmony, which is more or less my idea of God. I may be out of tune, but the universe is always just as it should be. "It is a lawful cosmos," as Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein likes to say.

So, this entry is the beginning, I hope, of my healing from this particular pain. Not that this sort of grief goes away entirely (does any grief leave us altogether?). But writing about it, acknowledging it, praying about it, talking to others about it, making it part of my meditation, all of this can help to find accommodation for it in my soul. It does not make me smaller to invite the grief in to share my house, it makes me larger and more able to find the room.

Cynicism

Before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, one thing upon which I most prided myself was my cynicism. I believed I could see through your motives without even trying, and that everyone was, like me, out for their own personal gain. For every example to the contrary I had a quick response: for the mother who sacrificed her own life to save her child, I would say, "Yes, because she didn't want to be thought of as a lousy mother who let her child die", and for those who gave of their time and energy because of their religious beliefs, "A purely selfish desire for salvation. If they didn't believe there was a heaven and a God who could send them there or elsewhere, they wouldn't lift a finger."

Now, the most interesting thing to me about my former cynicism is that I always thought of myself as being intellectually rigorous and entirely honest. It was those who fooled themselves into believing that they actually had some sort of selflessness who were being dishonest and mushy in their thinking. I have come to understand that--at least for me--cynicism may be the most blatant form of intellectual dishonesty there is. To assert that my conclusions on the world are entirely correct while being entirely unwilling to examine all of the available evidence which might refute them is the height of ignorance and is guaranteed to keep me ignorant.

Nor were my motives at all pure; while I may have seemed to myself to be courageous in my upright stand against what I saw as hypocrisy, I was really acting out of fear. I was constantly afraid of the uncertainty in the world, and needed this artificial certainty to feel safe. Indeed, if I had been certain of my opinions, I would have had no need to defend them so vociferously against those who challenged them. Which is not to say that I have been cured of my fear of uncertainty, but that the tools I have been given through AA and my study of the dharma allow me to recognize my fear for what it is and work toward coming to accept it as a part of my life. When our monsters become our familiars, they cease to have the power over us they once had.

A wonderful book to look at concerning this topic of the fear of uncertainty and how it rules our lives is Pema Chodron's Comfortable With Uncertainty.

May you all be well and at peace.