Category Nonfiction

Accessible help for grief

Nancy Crowe
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My refurbished Christmas star.

When my mother died, the last thing I wanted to read was a well-meaning but too-much treatise on grief. Dr. Alan Wolfelt’s Healing the Adult Child’s Grieving Heart, with its 100 practical, one-page ideas for things to do or think about, was exactly what I needed during those first weeks and months.

Its user-friendly format also makes the book easy to revisit, as I often do when the holidays bring a fresh load of “Crap … I should be doing better with this.”

Grief is a process, not a destination. I know this. The Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year stretch is cold and dark in this corner of the world, and the holidays add another layer of challenge to whatever we are facing. I also know “shoulds” hurt more than they help, and they’re so not in the spirit of God using the humblest, darkest circumstances to show the greatest love.

51u5HQKtEoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_So I took the slim volume off the shelf and opened it — right to No. 68: Prepare yourself for the holidays. Wolfelt’s top bullet point on this page is, naturally, the sadness felt over no longer having your parent around to share these special occasions and gatherings. Having lost both parents makes it feel all the more sad and strange; we are orphans no matter how old we are.

However, Christmas is about memory as much as it is about the here and now. Wolfelt notes in his second point: “Your family’s holiday traditions were formed decades, sometimes centuries, ago and resonate with layer upon layer of memories.”

He’s spot on about the layers. In addition to the happy, quirky Christmas memories that reside in my consciousness are ones of my mother’s terminal diagnosis two days before Christmas and her passing two days after. In between was a blur of travel, consultations in poinsettia-bedecked hospital hallways, the beep of monitors, relaying information to other family members, waiting for doctors, talking with Mom, sharing Reiki energy to ease her transition, and almost, but not quite, forgetting about the holiday.

The following Christmas, I had the tree-topping star that has graced a Crowe tree since the 1950s refurbished. It doesn’t twinkle and blink like it used to, but the blue circle around it glows in a way I swear it never did before. It casts a new light in some of the darkness, which is what Christmas is about in the first place. It also lets the happy memories begin to re-layer themselves over the sad ones.

For another layer of memories, I dug out my dad’s favorite Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music.

I flipped a little further in the Wolfelt book, finally landing on No. 96: Let go of destructive beliefs about grief and mourning. Such as: “I need to get over this.”

Your grief is your grief, Wolfelt says: “It’s normal and necessary. Allow it to be what it is. Allow it to last as long as it lasts. Strive to be an authentic mourner — one who openly and honestly expresses what you think and feel.”

I’m still working on that … and following yonder star.

Listening to the birds

Nancy Crowe

29868587Birds bridge the ordinary and the unknown as few other creatures can. In Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation, novelist, essayist, and children’s author Kyo Maclear details a year of urban birdwatching and life shifting in her home city of Toronto.

While coping with her father’s illness, the married mother of two young sons happened upon the photography of a musician and urban birdwatcher, and was riveted. “These birds lived in gardens of steel, glass, concrete, and electricity,” she said, but the message in the photos was not one of environmental sins, but of love for “the dirty, plain, beautiful, funny places many of us call home.”

The musician (as he is known throughout the book) became Maclear’s guide on a number of bird walks throughout the year. As so often happens when we take up something new, ostensibly to distract ourselves, the insights that emerge bring us right back to face the music, if we are willing.

Accompanying the musician to his father’s aviary of finches, for example, and feeling like a “galumphing invader” among the tiny, captive creatures, sparks reflection on the quality we most associate with birds: freedom. We are all captive in some way to something, Maclear said — such as the cages of ego and habit we may or may not recognize. A small birdwatching excursion to a marina on the edge of the city not only teaches her how to distinguish among trumpeter, mute, and tundra swans but becomes an almost meditative experience of simultaneous waiting and experiencing.

As she began to talk about the subject of this book, Maclear was surprised by the number and diversity of people who shared their own bird stories and passions — rich hobbyists, former POWs, people who traded the bottle for binoculars. “They had lost something, hoped for transcendence, wondered how best to live this life. Birds spoke to their irrevocably blue parts, their hopeful parts.”

The birders she encountered in books and in the world shared little except this, she concluded: “If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”

 

 

 

Horse sense

Nancy Crowe

512fUSHSArL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_When you don’t know what to do, or even when you do, sometimes the key is simply to be. Author and animal Reiki instructor Kathleen Prasad’s book, Heart to Heart with Horses: The Equine Lover’s Guide to Reiki (2017: Animal Reiki Source), illustrates this beautifully. As one of Kathleen’s students, I was already familiar with her work, but a desire to learn more about working with horses led me to this book, her latest.

Reiki, a Japanese stress relief and relaxation technique that also promotes healing, is not limited to hands-on practice, especially with animals. A practitioner can give a Reiki treatment from across the room or just outside an enclosure or stall. It’s all about energy and presence, to which animals are much more attuned than humans. Horses in particular are very intuitive and sensitive creatures. You do not need to use the traditional Reiki hand positions, or use your hands at all, for them to “get it.” In other words, instead of “doing” Reiki, try “being” Reiki, Kathleen suggests, and she offers several ways to do this.

From her own experience and a sprinkling of guest authors’ stories, Kathleen teaches animal Reiki as a meditative practice which creates space for healing … whatever healing might mean for that horse in that moment. The practitioner does not have to know “what’s wrong” or direct how healing will happen. Sharing Reiki energy helps set up the conditions for whatever is needed — the clearing up of an infection, a peaceful transition at the end of life, insight into a behavioral issue, or none of these.

The practitioner’s state of mind and heart is the real key, Kathleen says, and a daily meditation practice helps with this. It’s also important to let the animal choose to participate in the treatment, or not. She says horses will often test the practitioner by declining (moving away or showing signs of irritation or aggravation), just to see if it truly is up to them. Once the horse knows he has a choice (and, I might add, that you are not the sort of healer who pokes, prods, or gives shots), he is more likely to be receptive. A horse may even move closer and position himself near you, perhaps pushing a hip or shoulder into your hands. Then you can offer some gentle hands-on work, but that should always be at the animal’s initiative, Kathleen says.

We humans have ridden horses into battle, made them schlep us and our stuff over great distances, and more. Heart to Heart with Horses offers us a respectful, compassionate way forward  — connecting with these magnificent animals and allowing them to be our teachers.