In these tumultuous and tiring days of disruption and disorder, the sources we turn to for wisdom and nourishment, talk an awful lot about love.
The global pandemic has resulted in a tough year for most of us. Faced with so much loss, grief and mental health challenges, the world is looking forward to closing the chapter on 2020. What if we put this year to rest, like we lay a loved one to rest?
As you may know from Reena’s recent blog post, Momento Mori and Don’t Forget to Live, my vibrant 82-year-old mother-in-law with whom we shared our home of 12.5 years, died suddenly a month ago. It was yet another reminder of the constant presence of life and death, and how unpredictable the human experience is.
Memento mori is latin for “remember that you [have to] die” and is also an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. And while we’re all going to die and we all know we’re going to die, most people don’t think about it at all.
It was 2014 when I welcomed Danielle LaPorte’s soothing voice to guide me in discovering my core desired feelings. I listened to her audiobook, The Desire Map: a Guide to Creating Goals with Soul and I’ve never looked back. No longer do I focus my energy identifying and working towards what I want to accomplish in life. Instead I think about what to do, so that I can feel the way I want to feel.
In case you missed our offer in the last newsletter, we have a new free tool to share with you and yours. Until last week, A Brief on Grief and Mourning was only available inside the 7 Tools for Making Sense of Life & Death online program. We’re making this free tool widely available now because grief is not just something that happens when someone you love dies.
Do you too have life lessons that keep showing up—same message, different day? One of the recurring messages in my life is that grief is a pathway to healing. Actually, let me rephrase that. My recent experience of fall-on-my-knees grief revealed, once again, that grief is a pathway to living and loving fully.
My first memorial service took place on Zoom, just a couple weeks ago. We were honouring the life of a dear friend from my church, who died of complications related to a cancer he had been living with these last few years. I suppose I’m fortunate to have gone through nearly thirty years of life without anyone close to me dying. In fact, I’ve only been to one funeral, that of someone I can’t say I knew very well. This is all to say, I still feel quite new to realities of mortality and the rituals that fall under what we at Willow call “Departure Directions.”
These times are challenging beyond compare and we have something that can help you, now. Multiple times every day, I read, see, hear and feel how we’re experiencing an unprecedented time of uncertainty. Personally, in our communities and throughout our planet, we’re living with health crises, ecological devastation, political and economic turmoil and systemic racism and injustice. We don’t know when the impacts of all this will end, how it will end, and what our lives and the world will look like in the near or distant future.
