No Pushback
Death drew a loose circle around me this past year. In addition to the death of my father - parents, spouses, children and friends of people I care about have died. Some lived a full life in a short time, and others spent years on earth, and never truly lived. Regardless of what each person did with their time, these loved ones are missed.
Father's Day reminded me of my Dad's death. Not that I'd forgotten, exactly, more that his role in my life was largely one of absence, rather than presence. My parents separated and divorced when I was tiny, so I never lived with him. In fact, we nearly always lived in different states. There were many years when I didn't see him, and several that we never spoke. I can't remember ever spending a Father's Day with my Dad, still, most years I called to honor the day and his role in my life. This year, there was no one to call.
These deaths and my own childhood experiences inspired me to consider the impact of absence. Through my years of personal growth work, professional training and coaching clients, I learned that absence, which translates to abandonment for a child, is a challenging trauma to move through.
Absence trauma provides nothing to push up against. How do you fight with or run away from someone who's not there? If you experienced physical or verbal abuse, you may have yelled back, hidden in a closet, or gone off to a dream world where no one would find you - even if your body was still standing beside the perpetrator. Those excellent defenses don't protect the abandoned, with the exception of the dream world, perhaps. There is no one to yell at, nor anyone to hide from.
As an adult experiencing the loss of a loved one, the absence sometimes sneaks up on you. Perhaps you're planting the first tomatoes of the season and suddenly feel washed with the grief of your deceased spouse who enjoyed every bite of the summer harvest. You may witness a graduation, and like a sucker punch, know that the child you loved will never matriculate. And then there are the birthdays, anniversaries and holidays, like Father's Day when, an empty chair sits at an otherwise full table or a phone rings, never to be answered.
While no magic pill provides an antidote to traumas of absence, healing remains possible. As written in "Acts of Bravery," the key ingredient for any healing is courage - courage to feel the feelings that you believe may break you or make you appear weak. These include the emotions of grief, anger, betrayal, and fear, as well as the memories of joy. Sometimes absence wisely leaves us feeling numb without access to those other emotions, because first we have to survive the moment. However, I find that, when I'm ready, juxtaposing the feeling of someone truly showing up with the sense of someone being "gone" provides an in-road beyond the numb.
Fortunately, our adult capacity to hold the space for all such feelings far exceeds the ability of a child. So while we may believe we "can't go there" emotionally, know that the memory of "can't" is real from childhood. It was true once; honor that. And to mend, allow the space in the present for waves of feeling to move through, because now we can.
I mentioned courage as a key ingredient, but I didn't fully explain. There are two aspects of this courage:
The willingness to feel the feelings with great gentleness and compassion for self.
To know that you will be hurt again, and to love and be vulnerable anyway, because the essence of who you be will remain intact.
By moving through the feelings, rather than pushing back at them, you naturally open a space for new experiences of great joy and deep sadness. Humanity is tricky that way. To live with bursting vitality inherently means breathing into the full range of human emotions. It's the key difference between those who lived long and those who lived fully. May you tap into your courage and breathe the fullness of life.
With love and breath,
Joanne Lutz