loss

Loss and the natural grief that accompanies it can be one of life’s primary transformational experiences.  In this session, Roy Remer explores how the pain and poignancy of loss can also teach us lessons which may be of benefit to others in our community. The session includes short meditations, opportunities for inner reflection, and guided exercises. 

This session was run on May 23, 2020, as part of Reimagine: Life, Loss, & Love, a Worldwide Virtual Festival on embracing life, facing death, and loving fully, during COVID-19.

In this session, Mary Doane discusses how to use mindfulness to explore and process our experience of grief, allowing us to accept more and suffer less. This session was run on May 19, 2020.

In this session, Roy Remer discusses how to use mindfulness and compassion to meet the experience of grief, and ways to process grief-related emotions in a non-judgemental way. This session was held on May 7, 2020.

By Alistair Shanks

We are living in a time of disappearances. For the most part, we have been stripped of our distractions, our busyness, our schedules, and plans as we shelter in place. We are being forced to reorder our activities, our needs, our lives.

We are in a state of continual waiting,  a perpetual state of uncertainty. Like a dream, we are at the mercy of an alien, inimical force, invisible and unpredictable. The world has come to a standstill. Construction sites are silent, cranes still, businesses dark, the streets empty.

We are grieving the loss of normalcy, a sense of safety and order; everything has been upended. Nothing is normal. Leaving home feels risky, a trip to the grocery store dangerous. People have lost jobs, businesses, livelihoods. People are dying alone in isolated units surrounded not by family and loved ones but by medical teams clad in protective gear.

While also grieving the loss of a sense of connection to others — friends, families, our broader social networks, work colleagues — new opportunities arise to connect in different ways, to offer small kindnesses. There are the friendly smiles and knowing nods as I pass masked people on the street, the greetings of strangers who would normally go by unnoticed. A woman offers a bottle of hand sanitizer to a homeless man outside a Safeway. Many people recognize that we are in this together, that we are all struggling to adjust to this new normal.

Our separation has only made more obvious our dependence on one another, our interconnection. We breathe the same air, share the same sidewalks and streets, depend on invisible supply chains to provide our food, our medications, our consumer goods. We are interdependent in every way, a fact that is easily lost in the daily tumult of overbooked lives.

In the midst of this pandemic, the cycles of life go on unperturbed. It is still spring and trees and flowers continue to bloom, only to disappear in their own time. The days become longer. In the absence of human activity, nature offers signs of reasserting itself: wild boar on the streets of Barcelona, mountain goats taking over a town in Wales, whales in Mediterranean shipping lanes, baby turtles in Brazil surviving in higher numbers due to deserted beaches.

And there is the fear, the vulnerability. We are all vulnerable, for once unable to distance ourselves from the world’s tragedies. It is no longer just an image of suffering on our TV screen. It is here and we are not in control, our lives moving in an arc out to the horizon, a line of disappearances. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

I often point out to our volunteers that a lot of what we do as we sit with those suffering near the end of life is to also sit with our own sense of helplessness. We are simply witnesses to the pain and struggles of our fellow human beings. Our volunteers learn to be with discomfort, with uncertainty, helplessness, the unknown. In many cases, it is all we can do and it is no small thing. I have seen the impact of a single steady, mindful presence transform a room.

What can we do with our helplessness? In this time of upheaval, we have been shorn of our assumptions, our certainties. In our helplessness the only sane, rational response, as ever, is love. Maybe our task is, as the poet David Whyte writes, “To love and to witness love in the face of possible loss, and to find the mystery of love’s promise in the shadow of that loss.”

We all need self-care in times like this. Zen Caregiving Project volunteers are trained to practice self-compassion, to acknowledge doubts and difficulties, and hold them with tenderness and care. As Jack Kornfield has said, “In this moment we can sit quietly, take a deep breath, and acknowledge our fear and apprehension, our uncertainty and helplessness…and hold all these feelings with a compassionate heart.”

We can embrace our interdependence. We can turn to the person next to us and ask, “What is your experience? What is it like for you? How are you doing?”

And listen.
Listen deeply.

RoundGlass: The End of Life Collective

The End of Life Collective is a community of caregivers and care seekers gathered in one place to help you and your family through life’s most important time.

End Well

A non-profit media platform and annual conference with the aim of normalizing conversations about our mortality throughout life. The website shares videos from leaders in all sectors who approach the topic of death and loss from many diverse angles.

ReImagine

ReImagine is a citywide exploration of death and the celebration of life through creativity and conversation. ReImagine will operate in San Francisco and New York over the coming year.

The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living

A book by Frank Ostaseski, the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project and Metta Institute, who has sat on the precipice of death with more than a thousand people. He has trained countless clinicians and caregivers in the art of mindful and compassionate care. In The Five Invitations, he distills the lessons gleaned over decades of selfless service offering an evocative and stirring guide that points to a radical path to transformation.

End Game

A short documentary following the stories of three visionary medical providers, one of which is Zen Hospice Project, caring for and supporting those approaching the end of their lives.

What does it feel like to die

A book by long-time hospice volunteer, Jennie Dear, who uses the latest medical findings and sensitive human insights to offer answers to questions that affect us all like Does dying hurt? and Is there a better way to cope with dying?

Death Cafes

At a Death Cafe, people drink tea, eat cake, and discuss death. You can search for the next cafe anywhere in the world. They also offer numerous resources on death and dying.

Death Over Dinner

An interactive toolkit to help you set up and host a dinner to discuss death with friends and family. The website provides videos, articles, and thought-provoking questions. Even if you don’t end up hosting a dinner party, it will get you thinking.

End of Life Doula Directory

A directory of certified end-of-life doulas thoroughly trained in all three phases of end-of-life care. 

Heartfelt Memorials

A company offering interactive and collaborative remote memorial services enabling five to 500 family and friends to memorialize, eulogize, and celebrate a deceased loved one. From afar, family, friends, and community will virtually attend your loved one’s end-of-life celebration.

The Five Invitations

A website and book authored by Frank Ostaseski, the co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project. Based on Frank’s own experience of working in hospice care, he offers a unique, comforting, and practical wisdom on how to work and live alongside grief in your life.

Grief.com

A website created by David Kessler, one of the world’s foremost expert on grief and loss. It provides free resources on loss and grief, connections to grief groups and an overview of the Five stages of Grief.

Grieving Mindfully

In this book, the psychologist and Buddhist Sameet M. Kumar offers an alternative approach to grief: accepting and feeling it, and then using it as opportunity for growth and finding meaning. 

Help Guide: Grief and Loss

A page with advice on grief and loss and how to navigate it. This guide also offers links to other useful information in the “resources” section.

Wild Edge of Sorrow

In this book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in a lyrical yet practical handbook.

Kara

A non-profit that offers a wealth of resources and services to support children, teens, families, and adults in the grieving process.

The Dinner Party

A collective of men and women in their 20’s – 30’s who’ve been touched by a significant loss who host dinner parties to share a meal and discuss loss, grief, death & dying.

Breathing Wind Podcast

Breathing Wind is a podcast about grief, parent loss, change, and healing. Founded by Sarah Davis, this podcast began as a collection of stories highlighting the shared experience of losing parents at a young(er) age. Season Two’s focus is on healing.

Advanced Planning

Coalition for Compassionate Care of California

This resource shares conversation tools for advance care planning, advance directives, and answers to your frequently asked questions.

Compassion and Choices

This interactive site provides templates, resources, and toolkits to help you with planning for your future care. Spanish versions of all site documents are also available.

Prepare for Your Care

The Prepare for Your Care website caters to people with minimal to no computer experience. They walk visitors through basic advance care planning steps with prompts and videos to help people get started. The website is also available in Spanish.

Five Wishes

A program of Aging with Dignity, Five Wishes is a booklet ( paper or online) that guides you through planning for end of life. It also facilitates conversations with family and friends about your future medical, spiritual, emotional, and physical needs. It is America’s most popular living will, with more than 35 million copies in circulation.

The Conversation Project

The Conversation Project® is a public engagement initiative with a goal that is both simple and transformative: to have every person’s wishes for end-of-life care expressed and respected. The Conversation Project believes that the place for this to begin is at the kitchen table—not in the intensive care unit—with the people we love before it’s too late. The Conversation Project offers tools, guidance, and resources to begin talking with loved ones about yours and their wishes.