It’s interesting, I haven’t really learned about grief in my academic career. We’ve talked about existential counseling theories which is like everything is impermanent which includes death. We’ve briefly touched on the 5 stages of grief. We’ve talked about developmental life stages and people thinking about death but I don’t really feel like we’ve gone over loss and how to deal with it. So I don’t really feel equipped to talk about it from a psychological standpoint, just kind of from a personal one.
Why I’ve been thinking about it is because of Mocha’s calf who was born stillborn. It was a few weeks ago when I found them. I was sad when I was around Mocha, especially when she took me to see her calf and she nuzzled it and cried at me. And after then when I took her in to the barn area, she would look in the calf’s direction and moo at it. Definitely moments of sadness that will last in my memory and demonstrate how emotionally cows are similar to us. But other than when I was around her, I didn’t think it was affecting me. But I found myself being short with Chase, impatient with the animals and having this overwhelming feeling that my life was falling apart. I knew that my life objectively was not falling apart, so I took some time to reflect on it.
It’s ironic. I know that I’m a sensitive person, I feel things very deeply and I’ve accepted this about myself. Yet I think that I have felt like I’ve experienced bigger grief you know? I didn’t know her calf, and I’ve seen lots of animals die at this point, so when I finally did connect that that was what was going on and had me feeling like I couldn’t really handle things, it was like it changed nothing but at the same time it changed everything. Also, going through however much I have gone through in the past has made me even a little more ignorant of when I am feeling things- I don’t want to break down. I want to keep going. I feel like I’ve broken down enough in my life. That was a phase, and I’ve decided the phase is over. That’s not really how it works. So just being able to take some time to figure out what was happening with me, turned into surrendering into the fact I couldn’t control it and holding the feeling. And it was all that the grief really needed.
My rallying cry as become “Make our hearts bigger than the pain.” and that’s kind of what life has shown me.
It’s one of the most useful phrases for me and it comes from a practice I learned from Jack Kornfield a few years ago. He gave a talk basically asking how we can enjoy life knowing there exists war, poverty, injustice, and intense suffering in the world. if we think about it too much we turn away or become paralyzed, so he said to imagine that we can hold space for the whole thing.- the good and the bad. Really imagining your heart is THAT big is sobering.
So this is what I do when grief starts to feel suffocating or I start having those pangs of anxiety about the things I can’t control. it’s one of the most useful skills I have learned for my mental health and I really don’t think I would be able to live on a farm without it.