Coping with the Loss of a Loved One

Martha Beck discusses ways to live on after losing a loved one.

Coping with the Loss of a Loved One If you’d have a lost, a loved one or a relationship, a dream, you’ll not going to be able to go on, just sort of, moving straight ahead and improving your life in every way that would be shown on TV, you know, as a dramatic example of happy living. We’ve really, when we run into such an event, I call it catalytic event. It would bit like a caterpillar, getting the trigger that says it’s time to become a butterfly. And the first thing that caterpillars do, after they make their cocoons is not to just start sprouting wings and tinny. It is to dissolve. They’re actually dissolved in to what looks like a liquid. If you cut the cocoon, open it, it just spills out. There’s nothing that looks like a living organism. And after a severe loss, a job, a loved one, we feel ourselves dissolving. And so the ego we have, the self we are, has to just disappear. And I call this the stage of death and rebirth and as Eckhart Tolle has said, “The secret to life is to die before you die and so to learn that there is no death”. But that dissolving is terrifying for most people. Just note that it’s okay. You’re supposed to fall apart before you can be made new. Tthen after a while, when the caterpillar is completely dissolved, a chemical trigger tells certain cells to begin re-structuring, all that, caterpillar-soup into a butterfly. And you’ll experience that after you’ve grieved for a while. As the reawakening of hopes and dreams and they’re not things you had before. The caterpillar doesn’t have butterfly dreams. It can’t even imagine what a butterfly can do. But you will find after you have gone through a grieving and dissolving that new things start to appeal to you. And you need to really pay attention to your heart and follow those things and I call this dreaming and scheming. You’ll first to have dreams then you start to make them in to actual schemes. And then you’ll go in to the phase I call emerging like the hero’s journey. And this is when the butterfly cuts the top off of the cocoon and pulls itself out. And this is hard. It’s not an easy emerging. If the butterfly struggles, it’s vulnerable, it can’t fly. But, if you cut the cocoon to try to help it out, the butterfly will die. And the harder it struggles, the longer it lived. So building the new life, in this new way after a lost, it’s hard at first but that’s okay. That’s part of the process. And then after a while, you’ll get to a place, where you’ve sort of mastered this new state of being and I call that the Promised Land, or flying. It’s when you are the butterfly and you can just take wing in a way you could never even imagine when you’re a caterpillar.