Embracing Grief: Leaning Into Loss to Find Life

By Alise Chaffins

For most of her life, Alise Chaffins had only a casual relationship with grief. From 2013 to 2014, however, grief went from an occasional passerby to an intimate companion. Her mother was diagnosed with ALS and in 11 short months, it took her life. She left the man she had been married to for nearly sixteen years amid the scandal of an affair. She remarried, got pregnant at a time when her mother was gravely ill, and experienced the stillbirth of her son at 35 weeks and 4 days. Her 16 year old came out as a transgender man. She and her husband were finally settling into a congregation and were suddenly asked to leave their church for supporting that same transgender child. In the course of just over a year, she experienced one calamity after another, each resulting in a deep, but unique grief. 

In Embracing Grief, Alise examines the various ways that her life has been impacted by grief and how she has learned to lean into her sadness and find a more full life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alise Chaffins
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519971791

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Table of Contents

Embracing | Grief | By | Alise D. Chaffins

Embracing

Grief

By

Alise D. Chaffins

Foreword by

Caleb Wilde

Copyright © 2015 by Alise D. Chaffins

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America.

First Printing, 2015

ISBN 978-1519158734

www.knittingsoul.com

Foreword

Caleb Wilde

My grandfather has a little vacation house situated at the mouth of the Elk River, just north of where the Elk empties into the Chesapeake Bay. It sits about an hour drive from his house. He bought it soon after his wife, my grandmother, died abruptly in 1992 as a place he could go to find solace from both his grief and the constant demands of our family’s funeral business.

His plans for it were never fully realized as the growth of our funeral home swallowed up his free time. But that house became a vacation refuge for many others, as he often lent it out to dozens of his friends (and some of the families that came through the funeral home) who needed to get away for a short time. There have been new divorcees, all kinds of bereaved persons, and even some money strapped honeymooners (like my wife and I) who have used that house.

I met Alise online a couple years ago. Over the past two years, our worlds have come much closer and I’ve watched and listened as she has walked her journey of grief. And I was really happy when Alise and Rich used my grandfather’s grief house as a refuge of sorts, a place that allowed them space for a short time after their son’s stillbirth.

Grief is one of those overlooked ways that communities are strengthened through small acts of grace. It could be said that death provides the lifeblood of community cohesion.   Perhaps the heart and center in many communities aren’t the churches, or even the schools, but sometimes it’s the funeral home, where comfort, care and grief can be put on full display in vulnerability and trust.

As a funeral director, I’ve seen countless moments where our little community in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania has grown together through tears, hugs and funerals. It can be beautiful. And yes, death, at times, can be beautiful in that it underscores everything that makes us human.

There are certain forms of grief that have a tendency to dangerously isolate the bereaved. There are losses in society that – for one reason or another – aren’t recognized. When this isolation occurs because grief isn’t recognized, it is called disenfranchised grief.

The experience of disenfranchised grief complicates grief work because grief is supposed to be shared.  The age old axiom is that grief shared is grief diminished. When someone dies, that death throws a web of relationships out of balance, causing mourners to learn how to live in the new normal.  That new normal is best found together in community.

When grief and/or pain isn’t shared.  

When there is no community to share it with.  

When it isn’t recognized by society, then grief becomes complicated, isolated and dangerous.  

All this can lead to depression, anxiety and a host of other psychological, social, psychosomatic and physical pains.

But disenfranchised grief doesn’t always result from death. There’s a grief from divorce that society tends to downplay. There’s a grief from lost dreams and expectations that are usually borne just by one who had them. Disenfranchised grief takes on many forms, but the underlining factor that unites them under the term disenfranchised is that society – our friends and even our family—simply refrain from extending appropriate compassion.

What Alise shares here in Embracing Grief is a perfect storm of different forms of both complicated and disenfranchised grief. This story is a combination of factors that would normally forever sink a person into the despairing pits of isolation.

But what amazes me most about this book is not only Alise’s eloquence to write about something that is so hard to put into words but that she’s made the entirely brave step to share. The tendency would be to focus inward and stay that way for fear of being hurt again. Or to react bitterly and angrily. Vulnerability becomes as painful as the grief itself.  But, here, for you to read, to judge, to feel, is Alise’s soul laid naked in an act that is both brave and fearless. Despite the isolation and rejection, she has chosen to share.

In some ways Embracing Grief is like my grandfather’s cabin ... a place and a story that will provide a refuge for those of us who need a little hope.

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Introduction

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I was thirty-three years old before anyone close to me died. Kack was the grandfather who lived across the street from my family while I was growing up. He passed away after I no longer lived in the home of my youth, but it was still hard to lose the man who fed us junk food and had let us stay up late to watch Dallas when we slept over at his house. However, he was old, and his death was a good one - laughing on the phone with a friend one minute, gone the next. When my parents called to say that he had passed away, we piled the kids in the minivan and went to stand with my grandmother and my mom as they said goodbye to their husband and father. We cried at the funeral, then went home and laughed about the 150 hats that he had stored in his closet. I was sad about his death, but not surprised by it. My grief felt like it balanced with the loss.

For nearly four decades, I had only a casual acquaintance with grief. We brushed shoulders, but there had never been any deep knowing. The mourning that I had experienced for Kack and other losses had been short and appropriate. I had cried (the primary sign of healthy grief), I had remembered fondly (the other sign of healthy grief), and I had moved on (the final stage of grief). I knew how to grieve, and grieve well.

I saw that some people weren’t able to grieve as well as I could. They seemed to dwell on their losses instead of moving on. They would constantly bring up the source of grief, even if it was clear that the other people around didn’t want to hear about it. They didn’t seem to understand that grief was to be a private thing, not a public affair.

I felt like I was patient with them,