Fine Lines: Walking the Labyrinth of Grief and Loss

By Kathy Swaar

It happens. One minute everything is fine; the next it is not.

Mirroring the twists and turns of the labyrinth- many of which are 180-degree U-turns-intimate loss changes everything. Roles that previously ordered life and defined existence no lon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathy Swaar
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735807911

Book preview

Introduction

For the last five years of his life, my husband constantly badgered me—in the nicest possible way, of course—about when I was going to quit my day job and write. I always responded—in the nicest possible way, of course—by reminding him that we needed my day job to help support his farming habit, so that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

And then he was gone.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, less than three months after our first inkling there was something really wrong.

Bill’s death shattered both my heart and the circumstances of my life, creating a series of fine lines resembling the circular splintering of safety glass hit with a hammer or baseball bat. Everything changed. The day job was no more. I no longer knew who I was, what to do, or how to be.

Bound by my own self-imposed shoulds, oughts, can’ts, and musts, along with the constraints of a culture that doesn’t want to talk about grief—and doesn’t know how—I had no place to put all that overwhelming emotion, no idea how to unpack all the baggage around what I thought I knew about it and the shape and form my grief actually took. And the one person I would have turned to in the face of trauma of that magnitude—the one who held my heart, always had my back, the one I could tell anything—was the one who was gone.

Not knowing what else to do—and to fill all those hours I now spent home alone—I picked up my pen and Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write and started working my way through it. The prompt for the chapter on voice instructed us to time-travel back along your own life—your narrative time line—and stop at a time or an episode that is emotionally charged for you. You are then asked to scoop this ‘cup’ of time from your life and write about it.¹ It included a list of ten examples. Item four—my greatest loss—jumped off the page and screamed my name.

But I wasn’t ready to go there yet. I slammed the book shut, put it back on the shelf, and grabbed one I knew would not require me to write anything: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it—and about Bill and what he always wanted me to do. So a month later, I got it back down and started writing again. That prompt turned out to be just enough to give me permission to pour all the things I didn’t think I was allowed to feel, think, or say—all the messy details of life without the one I loved most—out onto the page. And in the writing of the fine lines of my grief, this book was conceived.

But I struggled with how to organize the chapters. Because of grief’s nonlinear nature and its stubborn resistance to any sort of categorizing and quantifying, it wasn’t possible to put the chapters in truly chronological order. When I discussed this in a session with my spiritual director, Trudy stopped me mid-sentence and asked if she could share an image she’d received while I was speaking. It was the labyrinth. She graciously sent me home with her Chartres hand labyrinth to use and sit with until our next visit, to see if the labyrinth theme held.

It did.

A clear order for the chapters emerged, divided into four sections—as is the Chartres labyrinth—and mirroring the process and experience of walking the labyrinth as spiritual practice: letting go, navigating the twists and turns, finding your own pace/path to the center, and returning.

Walking the labyrinth of grief and loss requires letting go of what was in order to face what is and remain open to what may be. It is full of ins and outs, twists and turns. Unlike my original perception of them—that life on one side of those fine lines was livable, and on the other side it was not—the fine lines of loss are not either/or. They are interconnected, spiraling out and back on each other, and together form one continuous path. While grief is universal, each of us experiences it uniquely; we have to make our own way, at our own pace. And all along the way, even in the wreckage of our lives, the broken shards, the bits and pieces, there are invitations, gifts and graces, knowledge and insight.

Using personal narrative, pastoral reflection, and prayers, each chapter in this book explores one of the fine lines of grief I encountered and the invitation nestled within that fine line.

A note on the prayers. One of the biggest challenges of Bill’s stunning diagnosis and rapid decline and death was the fact that everything happened so fast: I had no time to adequately process it. In shock, numb, I simply could not pray in the traditional sense. I did not have the words. They have finally come, and I have included a prayer at the end of each chapter. If you too are struggling to pray and can’t find the words, use mine.

The invitations included for each chapter offer a glimpse beyond the pain of the immediate circumstance and the opportunity to make connections of your own along the way: to your truest self, to others, and to the Holy.

This book is not a how-to. It cannot fix or remove pain.

Instead, it companions.

Henri Nouwen says, The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.²

Consider this book the literary equivalent of that friend. It will sit with you, hold space for your tears, pray when you can’t. It will not offer answers or solutions, because grief isn’t a problem or question; it is simply part of being human. Instead, it will be with you, and by its presence, give you permission to be: who you are, where you are, how you are.

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1 Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), 160.

2 Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2004), 38.

Part I

Letting Go

The labyrinth walk is a pilgrimage of invitation. At every step along the way, we find opportunities to start, to pause, to revisit, to notice, to ponder, to learn, and ultimately to take what we experience with us into the wider world and the rest of our lives. In her first encounter with the pattern, labyrinth pioneer Lauren Artress studied with psychologist, scholar, and author Dr. Jean Houston, who described a powerful spiritual tool whose path would lead each of us to our own center.³

My experience of grief has mirrored and embodied all of that. The sudden, unexpected death of my husband of forty-one years and 361 days—my soulmate and best friend—was both beginning and end. It changed my identity in multiple ways, and I had to discern all over again who I was now and where I fit in the world. Coming to terms with that loss has been like walking the labyrinth, full of stops and starts, twists and turns, taking me to the center of myself and back out, over and over again.

Those who walk the labyrinth as a spiritual practice often begin by consciously and intentionally quieting and emptying the mind as they follow the path. Likewise, grieving is an ongoing process of releasing, of letting go: letting go of what was, what isn’t, what will now never be; letting go of assumptions, expectations, things we can’t control, and what no longer fits or serves; and letting go of what confuses or distracts in order to be fully present to what is and open to what may be.

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3 Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 2.

Chapter 1

There is a fine line between the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Invitation: Start where you are.

I am a sports junkie. It is both hardwired into my DNA and anchored in my experience. My earliest memories are of sitting on my dad’s lap watching boxing and baseball on Friday nights and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Littered across my family tree, you’ll find sports promoters, semi-pro and professional athletes, coaches, officials, and a plethora of almost-made-its. I cut my teeth on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, enthralled by the trumpet fanfare, the announcer’s assurance that we would see it all, from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat, and the stunning video footage of both that started every show.

From 2014 on, that iconic intro has defined my life.

The last week