December 2023 – “The Stream Which Seems an Endless Lake”: A Metaphor for the Grief Process
Following on the last two newsletter articles (here and here), this month’s thoughts focus on a metaphor for grief that I use frequently, because of the way it seems to usefully embed the different phases of grief as it unfolds from shock to acceptance. Of course, find the metaphor that works for you, that describes your actual experience in a way that gives it shape and language and meaningfulness. But here’s a suggestion of one which you can tuck in a pocket, and bring out in times when it’s hard to find an understanding of loss that isn’t simply endless misery. Given that we’re fully heading into the holiday season (like it or not), and that the archetypes of family are getting lit up along with the fairy lights, it seemed an apropos time to offer up this lake-and-river imagery.
So, however your December is shaping up, may you find a joy that matches your unique self, and enough supports to make use of whatever the stress of the season brings you.
A simple metaphor for the phases of the grief process.
There are many metaphors for grief: grief is like an earthquake; like a tsunami; like rolling unpredictable storms; it’s homesickness for a destroyed home; it’s like a missing part of oneself; and probably dozens and dozens more. There are so many because we humans need metaphors for what is deep in the human psyche, because analytic or conventional terms do not really capture and express the profundity of the experience. Poets do, after all, exist for a reason. So, in that spirit, one metaphor I like and use a lot, which seems to capture the phases of grief in its movement from devastation to resolution, involves a dismal underground lake.
Imagine a vast underground lake, completely dark, without a shore, and without a bottom. That’s where we start with a deep loss, particularly if we haven’t experienced serious grief. But even if we have, and we can understand the phases, for a part of us it can still be experienced as that lake: endless, timeless, lightless, and groundless.
In the middle of such a lake, we can’t imagine ever getting out of it, because there’s no direction and no movement. It seems like if we stay in it, we can swim forever and not get anywhere, or just stay in place and drown. The experience is experienced as intolerable, so we try to deny, distract or numb in order not to experience this state. Which is completely understandable, as the “lake” is basically synonymous with misery. Yet, the nature of grief as a process leading from pain to poignancy (see a previous article here) requires, if it is not to be obstructed, a surrender and trust or faith that—despite the sense of unendingness—it will move and resolve. We need sufficient supports to trust this, and when we have enough, we can calm our thrashings and experience more of this lake, the loss as it is, the grief qua grief.
If we can stay in that “just experiencing” mode (albeit, shivering and shaky and wanting to flee), something unexpected (at least to a part of us) starts happening: we begin to notice a subtle current in that lake. This shows up as fluctuations in the grieving (rather than a flat cold pain), and even flickers of relief or light (pleasant experiences, flashes of connection, moments of faith). The oppressive dark waters move a bit, initially seemingly randomly, but nonetheless they’re undeniably moving.
As we inhibit jumping out of the water, and maybe a bit more trust sets in that it is not a shoreless lake, we start experiencing that movement as more of a current which is moving in a direction. Some hope comes: movement implies change and possible resolution to the pain. If we are able to surrender a little bit more to that current, we notice it starts carrying us, like a stream. As it does this, we start noticing that we’re no longer in an endless expanse, but in a channel, like a lava tube. There is more sense of directionality, time, and definable space.
As this becomes clearer, we start sensing different scents of things growing, and the ambient darkness starts becoming less heavy, more twilight than pitch black midnight. We start to hear echoing noises of life again, allowing us to surrender more, and the current now is clearly a stream flowing more strongly upwards. Relationships which had seemed to die with the loss start seeming more relevant and available. Sensuality that had seemed frozen by the cold of the loss begins to reemerge.
Eventually this stream enters a cavern where the exit is clearly illuminated, where the deadness of the lake is clearly behind us, and the life—in all its qualities of change, connections, possibility, potential, desire, and trust—becomes more obvious. Life becomes experientially available again, tangibly and undeniably, even though it was also obvious that in the lake phase of grief, we could never return to life. We stabilize aboveground, and the stream spreads out and leaves us on the earth. We don’t forget about our loss, or about the pain of coming to terms and acceptance with that loss, but we do know now that it was survivable, and that life as life was not lost. We have gone from pain/shock to poignant acceptance, and the process that we call grief—which is the process of reorganizing our personal world to incorporate the reality of what has died away—has come to its organic conclusion.
So: the endless lake becomes a flickering current, which then becomes a current with direction. This current keeps moving, channeling into stronger movement and change, which opens to signs of life our senses can register, and eventually to being reestablished back aboveground where life is thriving and welcoming. Lake to current to movement to emergence, darkness to light, disconnection to re-embeddedness, deadness to life. Such is grieving.
