Metabolizing Grief

New Ways for a New World #4

Dear people, this is a lot to hold. A young mom shot by federal agents a few seconds after she shared, “I’m not mad at you dude!”. Minnesota’s beautiful immigrant and refugee community being completely terrorized. Cowardly leaders in Congress and churches who just keep propping up this madness even though they know it’s wrong. A president threatening to seize Greenland just because he has a psychological need for it and the only thing that can stop him in his own words is “his own morality, his own mind.” Yeah, it’s a lot to hold.

And for so many of us, a whole lot of grief.

How is this our reality? How is this even okay with this many millions of people? What am I supposed to do with this much anger and sadness at the state of our country? Will we ever feel stable again or is this just what we must learn to live with even when every part of our souls are crying out for something better?

Yeah, it’s all so much freaking grief on top of our own personal losses we’re all navigating.

Last year I wrote a piece around Mother’s Day called Metabolizing Grief that I have drawn back often. I knew I wanted to be part of this series because in order to survive and thrive in this new world we’re living in, we need to learn how to metabolize the pain and grief that’s part of being human. Over the last few weeks we’ve engaged with three parts of this 9 part series “New Ways for a New World: Life and Faith Beyond Boxes, Binaries, and Borders”: Owning our Agency, Shedding Shame, and Dismantling Binaries. If you haven’t read them yet, you don’t need to in order get something out of this one, but my hope is that you’ll go back to them and we can add all of them to our tool kit as we find new ways of living and leading in this new world.

While I have seen grief become more prominent as a topic since COVID—which upended our world just a few months after our personal world was turned upside down by our son’s death—it’s still a very tricky reality that people don’t love addressing and honoring because it’s so…messy, hard, and uncomfortable in a world that loves comfort. Also, in a culture that’s so fast and digital and everything is always changing, it’s hard to have the space we need to feel the pain of our losses–whether they are personal or communal. It’s also hard to process grief when the waves keep coming and everything is just muddled together.

One of the most important things I keep learning about grief is that for a lot of us (not saying everyone because grief has no rules and everyone processes differently) is that there’s no “getting through grief” or “following all the stages and landing at acceptance.”

Rather, there is just the learning to integrate these painful realities into our lives. To practice every day how to hold the pain, loss, confusion, and disorientation along with life, joy, love, connection, meaning. To embrace paradox. To honor this part of our own stories, our world’s stories and remember that the worst part of our story is not all of our story.

A chunk of years ago my therapist shared a simple thought about learning to “metabolize grief” in one of our sessions outside with the Colorado flatirons at our back (nature-based therapy rocks, by the way). We didn’t process it deeply in the moment, and I had been using “integrating grief” as a guiding principle. However, metabolizing grief really resonated, and as I kept drawing back on it and noticing how healing was working in my body, it just…fit. The words integrating and metabolizing are similar and can be somewhat interchangeable, but as I think of some of the new ways for a new world we need to practice, metabolizing feels like it’s the most helpful.

To me, metabolizing means that whatever needs to be integrated into our systems does its thing; it implies movement, flow, changing, transforming.

I looked up its definition. Metabolizing just means to “perform metabolism”, and metabolism means “the sum of the processes by which a particular substance is handled in the living body” (Merriam Webster).

“The sum of the processes by which a particular substance is handled in the living body.”

Now we’re talking.

The sum of the process by which grief is handled in the living body.

I looked a barely-bit deeper, and it comes from the Greek word metabole means “to put into a different position, turn about, change, alter.”

When it comes to grief (no matter the type), I don’t think we can make it, will it, force it to be different. But I do think over time, healing, new experiences, and integration my grief has been put into a different position. It’s changed. It’s altered—again, again, again, and again. And we are, too.

That’s what metabolizing grief is to me: Honoring it, acknowledging, feeling it, letting my body do its thing, trusting it, riding its wave, thanking it, integrating it, allowing it to be what it is–part of me but not all of me.

I’m always reminded, too, that humans have an incredible capacity to metabolize grief. Our problem is that some of the cultures, families, and religious systems we live in have stunted it for us and tried to teach us to bypass and try to avoid it (even though it can’t be avoided). Yeah, on the whole we’re just not that great at it.

Right now in our own lives, I’m guessing that everyone reading is grieving something–the loss of a human, dreams, health, youth, faith, jobs, what we thought our lives or families were going to be, and the reality of losing family members to a cult that keeps getting cult-ier.

In the wider world, there sure is a helluva lot of grief to metabolize–over and over and over again.

It’s not finite. Grief is beyond boxes, binaries, and borders. It’s wild and unpredictable, often beyond words, and will only pick up steam as we age and have more life experiences and realities to hold.

We grieve because we love.

We grieve because we care.

We grieve because we know a better world is possible.

We grieve because we are humans with an incredible capacity to survive really hard things and keep on keeping on.

My hope is that we’ll notice our default of minimizing grief, doubting our reactions, shaming ourselves for our feelings, convincing ourselves we’re over-reacting and should be in better control of ourselves. Learning to metabolize grief is vulnerable and tender, but it will help us honor the human experience with less shock and denial and help us gentler with ourselves and others, too.

Wherever you’re at in your own personal story and in this weird chaotic cruel season of the wider world’s story, here’s to metabolizing our grief over and over and over again–Honoring it, acknowledging, feeling it, letting our bodies do its thing, trusting it, riding its wave, thanking it, integrating it, allowing it to be what it is–part of us but not all of us.

With you from Colorado,

Next up: Expanding Faith (on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)

Some practices for metabolizing grief (I know there are so many more, this is just off the top of my head today in the simplest way):

• Take the word “I should or shouldn’t be be feeling…” out of our vocabulary.

• Notice our resistance to grief–how easy it is to dismiss, minimize, or push down and practice letting it be present and just…be.

• Move our bodies, get outside, let what’s in us circulate.

• Practice saying what we’re feeling and experiencing out loud without “but’s” (it’s harder than we think!)