Welcoming the Dark Angel
Ah yes... Here She is again. She never fails. She comes for me.
As you can probably imagine, I encounter Grief often in my work as a hospice chaplain, and also with my clients at Deep Ocean Spiritual Counseling. I grieve along with the patients and clients I serve, and often “joke” with friends (but am totally serious) that I am a “Professional Griever.” However — just as there is a difference between attending to a patient in the throws of loss and being the patient oneself — it is something especially potent when the Dark Angel of Grief appears in Her fullness specifically for me. And I am currently experiencing a significant personal loss, and here She is. Right on time.
I call Grief the “Dark Angel” because, alas, I’m afraid Her benevolence is only apparent to those who can stomach the shock of Her appearance and the stings of Her transformative work. She is highly misunderstood. Especially in the United States, which has a particularly “shit-showy” relationship with Her, I believe it’s not at all hyperbole to say that societal suffering is in no small part due to our disastrously-repressed and borderline-abusive relationship with Grief. Most of us have yet to learn that just because something is challenging (excruciating, even), doesn’t make it malevolent; and just because something is emotionally gut-wrenching doesn’t mean we’re “lacking faith” or are “spiritually immature.” Quite the opposite in the case of Grief. She comes to our aid, but we have to be able to behold Her; to handle how She looks; and to stay open, even as Her approach ripples earthquakes under our feet. Doing so is a sign of the utmost spiritual maturity: to welcome the Dark Angel of Grief is to engage in holy surrender; it signals a willingness to receive the initiatic and transformative alchemy that guarantees no comfort, but assures new life.
What Exactly Is Grief?
Grief is not an emotion. Grief is a psycho-spiritual process of sacred disassembly and reconfiguration that metabolizes loss to bring us to new life. She is the digestive system of the spiritual body — the essential, metabolic art of decay — but also, eventually, She is the resultant respiration that gives oxygen to a new world and that renews a wholehearted hunger for life. The Dark Angel’s process is not interminable; and yet, at the same time, it is of no predictable duration either.
It is no wonder that so many rightly compare Grief to the caterpillar’s metamorphosis. The caterpillar enters the temple-chrysalis of loss; allows itself to be disintegrated by its own enzymes; and eventually emerges transformed, in a fantastical, fresh form, ready to take flight into new life. So too is the experience of Grief. The Dark Angel has a job and a purpose. She breaks us apart; melts us into “goo;” and magically — as if we were a Cubist painting in motion — reconstitutes us into something we could have never foreseen. The reason Grief is so terrifying to so many, is that during this breaking-apart — this sacred dissolution — we have no idea what awaits us on the other end of the process. We are entirely at Her mercy.
Cubist Art Print by La Cassette Bleue, as presented on allposters.com
Because Grief is a process, She is not synonymous with sorrow. In fact, the Dark Angel cannot be summed up as any, single emotional state. To say Grief is a particular emotion is a categorical error, for if She is anything, She is a dynamic event, inclusive of a panoply of experiences. Sadness; shock; relief; anxiety; gratitude; horror; awe; loneliness; humor; exhaustion; numbness; excitement; vacancy; disorientation; rage; calm — She uses these and many other physio-emotional constellations to chisel and break us apart; to dissolve us into liminality itself; and then to weave and quilt our new form.
There is a vibrancy to Grief because of Her dynamism. One moment we’re on the floor in fetal position; the next moment we find ourselves singing in the shower, surprised at our okay-ness. Shaman Martín Prechtel reminds us that “Grief is not depression. Depression comes from not being able to grieve.” Grief, therefore, is not matte-grey. She is multi-chromatic. That the Angel is called “Dark” is a reference to Her mystery; Her numinous depth; and the ways in which She is shadowed by the culture and therefore initially perceived as a Dark Demoness. But if we were to behold Her closely, we would see, She is the infinite black, the color that contains all, iridescent to those who care to look.
The Dark Angel is movement, not stagnation, but we must be aligned with Her tempo. She is the movement of the metabolic; the pace of fungi eating wood; of mollusks absorbing algae; of the shedding of the uterine lining. Her speed is never fast enough for the ego, who fears uncertainty, and would prefer to know quickly what the next reincarnation will be. And yet, Grief is efficient, and if allowed to do Her work, operates at the exact pace of karma, taking no longer than nature requires.
Relating to the Dark Angel
When Grief shows up, it is important to open the door. If we repeatedly dismiss Her, She will go underground into the unconscious. There, unable to the develop in the light of consciousness, She will regress into Her more primal, wrathful forms; become increasingly tempestuous; and leak into our lives by thwarting how we direct our energies. Rather than disintegration and dissolution, She will opt for destruction. Take my word for it: She is powerful and you do not want to defer Her. Open the door.
In the face of something so awesome, the correct attitude to adopt is respect and reverence. After all, the Dark Angel of Grief is the Priestess of Metamorphosis, the Guardian of our initiation into new life. We cannot know exactly how She will walk us through the initiatic rite — that process is mysterious to us. All we can know is that Her liturgy will be uniquely tailored to our personal evolution. It behooves us, therefore, to bow humbly to She who carries the keys to our fate. At times you might want to question Her ways — but best to just say, “Ah, this too. Thank you. So it is.” One doesn’t question Baba Yaga; one doesn’t challenge Ereshkigal; and one sure as hell doesn’t disrespect the Dark Angel, or treat flippantly what arises in the temple of Grief. It is sacred ground. Treat all that comes as holy, and know, in return, She will guide you through.
Respecting the Dark Angel is a posture of “reverent unblockedness.” That can be challenging for an ego that wants to twist reality towards its own ambitions. True, we are called to actively relate to Grief, but as Sylvia Brinton Pererra says of descent generally: what is needed is “an active willingness to receive.” What are we receiving? We are receiving the multi-colored-falling-away; the strip-show; the dazzling dance of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t. We receive the shifting weather of moods, thoughts, and psychic energy; of lonely stillness and restless movement. And we receive the not knowing of what will become of us. In short, we receive our own psycho-spiritual, metabolic dissolution in all its dynamic forms. It’s not easy to trust such a topsy-turvy Angelita Oscura. But with open palms, stand your ground, until She takes that away too. Then fall reverently.
Sometimes we worship at the altar of Grief alone, sometimes we need fellowship to do so (particularly if the circumstances leading to loss were traumatogenic). There is no failure in having support: the important point is to open the door to the Temple; to have reverence for Grief’s dynamism; and to respect Her process with as much trust as we can muster. We will each need different things in order to do that.
These days, my reverence to Grief looks like moaning with Her when She wants to moan; it looks like writing and singing songs on the guitar I can barely play; it looks like napping in the sun; it looks like moving my body to keep it loose and receptive; it looks like being still, staring out a window, doing absolutely nothing. When I sit in meditation with my fear; or when I pray for all the others who feel like this — it is as if I light a candle on either side of the Dark Angel. When I connect with friends who hear my testimony, or cry with lament to my sweet sister — it is as if I bow to the Priestess. Even writing this essay; or scribbling bad poetry on a Post-It over breakfast; or laugh-crying at the challenging-hilarity of acquiescence — all of it is like chanting Grief’s mantra.
In return, The Dark Angel of Grief blesses me. How do I know? Because my partner of almost nine years remains a Great Love even now that we are broken up. The Greatest, in fact. I know I am blessed by Grief, because My Love is still a Love. He is no enemy. Grief blesses me to not pigeon-hole reality; to not collapse him into “this” or “that,” into some overly simplistic fiction. And so, he remains wonderful and kind and brilliant and complex. My heart remains open to life, even when I don’t know what it will look like, and this is the most encouraging blessing of all. As Martín Prechtel says, “Grief is praise” for our love of life. And so I welcome Grief, the Dark Goddess, in praise of all my partner and I were and are to each other, and in praise of how the river of my being will eventually bend. What comes next? I scarcely know. Am I sad? Routinely. Terrified? Yes, sometimes. But I revere the Priestess of Grief, and so I say, “Ah, this too. Thank you. So it is.” I abide in Her temple, receiving Her iridescence as best as I can, knowing the Dark Angel isn’t done yet. I trust her, even when She turns me into goo.
The Big-Not-Easy of Grieving in Our Culture
I asked the organization I work for if I could use allotted “bereavement days” to grieve this tremendous loss, and I was told in no uncertain terms that the end of my relationship was not a “qualifying event” per our bereavement policy. The irony isn’t lost on me. After all: I work for an organization that specializes in ushering people through the threshold of loss. I’d be lying if I said the response didn’t light me on fire. (Note: Rage = also part of Grief’s dynamism. “Ah, this too. Thank you. So it f-ing is.”)
But, I chose not to be a flame-thrower in this instance. I cannot entirely blame the organization I work for because, for Heaven’s sake, it’s sitting in a cultural soup of collective dysfunction vis-a-vis Grief. Doing so would be a little like blaming an individual litterer for the entirety of climate change.
Our collective culture spouts values of individualism and control that are counter to the reality Grief reveals. To grieve is to surrender to a numinous process of psychological and spiritual collapse and regeneration, a process that we are not in control of. It implies that this very Self is not so separate, not so permanent, not so in-charge, not so unreachable. Moreover, Grief is an admission that — not only do we affect one another, but we inter-are each other, for the loss of you is a conversion of me. This is the case even when we grieve, not a person, but the loss of a house or job, or even when we grieve environmental destruction. A change in the interdependent reality changes us, and this means, we were always part of that interdependent reality — in fact, we are an interdependent reality.
Oooooeeee, American culture does not like that. Here, the individual is supposed to be sealed with concrete, impenetrable, and in charge of it’s own fate, right? Success is often taken to mean doing something rather than letting be. Strength looks like taking charge; predictability; speed; and self-directed innovation; it is rarely viewed as having the stamina to receive, let alone having the stamina to receive a dynamic, spiritual transfiguration by some mysterious, metabolic process we cannot control.
If I adopt the mythopoetic phrasing of Grief as a benevolent, Dark Angel of Transformation, I’d say the culture unconsciously views Grief as a suspicious, feral dog: one you can feed a few scraps, but don’t let it into house, or let it break your routine. Not only might it be distrustfully rabid; there’s also no time to clean up the shit it might curse your carpet with (and forget about it being a blessing!) Truth: even if I had been granted approval to use my bereavement leave, it would have been for a grand total of 3 days. A few bones and sinews, then back to work!
Just as not opening the door to Grief has disastrous consequences for the individual (thwarting how we direct our energies; deadening life with a matte-tint of meaninglessness; surprising us with self-destructive tendencies) —imagine the same thing on a collective scale. When Grief goes underground, becomes primal, and starts banging on the floor boards of our collective unconscious, we will have unchecked appetites from having refused decay (i.e., rampant consumerism); we will have systemic oppression from having denied life’s dynamism (i.e., patriarchy, and racial and gender injustice); and we will have projected enemies “out there” from failing to receive the blessings (i.e., domestic and international conflict).
We have erected a planned world, and so, have frozen our sorrow into statues of stone. But, eventually, the Dark Angel will splinter through our manicured reality, lighting it on fire if She has to. We can feel Her pent up (now destructive) energy as weird displays of perverse aggression, micro and macro: it’s the guy who cuts you off in the road; the politician who has no empathy for hardship and cuts Medicaid; the country that starts a genocide. Again, I turn to Shaman Martín Prechtel who summarizes this perfectly when he says: not being able to grieve “turns our losses into violence.” A society that’s unable to grieve, turns our losses into war. Psychic and corporal.
And so, we are wedged between something difficult here. On the one hand, there is an ethical imperative to welcome in Grief, for all our sakes. On the other hand, most of us are planted in a culture that makes that very difficult to do. How then should the earnest griever proceed? I’m afraid the only advice I have is that you just must find a way. Come hell or high water, you have to somehow fight for your right to party with Grief. Block out the fools; run past the nonsense; break the rules if you have to; but somehow get to the Temple, somehow open the door, and somehow reverently do your receiving-work the way you must. Not grieving leaves us dead. The Dark Angel of Grief is the path to new Life. Go to Her.
And lastly, if I can offer one more piece of advice: share. Talk to a friend, paint a painting, write — just find some way to sing what it’s like to welcome the Dark Angel, so that Grief is not relegated to a repressed state. Tell your friends, tell me, tell us — what’s She like? What’s it like to be open enough to life that you loved and lost? What’s it like to be open enough to death that you get to live again?
