THE REFUGEE CAMP OF GRIEF
I have long considered the freshly bereaved to be akin to those homeless wanderers who find themselves stranded in international refugee camps. We’ve all seen the images on television—hastily erected tent cities in dry windswept fields, filled with thousands of aimless threadbare souls waiting for release, waiting for a future, hoping for a new home.
The death of a loved-one can cut away our security and that familiar sense of home, of belonging. This is how people who are grieving become like strangers in a strange land. We cannot return to the life we knew and have no idea where the road ahead is leading. Refugee camps arise in the empty space between the perished life behind us and the unknown future ahead. Where do we belong now? Where shall we go?
When someone dies, in a very real sense, our hearts become homeless. The world and the faces around us may look the same, our routines and habits may be familiar, yet we can feel remote and removed from ourselves and the world. We can feel alone in the crowd even when surrounded by loved ones and friends. I call the place we retreat to, this inner destination of solitary sorrow, the refugee camp of grief.
Grief is the experience of living in a spiritual refugee camp, a locale where we are lost in the familiar. No longer can we rely upon the nourishing relationship that is lost: friend, lover, spouse, parent, child… when death strikes, a central fracture appears in the superstructure of our security. The foundation of home can crumble away leaving us standing in the sudden rubble of shock and disbelief. In the shattering of our sanctuary comes a fear—of being alone, of abandonment. Of not knowing one's way around in the emotional ruins. We are gripped by this fear. Grief is the visceral gut wrench of waking up in a disaster we did not choose.
And so we stumble away into the falling dark because we cannot remain so close to the smoke and utter devastation of our broken life. We wander stunned and numb into the distance like zombies. We do not eat or drink or notice our surroundings. We plod listlessly like people walking out of a war zone—hollow-eyed and empty of expression.
We all need a place to rest our head when we are lost. The refugee camp of grief is the place where we put up our make-shift tent of existence and lay down our unthinkable burdens. We kneel by the river and wash the blood off of our clothes. It is a place of mixed blessing, full of tears for a lost past which carries within it the seeds of an unwanted tomorrow. It is a muted, lonely place whose solitude can bring us much needed peace and space for reflection. But it is mostly a kind of emotional purgatory—a half-way house for the dispossessed.
The refugee camp of grief is an internal experience. It is a place of spiritual retreat, inaccessible and cloud-hidden. You may find it in the hush of your bedroom as you sit on your empty bed, or in the kitchen of your newly and oddly quiet home. You may find it in the boxy isolation of your car as you drive to the grocery store or as you absently collect your children from school. You may find yourself uncannily alone in the loud hurly-burly of your workplace. We can be in the middle of life and feel on the moon. That’s the refugee camp of grief. Inside the frail and ragged tents of our sorrow we stop, turn away and rest a while.
The refugee camp of grief is first and foremost a place of refuge. A refuge is never a home. It is a place of safety during exile. The fences or walls around the refuge serve to keep out threats, but also hem the refugee in. The word refuge means a harbour of safety, a shelter from danger and distress, a hiding place. The Latin root refugium literally means “a place to flee back to.” I like the idea of needing a place to flee. To hide. When we were children, hiding places tended to be dark, isolated and out of sight. They were places where we were protected from being found out. A hiding spot feels safe and beyond easy discovery. Too much visibility after a loss can feel like being naked in a room of fully clothed people. Refugees are people hiding in plain sight, people who are fleeing and whose bleeding hearts need shelter from relentless exposure.
For many years now, people have said things to me like: “now that my husband has died I don’t know where to go…” I would always wonder, why in the middle of their sadness were they wondering where to go? Clearly, they weren’t talking about travel or running errands or going for Sunday afternoon drives. It took me a long time to recognize that the “not knowing where to go” was really an existential statement about no longer being able to go home; to return to a place where the world had a familiar shape, where they belonged, where they were recognized, where the love of the other helped them feel secure, and playful and alive. “Where do I go now?” is a question that only makes sense to people who are lost.
Like the bereaved, people in refugee camps are trapped on the borderlands between the known and the unknown, between the past and the future, with nothing but pain, fear and loneliness in every direction. There are many willing aid workers tramping in and out of camp; friends, clergy, counsellors, family, but no real lasting comfort. There is no way for anyone to effectively or truly soften and soothe the heart’s endless ache. The refugee stands clinging to the fence, lamenting with wet eyes, “where am I to go?” Often times it comes as a cry to the heavens. A shout to God. Other times it is a shout at the void. Being lost, deeply inexorably lost, with full and forlorn comprehension that our loved-one is gone forever from this earth is the sad hallmark of grief.
The lost and restless heart cannot last long without a place to call home. We all need a shelter that is not temporary, a place of true belonging and welcome. A dwelling with a foundation. A house not built on sand. Home is where we are heading but when grief is new, when our eyes burn red with longing and our hearts are crushed under a landslide of sadness, home, safety and a sense of belonging are not easily found. We will rediscover home in good time, but at the start we need to quit moving and lay our weary shivering bones upon the mat of mourning. We must cease our high level functioning and busyness and rest from the long-suffering labours of watching-over and the heart-wrenching work of goodbye.
No one can force us out of our refugee camp though many try. They plead with us to pick up our mats and walk away. Even our greatest allies can become fixated on escape plans. It is as if resting in the dust of death is a basic transgression. Stopping can look like dying from a distance. It’s one of the reasons families panic when a mother or a father shuts-down after a death. The stillness of stopping mimics the body in death. “If you stop moving you die,” they say. Life moves, death stops. This stands in for truth of kind, but even sharks who must remain in constant motion to keep oxygen passing over their gills have learned to find a spot on the smooth ocean floor where the saltwater currents run swiftly enough to feed them the oxygen they require. Then they settle in and sleep. Stopping is stasis—a method of conserving energy while we recover and rest.
The refugee camp of grief is a place of slow and painful transition. Most linger here for months in a surreal fog of disbelief and despair. It is a place of pining and dusty tear stained cheeks, and of sleepwalking and half-seen half-felt things that bolt us upright out of bed. It is a place of echoing lonely voices, grinding teeth, hovering shapes, rattling bones, chilling intrusions, of screams and moans and the howling soliloquies of distant desert dogs. There is shelter here, but little comfort. Mostly it is a place of numb dislocated sleep. Of restless dreaming. Of paltry stone soup.
Refugee camps are places of scarcity and survival. There is not enough of anything that we need, and often too much of what we cannot stomach. We can love, but we cannot love as deeply. We can hope, but that hope can be choked by the cloaking darkness and finality of death. We can pray, but our prayers can seem lifeless on our tongues. We talk to others, but nothing appears to have meaning. We walk on the ground and see the sun shine, but the earth feels concrete and the sun cold. And though we sit in repose seeking elusive calm, there is always that hard wind blowing at our backs, whipping at our tent’s flimsy fabric, making us aware how frail the boundary is between us and the cruel harshness of existence, how thin the veil between love and loss.
We may want to get out of the camp quickly, to claw our way under the fence but we will only find ourselves crawling on hands and knees into the next camp. We all have to do our time here. It is death which forces us into to the arid tent cities of grief. Death accompanies us here and then stands outside the fence with its back turned. When we are in the refugee camp of grief it takes only a few errant steps in any direction to be reminded of why we are here. The memory of death is never far off.
The proximity to death is a cardinal concern for people in the limbo of grief. During our time in the refugee camp, the angel of death remains close at hand, but it is not the enemy and definitely not stalking us. Death cannot cross into our grief like a hungry wolf on the prowl. There are rules.
As we get ready to leave the refugee camp of grief, death becomes smaller on the horizon, shrinking with the passing of days, less ominously significant, less personal and threatening but never completely out of view. When our energy has returned, when our hearts have begun to thaw and our vision begins to penetrate through the mists of loss and we can see the brown and heavily trodden path that leads into the land of the living—only then do we stand, roll up our bed, and walk beyond the fences and squalor of our lonely sorrow.
The road out of refugee status does not mean that pain is behind us. It is actually just the opposite. We seek refuge from pain. We seek refuge from the overwhelm of death when seen in the hard light of day. When we hide, when we seek shelter, when we separate, it is from pain. When we decide we are ready go, to move our bodies and our souls into the world, we move toward pain. Pain is clear and true and honest. It does not lie and it cannot give refuge. But pain also clears the path before us. Pain cracks open the world so that something new can be born. Home is beyond the place of refuge. It can feel hopelessly distant but there is no other way for us to go.