Grief is now my friend; Finding the beauty in loss.

I lost a dear friend last week.  She was more than a friend.  She, inspite of her own pain and tragedies of her inner landscape, offered unconditional love always.

She died from a sad choice she made to undergo gastric sleeve surgery; something someone in her physical state should not have been advised to do.  It all went horribly wrong and she ended up riddled with infections that antibiotics seemed to fail miserably at controling.  A leak caused by this barbaric surgery was the cause of these multiple infections which left her weak and immune impaired.  Her lungs started to fail because she was already severely asthmatic and eventually just when it seemed she might be on the mend she suffered massive cardiac arrest from which she could not be revived.  She was 44.

There are so many arms to this story that could be explored and argued. The one that holds her therapist  and doctors responsible for supporting this poor choice as an attempt to find relief from her pain.  The one that focuses on how she came to make this decision, the one that tries to find reasons and explains why such a talented and filled with love person would choose to put her life at risk for the sake of her outer image. The one that looks back at her past and childhood for answers. And then there is the one that was born from the constant barrage of fear she got from health professionals who kept telling her if she did not lose the weight she would die; well she did.  Not from her weight but from a mismanaged situation and from a story she herself was sadly not able to let go of or re-frame.

However, those stories whilst indeed important and painful are merely a reworking of suffering. Instead  I looked at ways to honour her that were more befitting her Soul. She was a larger than life person.  She was beautiful in my eyes inside and out. A talented artist, curator, writer and academic.  The best friend any person could ever have.  She showed me what unconditional love was, fired up my compassion and extended my understanding.  For when she needed you, you really were called upon in no uncertain terms.  She could not pretend or masquerade her emotions.  For that experience that some found hard to handle, I am eternally grateful. She ironically in her so called drama showed me that emotions should never be judged but seen as our best navigator.  She lit up the pathway to Heart with the lantern of her luminous be-ing.

As usual in amidst tragedy there is always a ray of hope; a gift hidden amongst the dark dregs of despair and as usual I found it as I swam, literally, in the murky waters of my grief.


The sadness one feels when you lose a loved one is not just based in the loss of their physical presence or the emotional attachment.

The pain opens doors and connects us to the parts of ourselves we too have over time and conditioning anesthetised and abandoned.  As the emotion flows we are given opportunity to breathe life back into those parts of ourselves that have been numbed out or feel dead.

Here lies the joy of release.  Here lives the beauty in grief.