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Spirituality and Grief: Asking the right questions
By Kei Okada, MDiv, BCC on March 27, 2023
About the author
Kei Okada was born in New York and raised in Kanazawa, Japan. An initial plan to study for a year in U.S. extended to three art schools followed by four years of working with post-modern dancers in dance theatres in New York City. His love of language led him to study biblical languages at Union Theological Seminary, where the field education course led him to find a meaningful vocation in chaplaincy through a clinical training of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education). After working at NY Presbyterian Cornell Medical Center’s “Program for Children with AIDS” and Housing Works Adult Day Health Care programs for the homeless living with HIV, he worked for 15.5 years at Visiting Nurse Service of New York and Palliative Care. In the end of 2021, he retired from his position as Program manager, End-of-Life Spiritual Care, and currently he is writing his first book on how to facilitate meaningful dialogues with those who are living their final stage of life. Kei is a Board-Certified Chaplain under Association of Professional Chaplains (APC), and an Associate of Columbia University Seminar on Death. As a Christian mystic and an artist, Kei has been offering and writing in the U.S. and Japan on end-of-life consciousness and communication, integrating Art, Spiritual care, and Medicine.
Spirituality and Grief
We all live with loss experiences. We keep losing various things and people, while gaining new experiences, including the experiences of the losses. It affects, shakes, or moves our heart, mind and spirit deeply. How do we express such sensations, from which perceptions?
We do have spiritual words in our ordinary life, such as “grieving spirit”, “inspiring experience”, and so forth. What could be today’s inspiration on our current grief?
What is grief?
We may ask its meaning. When it’s painful, where is the pain? What is causing the pain? Is the pain a problem to solve, cure, or overcome? Who said so, and whom are we choosing to follow, if not our own decision and integrity? Or, it has some meanings to it that we continue to live with it, while the pain showing various aspects or meanings which may become significant to our life.
When the grief is painful, it is not comfortable to live with it. At the same time, grief itself can become our bond with our loved one, keeping the bond alive, as if the loved one’s presence were not gone in spirit.
Are you still fighting hard to get back what you have lost?
Is it an ongoing fight? If you stop fighting, is she going to disappear? Or… when you rest from fighting, how would she respond? What have you really lost that needs to be recovered? Her voice? Her presence, Her all? Is there anything you have not lost in relationship with her? Do you feel any wordless message or her heart or spirit “speaking” to you in silence?
Then let’s talk with the loved one.
What do we want to tell her now?
Since her physical presence was no more, how have you been, living with your experience of the loss?
Is “loss” the only word you use to describe your experience?
Can you come up with other ways to describe how your life has been?
Your life journey has certainly passed through a transition of season, or a terrain, unfamiliar to you. What have you been seeing in this unfolding terrain before your heart’s eyes?
How have you been reaping your new phase of life experience?
How would she accompany your journey from now on?
If her heart stays with you, watching you reading this article, she would ask you, ” … “
Grieving the way you love her, you listen.
Understanding you the way she loves you, she listens.
In silence we listen.
