Making Room for Our Children While We Grieve

Our children don’t always have a village to hold them while we fall apart…

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It’s a tender thing - parenting and grieving. Our children don’t always have a village to hold them while we fall apart in grief’s hands. Try as many of us might, some deeper part of us can’t fully let go, unless we’re certain our children are well held while we surrender to griefs deepest currents.

We want to be there with them, be the cauldron that contains their essence while they are tossed about and sometimes even broken apart. But to do that while we’re submerged in our own grief, shouldering single parenthood for the first time, can be near impossible.

It began for me in the predawn hours in the days and weeks after my wife's death.

When you’re a new widower or widow, you don’t know what each day is going to feel like. Sure, most mornings you wake up floating between numbness and pure misery, but you might also wake up out of a dream you shared with your lost partner, ecstatic over having felt their presence again. You could open your eyes awash in a love for your children so intense, all you want to do is pull them close to you, close the doors, and not let them out of your sight ever again.

You wake up in the chaotic tides of grief and the newly forming you.

This is how my writing practice took hold. I’ve always written, I took to blogging naturally when it became a thing. My first poetry prize was in 7th grade (yes - it was ridiculously dramatic). I fell just shy of enough credits to add a second major of creative writing to my undergrad degree. But in the past, writing has always had a quality of impulsiveness for me. My disciplines were spiritual practices based in movement, meditation, Celtic culture, and shamanism.

Writing became a central spiritual practice when I needed to make room for my children in my grief.

Those early mornings, when I first awoke in the darkness with griefs biggest conjuring still in motion, became the place of my own conjurings. My inner being was almost always fully activated back then. There were no mornings of lazy, thoughtless wanderings into the kitchen to groggily stumble through tea and comfort food. Every morning was a river, a vast expanse, a crushing feeling or an opportunity for radical insight.

Each morning was an invitation to listen, receive, and respond creatively.

The metaphors I captured, every sentence, poem - complete or incomplete, created new space in me to express my own essence and provide a nurturing environment for both of my children. Daily writing was an essential way for me to keep my grief flowing, opening the space within so I could show up as the Dad we all needed me to be.

It’s been over seven years now, I’m ready to share my process with you.

Survival skill became daily practice. I wake, I feel within, pause, listen and sense what arises. Can I receive this? Can I express it through writing? How does it lead me deeper into the fullness of just being?

The transformative power of poetry does not muffle grief in your life, it gives you a chance to experience grief as a teacher and guide.

It doesn’t really matter what you’re grieving. It can be a parent, a partner, a sibling, the Earth, a lost beloved animal companion. All grief responds to our open attention and the fires of creativity.

I hope you’ll join me for a few hours at the end of this month, June 28th 10am - 12:30pm PST on Zoom. We’ll explore how writing can join you in your grief and help light the way.

About Timothy Flynn

Timothy Flynn is a writer and widower living in Central Oregon, where he has been raising his two children following the loss of their mother. Tim has trained and worked at several hospices as a volunteer visitor, studied the history of death and dying in the U.S., and has extensive training and experience in shamanic practices related to death, dying, and beyond. A former teacher for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, he also holds an M.A. in Transformative Arts from JFK University with a focus on ritual performance.

"Tim knows the journey of love, loss & grief like he knows the back of his hand. He’s been through it, and is a clear example of making medicine from pain. The spaces he holds for others who are grieving are tender, thoughtful and deeply rooted in his poetic connection with life and grief." - Josea Tamira Crossley www.darkwoodsofgrief.com