Grief | Michelle Cromer

Healing Grief

Michelle Cromer May 16, 2022 Leave a Comment

I recently received a question from a woman who watches my YouTube videos and she asked me about grief. She was distraught due to her friends demanding she “get over it.” From my personal experience with death and dying, I understand that we never get over great losses, and I don’t think we are supposed to. We absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder but always deeper creatures.

All lives are hard and difficult to understand, and we acknowledge the slipperiness of those who died – they got out. You hold on to them because it can be so appalling here until you can’t hold on anymore. You can’t tether them to earth anymore, because the thread has grown too fine.

When they tell you to heal and move on, don’t listen. Healing from loss doesn’t look like healing from an injury. This was not a broken bone, these are pieces of our hearts, and now a piece of our heart is gone.

You will heal; just not the way the world wants you to because we are a grief illiterate society. You will breathe easier. You will ache maybe a little less, but take it from me; the longing will never ever leave. That is the beauty and the fierceness of your love.

Here is what I want you to know if you are going through grief: this is really as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What is lost can’t be restored. You are in pain and it can’t be made better. The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is a pain in the world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand in the middle of this blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.

Some things cannot be fixed they can only be carried. Grief as it turns out is heavy. And it is all in the way you carry it.

Have any Feng Shui questions? Feel free to contact me at michelle@michellecromer.com and sign up for your Power Color or visit me on Facebook at Michelle Cromer Feng Shui.

My Suicide Story

Michelle Cromer September 6, 2021 2 Comments

The story of my suicide begins one Monday morning when I decided it was time to finally escape from my sorry-ass, pathetic life. I took down my acrylic, brightly colored globe from the shelf, placed my finger on bright pink Texas, and ran it across the same grid line halfway around the world until it landed on what was nearly its antipode: lime green Kathmandu, Nepal. I figured that if I traveled to a completely unfamiliar place, totally out of my comfort zone, I could finally make clear plans to take my own life.

So there I was, hiking in Kathmandu two months later when it happened. I stood speechless on the grassless brown hill, looking down across the muddy river to where a ceremony was taking place. The women were dressed in bright pink, orange, and canary yellow saris—long strips of cloth wrapped around their waists, with one end draped over their shoulders. The men wore silk sherwani—close-fitting garments fastened in the front that extended below the knee. A few men carefully wrapped a corpse in white shroud material, then carried it to the banks of the river and respectfully placed it atop a stack of wood, which lay on a platform composed of ten layers of black bricks.

My guide explained that as part of this ceremony, the firstborn son of the man who had died earlier that day had carried a branch to the family’s home fireplace and lit it. The son slowly walked across the platform and up to the wooden block and ignited the first layer of wood right under the body. He then carefully placed the lit branch onto the crown of his father’s head. The white shroud burst into flames.

Everyone present took turns putting more wood on the fire, leading a song or prayer or initiating a dance. I had stumbled on a Hindu funeral. It is a Hindu belief that the soul of the person who has just passed away is already on its way to the next level of existence—in other words, the soul is already gone.

This celebration is a time for friends and family to honor the life of the person who has just died and to confront the death openly.

The father’s ashes were brought to the river by his family and spread there: life and death commingled in this symbolic rite of passage. I found the fire powerful, intoxicating and purifying. I couldn’t look away.

In the West, after a death, we usually hand over our loved ones to be tended to and cared for by strangers. Most of the people I know haven’t held a dead pet, much less a dead body. Hindus, however, deal with death by dealing directly with their dead.

My baby daughter, Catalina, had died just before this trip. Catalina had been born prematurely. Her heart stopped, her lungs shut down, and she died before she had a chance to experience life. I never even held her.

No one knew this in Kathmandu. No one here knew that I blamed myself for her death and that, up until this moment, I had been unable to cope. I had been denying myself my feelings about what had happened. I just felt people in my life would be better off without me.

Death was a topic I hadn’t wanted to discuss because I didn’t understand the feelings Catalina’s death invoked in me. I had convinced myself that her body was just a shell, a thing that held no value to me. I was wrong. Her body represented the person who was no longer here, not just the baby she was but also the person she would have become, and not holding her even once kept me from understanding and processing what had happened.

But standing there in Nepal, I realized in an instant that the meaning of life and the meaning of death is connected. And if you love you must grieve.

Grieving is love moving in reverse. It’s as if love has jumped in a car and gone backward. I fell to my knees, put my head in my hands, and wailed. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was blindsided by grief. Suddenly I was standing face-to-face with emotions that I had avoided my entire life, emotions hidden deep inside me in places too difficult to reach.

On that cloudy, misty, gray day in Kathmandu, I began to think clearly for the first time in ages. I decided it was time to return home and get professional help.

I finally managed my way out of deep depression by connecting to my grief in a meaningful way. Since I lost my daughter I thought I would help others who had lost theirs, so I started a foundation, Pink Crosses, in Juarez, Mexico that brought comfort and closure to the murdered girls of Juarez through forensic identification. When I helped the families, I found that I helped myself. I discovered that we find meaning by determining a purpose in our lives, doing work that makes a difference to others, developing meaningful relationships, and serving something bigger than ourselves. It does get better and finding meaning in the hopelessness does help.

If someone you know is struggling emotionally or having a hard time, you can be the difference in getting them the help they need. Call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-TALK (8255) at any time. You will discover the resources that are available in your area or encourage your loved one to call.

Thor – A Gentle Father

Michelle Cromer May 12, 2016 Leave a Comment

He has the kind of face that stops you in your tracks and the first time I saw the Colonel I thought the Norse God Thor was visiting from Asgard. He is a head higher than most people I would consider tall. His blonde hair, which is cut barely a few millimeters in length, frames an almost perfectly symmetrical face. He has distinct cheekbones and his angular jaw look as if it is molded from granite. His eyes are a vivid blue but sometimes they look as if a great body of water has softly melted into milky green hue, the perfect match for his army fatigues. If you get close enough you can see flecks of silver in his eyes. He appears to be in his mid-forties and everything about his body screams discipline.

But as handsome as he is, I always had a sense that his beauty was more than skin deep. Since he had been frequently deployed I didn’t run into him often, but the few times that I did I felt something odd, unusual, unexpected. Also there is an undercurrent of gentleness that seems out of place in his warrior body.

Right before Christmas I heard of his wife’s sudden death. I simply stood shaking my head in disbelief. Their daughter and my son are in the same class at school and just the week before, I sat with his wife, on a bench waiting for the last school bell to ring. I still feel a chill move through my body when I think of it. I didn’t know her well, yet I felt the impact deeply.

I now run into the Colonel in the school parking lot, in class meetings, at a band concerts, and at birthday parties. Wherever his daughter is, he is there too. I am on the outskirts of their lives watching as they travel through their grief. I know first hand that grief never ends, but it changes. It’s a passage not a place to stay; it’s not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. Grief is the price of love. I’ve learned it’s not the weight of grief that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it; and the Colonel carries his grief like Thor carries the weight of his hammer, with gentle dignity and grace. In doing so he doesn’t tell his daughter how to live – he shows her. Every day. Hard things shatter into a million pieces yet soft things don’t break. His greatest strength is his gentleness.

My grandmother used to tell me of the ancient Irish who had a mythic sense of how to weave the world back into fullness when the center failed to hold and all seemed to fall apart and be doomed into darkness. When disorientation became the common shape of life and the four directions seemed about to be blown to the wind, then the unifying fifth direction would have to be sought. This calming gentleness could only be found at the edges of the land in the darkest places and along the misty cliffs where the otherworld plays hide and seek with those of us on earth.

If people are willing to go to that place that seems darkest to them, each will find something of meaning and value. For as the darkness feels closer, the threads of existence move near as well. In facing the darkness one finds again the enlivening thread of gentle hope. If each then turns back again and pulls the thread of life toward the middle of things, then each automatically contributes to regenerating the unified center.

What the Colonel reminds me is that life is not always so certain; even straight roads have subtle curves in them. Perhaps the best thing one – anyone – can do is to listen more carefully to those hidden voices speaking from places beyond time and matter; places buried in the middle of the earth and the center, untouchable and gentle part of the soul.

(Please note: I’m not saying the Colonel is Thor, but come to think about it, I have never seen them in the same room together.)

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