Our National Guardsmen Are Dying of Unresolved Grief

Time Magazine just featured an article called “A Soldier’s Tragedy: He killed his wife, his daughters and himself. What one National Guardsman’s murder-suicide reveals about the plight of weekend warriors.”

Matthew Magdzas joined the Army National Guard in 2005 fresh out of high school and a year later volunteered to go to Iraq. Matthew spent 12 months on the front lines and was described as an “exceptional, safe and responsible” soldier by his commanders. “He was awarded several decorations, including the Combat Action Badge.” Matthew saved the lives of many of his comrades by “neutralizing” the insurgents.

After a 2-week debriefing, he was sent home to his wife and daughter, with no job and a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He did everything he was supposed to do. He sought help from the VA, and received several medications for depression, anxiety and pain. Matthew was placed on suicide watch, but expressed frustration about the care he was getting through the VA. I think it’s important to note that 6,500 veterans kill themselves each year… that’s 18 PER DAY.

He got no relief from his counseling sessions, and I have to say, I don’t know how ANYONE could find relief or comfort from the sessions Matthew described to a friend. “They pretty much sit me in the room, and they make me rehash only the things that happened in the war. I’m having worse nightmares that don’t go away. They’re not helping me get over it. They just listen to my stories and send me out the door.” He was then ordered to Fort Knox, KY for a mental evaluation. Because the psychologist determined Matthew had chronic PTSD, “it would be in the best interest of this soldier and the Army” for Matthew to be discharged. To a combat soldier, that is like being thrown into the trash.

I have zero experience with the military, and even less experience with war combat, but I have experienced PTSD, and am very familiar with death, unrelenting sorrow and despair. I am sure PTSD plays a huge role in veteran suicides. But I believe the VA and General Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff and top suicide fighter is missing a critical piece of the treatment puzzle: helping our combat veterans grieve! These men and women are trained to kill and to maintain focus even as their buddies are being killed and maimed right next to them. That is more than any human being should have to bear.

I know I’ve said this before but our culture doesn’t like seeing men grieve. I can only imagine that sentiment being amplified by the macho culture of the military. But if we don’t start teaching these men that it is not only okay, but that it is imperative for their recovery and reentry into civilian life to grieve, we will only continue to see more casualties.

I plan on reaching out to General Chiarelli, and encourage other grief specialists to do the same. We have to help our hurting soldiers and their families.

Flight of The Fallen Soldier

On my way to Vermont to pick up my final study, I flew on a plane that was bringing one of our fallen soldiers home to his final resting place. I don’t know a lot about the military, so I was surprised when the flight attendant asked all of the passengers to remain seated so that a fellow passenger and soldier could exit the plane first in order to accompany his fallen comrade. Whether I agree with the war or not, I am comforted by the idea that our soldier isn’t just being shipped home, he or she is being respectfully brought home.

The flight was late and making my connection was going to be really tight, but all of that meant nothing. In fact, I felt honored to be on the flight, like I was part of something very important. What, I wasn’t sure, but it felt big. Regardless of anyone’s faith, politics, nationality and even sexual orientation, for a brief moment, we were all in solidarity, proud, honored and humbled. Then I thought of the family waiting for their child to come home for the last time. My heart broke. I prayed for the family, the fallen soldier and his companion and then I prayed that we all would treat every soldier as if he or she were our own child. If every man and woman (yes, every politician) did that, maybe we’d approach things differently.

I’m not one who thinks I have all the answers. I don’t. I have even been guilty of being a bit too Pollyanna on occasion. But I do believe if we all just stopped for one second, shut our pie holes and saw the beauty in each other’s differences, we’d be in a hell of a lot better shape than we are now. Can we just drop the whole idea of needing to be right?  Can we, just for a moment, remember that any person we are against is someone’s child? If we could remember that, there would be no war or dead soldiers who need to be accompanied home. I know it’s idealistic to think a truly peaceful world is possible, but until it is… let’s do our best to take care of each other, love each other, and treat each other with respect.

What Has Happened to Empathy and Compassion in our Culture for Grievers?

I think I have the answers, so take a seat and get ready for a long VERY controversial post. I have tried for a long time to stay out of the realm of controversy, but I can't do it anymore. Our culture is completely out of balance and needs a good swift kick in the pants to get back on track. So let's start with the imbalance of religion and ritual, shall we?

Pro-Life

Take the sanctity of life for instance. There are religious people who will kill people because they are pro-life. There are "pro-lifers" that are for the death penalty. I have found that some religions lack support for parents grieving the loss of an infant. In some cases ritual and the rigidity around the rules of ritual even cause harm. For example, if a baby is stillborn into a Catholic family, that baby cannot be baptized because baptism is a rite for the living. That baby was living and for a religion that preaches, “Life begins at conception,” you would think they’d baptize any baby. Even if it is totally against their teachings or rules, I believe a priest or member of the clergy should do something, anything, make something up! Adapt the baptism to fit the circumstances, to comfort the parents. Don't you think that's what Jesus would do? He broke the rules of the sabbath after all!

Pro-Life

The flip side of the rigidity coin is a total lack of religion and ritual. That has become more and more the norm in our “fast food,” “drive-thru,” “microwave,” “instant gratification,” “3 days bereavement leave” kind of culture. It seems our culture turns to education, research and psychology as opposed to spirituality and ritualization when dealing with death. The problem is this approach completely removes the heart. I believe a major contributor to the issue is the commercialization of death. It's a business so we use words that desensitize us, like corpses and fetuses so it's easier to "dispose" of them in the same way we dispose of atomic waste and trash.

For weeks, I have been asking myself, “What on earth could be causing this calloused, non-empathetic treatment of the dead and of grievers?" I believe a lack of spirituality, life without rites of passage and rituals has created a lack of respect for the value of an individual life and has desensitized us to death. Political correctness hasn’t helped much either.

Which leads me to a very touchy subject, abortion! The argument of when life actually begins has created a serious quagmire for parents grieving after an early or midterm miscarriage and even for parents who have made the difficult choice to abort. The grieving that occurs for both sets of parents is profound but because of the political stances on both sides of the issue, the grief totally gets missed. Let me explain. The rhetoric used to justify “choice” refers to a baby as tissue or a fetus. If you are pro-choice and you have an abortion, it is not politically correct to grieve the loss or even have regrets because, God forbid, it give the pro-lifers ammunition to take away choice. Likewise, if you and your peers are pro-choice, when a miscarriage happens early, the overall tone, albeit unconscious, is that it was just tissue or a fetus.

In Remembering Well, Sarah York, a Universalist Unitarian minister, made a comment in reference to an infant that had died shortly after birth, that absolutely horrified me! She said, “He was not just a handicapped infant who never had a chance…he was a person who had spent some time in this world, and his parents needed to hold a service to remember him well.” The words seem benign but only to those who buy into the philosophy that “JUST a handicapped infant who never had a chance” who is aborted or miscarried, is somehow less valuable than one that lived for a little while. Four pages later she redeems herself by saying, “The physical remains, even of a fetus that has been aborted by choice, deserve a ceremony of committal. This honors…the relationship that existed between parent or parents and fetus.” On this point, I couldn’t agree more. A baby’s life in-utero in our culture, has been given less value, which leaves the parents on both sides of the issue communally unsupported. Remember the priest who preached pro-life but whose rules dictated that the baby hadn’t lived long enough to be baptized?

Unless you know me, it may surprise you to know that I am completely pro-choice. However, I believe that regardless of the circumstances, there is a very real relationship between the BABY (I am more and more offended by the term fetus than I ever could have imagined) and his or her parents. This is the entire basis of my work as a spiritual counselor and speaker.

Miscarriage

In February 2004, my partner Cindy miscarried a perfectly healthy girl at 8 weeks. We were devastated. Because of Cindy’s age, there was no time to waste: we had to try again immediately. It’s odd and yet very common in our culture that virtually no one really acknowledged our loss. Don’t get me wrong, people were sad for us but the general feeling I got was, “OK, that was sad
,
but let’s move on.” I must look deep within myself to fully grasp the effect my pro-choice views may have had on the way I handled the loss of our first daughter. In hindsight, I regret the fact that we didn’t do a ritual after that loss. I regret not naming her. I regret that she was discarded as “bio-hazardous waste.”

My next question is, what has caused our culture to reject spirituality, rites of passage and rituals? The answer to this question is highly complex. In my experience, the people that come to my church or to me for spiritual counseling have been deeply wounded by organized religion and have thrown out all that is good (i.e. ritual) because they have been harmed by the leaders of said religion. I call it “throwing the Bible out with the bath water.” Ritual has also been used to abuse people by the religious leaders they grew up trusting. Further, in the age of information, there are no more secrets and the darkness that has been hidden behind church and temple walls is being brought out into the light. It is no surprise that a relatively conscious person would cast a jaundiced eye on everything linked to organized religion.

Starhawk said, "Rituals build community, creating a meeting-ground where people can share deep feelings, positive and negative…a place where they can sing or scream, howl ecstatically or furiously, play or keep a solemn silence"

What effect has the rejection of ritual had on our society? I’ll tell you… the loss of ritual in our culture has virtually eliminated a sense of real community, thereby isolating people, leaving them completely alone with their deep feelings. No one escapes loss and generally speaking, there are no safe places (other than privately or with a therapist) where people can release on a profound level, the kind of grief that is released and supported by communal ritual.

How on Earth did we get here? How is it that empathy and compassion around death and loss is going the way of the Dodo Bird? The answers to these questions surprised me and I found them in Crossroads: The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage, in a piece called “Baskets at the Crossroads,” by Nouk Bassomb. Well, it was like finding the Holy Grail! Bassomb describes the rites of passage through which all thirteen-year-old African Bassa boys must go. He tells it beautifully. I hope that I can give it justice as I try to summarize it.

In the African Bassa culture, a grown man is expected to be “a firm, upright support for the entire village.” But that expectation doesn’t come out of nowhere. Boys are initiated and go through a series of rites of passage to become men. The first initiation involved Bassomb leaving his family behind, spending ninety days with twenty-seven other boys his age in a dangerous forest. The group of boys had one elder who was the initiator. The role of the initiator was to teach the boys the kind of reverence for God, culture, tradition and intuition needed to become a man.

Right there we can see several stark differences from our culture. First, Americans have very few elders and the elders we do have are not remotely respected. Second, because of the “melting pot” origins of our country, there is no one culture. Consequently most cultures within the United States have become watered down and homogenized. I have heard the phrase “the Americanization of the World,” and believe me, it is not being used as a compliment. Thirdly, there is very little reverence for God even in the most religious and spiritual communities because we are so busy trying to be right and make others’ beliefs wrong. Which, in principle, is NOT reverence for God, nor is it philosophically American. Last but not least, it is criminal that the men in our culture are not taught about the importance of their intuition. Is it any surprise that we are destroying our earth, attacking each other and bereft of values? I digress.

Rites of Passage

The African Bassa boys were taught about how to use what they learned to navigate the many “crossroads” they will encounter when put to the test. Bassomb states, “I learned that the crossroads are not only where people coming from south, north, east and west meet, but there also come together the old and new, the traditional and the modern, the archaic and the contemporary, the young and the aged, the visible and the invisible, the world or the living and the world of the dead.”

Within a few weeks, Bassomb was called out of his family home and told, “It’s time for you to depart, boy. Go! Now!” He is forced to leave his family, his home, his village with nothing more than a cloth wrap around his waist. The elders tell him that for the “next 18 moons” he cannot return to the village or communicate in any way with anyone in the village. As Bassomb, a thirteen-year-old boy, walked out of the village, he heard his mother shout, “Be humble and compassionate… and praise the Father each and every day. Don’t forget to put your baskets at the crossroads. And check them often.”

Which brings me to the most profound lesson we can learn from this beautiful man and his story. Nouk Bassomb wrote, “It is at the crossroads that we learn kindness, love, respect for the elders, protection of children, compassion for the weak and the meek. Being generous, compassionate, humble, hospitable, all help to fill our baskets. 'Check the baskets often,' Mom said. She is the one who taught me to pray, which is to say to put my basket at the crossroads, an empty basket.”

The boys of that culture are taught to fill their baskets with “stories and experiences,” not material goods. This rite of passage empowers these boys and not only turns them into men, but good men. In my youth, it could be argued that my peers and I were taught about the baskets, but we were taught to fill them with recognition, achievement for the sake of self, and money. In our culture, that is what defines success. Experience, wisdom and stories are of no value other than entertainment at a party or a juicy “tell all book.”

American teens and children are being robbed of the gift of empowerment. The more they try to fill their baskets with “gold and silver,” the emptier they feel. The emptier they feel, the more our teens turn to drugs, alcohol, violence, sex and video games to numb out to their emotions or present circumstances. Without rites of passage and ritual, we are raising generation after generation of people incapable of being present enough to do their own grieving, let alone have compassion for someone else who is in grief.

Our children and even adults need to be put in situations that give them opportunities to find God (the Divine within), themselves and to stay present, in the moment to survive with no time to numb out. That will create a “village” that comforts the grieving, that walks with them through the process. A village that doesn’t label grief in stages, or diagnose grief as a neurosis, and provides a place where an elder’s story of loss can inspire the younger generations.

Do We Really Have a Choice?

Sometimes I wonder if our lives are predestined or if we really have choice. Often it seems the universe conspires to lead us in a particular direction, and no matter how hard we fight it, we are going there whether we like it or not. I had a very specific vision of what my life was going to be; let’s just say it doesn’t remotely resemble the life that has unfolded (and continues to unfold) before me.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that my life’s work would be about grief, death and how death can teach us to live. But as I examine my life, this is where I have been headed from a very young age. When I was six years old, my stepfather died of a massive coronary. From that point forward, death and loss became a major theme, so my mother’s and my unresolved grief became the foundation of my most formative years.

Many losses and years later, a newly ordained minister, the very first “official” service I did was a memorial service of a friend who had committed suicide. The first words I spoke were, “I could never have imagined that when I met Robert six years ago, one day I would be a minister, and that his Memorial Service would be my very first.” Not two years later, I was standing at the same pulpit for my brother’s memorial giving the eulogy; three months after that, I conducted the entire funeral service including singing “The Lord’s Prayer” for my oldest and dearest friend, Doris. Two short months would pass before I was once again at the pulpit after my daughter’s passing. I wasn’t just a mother in front of her family and friends; I was a staff minister in front of her congregants. I felt their eyes watching as they held their breath. I saw the way they looked to me as a leader in their community to see how I would handle the weight of all of these losses.

The weight on my shoulders was great and I chose to be very honest about my descent into doubt and hopelessness. I stopped giving sermons and I stopped seeing my spiritual counseling clients. I could no longer help a desperate person find hope with the same shallow teachings and platitudes that I had been taught because I knew they were false. I had to find deeper meaning.

I read books, tried individual psychotherapy, group therapy, mediums, spiritual counseling, and finally The Grief Recovery Institute. I got a lot from each of these approaches for the loss of my brother, but none of them helped me completely with the loss of my infant daughter. I even went to Compassionate Friends, a bereavement group that helps families after losing a child. As I sat in this group and heard story after story of how this baby died and that woman miscarried, and how nobody understood, all I felt was traumatized, not supported. I knew grieving for the loss of an infant was different because of a lack of a perceived relationship between the parents and an unborn child or a baby under the age of one year. Doctors have even been known to say things like, “You can always have another,” or “At least you lost it sooner rather than later.” As if to say there was no connection between the parents and infant. I noticed that people either focused on the death scenario or simply refused to acknowledge it at all.

That was the impetus of a study I have been conducting for the last six months. I had hoped to uncover the missing piece to completing grief after losing an infant. At the beginning of this study, I wasn’t sure what the remedy could be. I thought it might be a simple “Five Easy Steps to…” What I learned was that each case is unique, because grief is not the same for everyone. I discovered that the existing paradigms are helpful but incomplete, that so many of the resources available to grievers are psychologically-based, religiously-based, just one person’s experience or completely “woo-woo” psychic-type stuff. Again, these can be helpful, but I realized that there is a lack of spiritual (NOT religious or “woo-woo”) help for grievers who may have lost their faith. Further, the religious material out there for grievers is filled with judgment and threats. Not good!

The most important gift I received from this study was the understanding that grief recovery must include the story of the relationship. I could walk into any funeral of an adult today and people would be crying and laughing but most importantly, they would be telling stories. Stories about their loved one’s life, not just the circumstances surrounding the loved one’s death. That is what I would call complete grieving.

But what happens, for instance, if you have a baby that is stillborn? If I walked into one of those funerals, I am willing to bet, there wouldn’t be laughter and stories about the baby’s life. And that, my friends, is the most important missing piece to grieving the loss of a baby. I have found in my study and in my own experience that healing occurs more completely when the grieving parent tells the complete story of the relationship they had with their infant, of both life and death.

I had a very real relationship with my daughter while she was inside my partner Cindy’s belly. I read to her, I sang to her, we even bought a Doppler to hear her heart beat every night. Later in the pregnancy when Cindy was on bed rest, we had weekly sonograms in which I got to watch every stage of growth. Later still, we lived in the hospital for the last six weeks of pregnancy where Cindy was hooked up to every monitor you could imagine twenty-four hours a day. During that time, we literally heard every beat of her heart, every movement of her little body; we could tell by the accelerations and decelerations of her heartbeat whether she was hungry, sleeping, uncomfortable or happy. Her kicking told us a lot, too! Mostly she would kick to either applaud my singing or to shut me up… I never quite figured out which kick was a good review and which kick was a bad review. This was a seven and a half month relationship that started the moment we found out Cindy was pregnant. The story of her birth and death only covers nineteen hours of that relationship.

I do believe one needs to acknowledge the crushing blow of an infant’s death; as a result of this study, I have created a workshop for parents who have lost an infant called “Birth Write: The Write Way to Grieve ©” which will help parents document through writing the story of the LIFE they had with their baby. I have also developed another workshop called “Finding Your Way Back to Faith” for grievers who have lost their faith as a result of their loss. I am really grateful for the wisdom I gained from this study. I believe it has brought my life’s purpose into sharper focus and provided me with a very real direction. I am currently writing a book that will include my new grieving method and the material that comes out of the workshops.

And so, this is the life that is unfolding in front of me. During many of my past loss experiences I have felt broken. Shattered. But now that I have made peace with the fact that this is what God or Spirit wants me to do with my life, I actually feel more whole than I have ever felt in my entire life.

If you find yourself in a life that doesn’t look like the life you imagined, like you don’t have a choice…you do. You can choose to stand idly by as your life unfolds before you, or you can take the unique experience and wisdom that only you have, make peace with it, and boldly live your life purpose.

My Near Death Experience!

I have been thinking a lot about death lately. I recently completed hospice training and it was an awe-inspiring experience that brought me to the realization that my life’s work is death and helping people understand what death can teach us about living.

I had a near death experience a few days ago. I was walking down the stone steps in the picture on the left, I wasn’t in the proper shoes and I slipped. My feet went out from under me so fast. One second I was standing there watching my family by a beautiful river and the next thing I knew, I was eating leaves. In truth, this was but a mere “life’s most embarrassing moment,” not an actual NDE (near death experience), but replace those leaves, that cushioned my head, with rocks and this piece becomes my obituary, not a humorous little spiritual piece on my blog.

I was lucky. I walked away with a bruise on my hip, an achy right arm and shoulder and a very bruised ego. Thankfully, my family will always have a ridiculous image of me lying on the steps plucking leaves out of my hair rather than the alternative.

So what did I learn from this? First of all, always choose your footwear wisely. Seriously, life can change and even be over in an instant. And do you really want to die in the wrong shoes?

Metaphysically speaking, the right side of the body (the side that I injured) represents doing or taking action. My feet (the part of me that faltered) represent my understandings. When I clearly understand what I am supposed to be doing and ignore or choose to take the wrong action, I am sure to lose my footing and get hurt.

Life is too short to let fear of falling on my face or fear of getting hurt, stop me from knowing and living my purpose. You may be wondering, “What is my purpose?” It’s really quite simple. We all are given a set of gifts and experiences that we are meant to master. When we learn, understand and combine our gifts with our experiences, we are then able to help others heal and evolve. Knowledge plus experience equals wisdom.

I can look at my life and know what Spirit wants me to do by looking at the gifts I have (the gift of gab and a gifted voice), combine them with the knowledge I have gleaned from my life experience (which includes having to repeatedly deal with death, loss and overcoming a fear of singing in public) and voila, there is my purpose. To use my voice in all of its capacity to help people grieve, understand death and as a result, live life to the fullest.

What are your gifts? What has your life experience taught you? If you combine your gifts with your life experience, what is your purpose?

Don’t wait to get knocked on your ass before you start living the life you were meant to live. The trick is to put one foot in front of the other. Just make sure both feet are in the right shoes and on your path!

Tune in next week to learn how to overcome your fears.