A couple of weeks ago I wrote about grief and how it affected me, and tried to share a few words I’d read which I thought were helpful. I’ve been so grateful for the positive response to that post. Thank you! It means a great deal to know that something I’ve written may in a tiny way have helped a friend.

Today’s post is a very short one and it’s concerned with the process of ageing. It’s a single quote from one of my favourite books — The Japanese Lover, by Isabel Allende — and as I read it I thought it was a beautiful way to describe how we change as we get older. This isn’t something to fear, though. It’s something we should embrace.
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"Yesterday, Alma, when at last we could meet to celebrate our birthdays, I could see you were in a bad mood. You said that all of a sudden, without us realising it, we have turned seventy. You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We're not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What's so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age."

Last weekend was the 10th anniversary of my mum's death. It’s always a poignant and difficult time, and stirs up all sorts of emotions, including fear.

People find many different ways of dealing with the fear of dying. In my case, I’ve found that yoga has changed the way I look at things. Its lifestyle and philosophy has helped me to find a way of learning to understand the joy in living in the present moment and to understand my fears.

Yoga philosophy recognises that we all suffer. This suffering can be categorised under five headings, the klesas.

The five klesas are:

avidya — not seeing things as they are
raga — attachment
dvesa — aversion
asmita — the story of I, me and mine
abhinivesa — the thirst for further existence

The five klesas enable suffering to keep tormenting us, because they create loops in the mind-body that reinforce the way we behave. The term klesa comes from the verbal root kliss, which means "to make suffer, torment, or distress".

It is the abhinivesa klesa that is most often thought of as the fear of death. When you contemplate death, what you think about is not so much what happens to the physical body at the end of your life; it’s that "I" am going to die. The story of "me" will come to an end. And the question we ask ourselves and what we are most scared of is: what happens next?

Abhinivesa is not literally the fear of death, but the fear of being forced to let go of the story of "me".

When my mother died, it brought the fear right to the surface. And that fear is still there when I think about how she passed away or on occasions such as the anniversary of her passing. My go-to way of coping has always been to avoid the fear and the inevitable loneliness it brings on.

Being home alone — something which felt very real for me last week, after the return of my daughter to university — caused me to go into a bit of a cleaning frenzy! Keeping busy is my avoidance strategy, my way of pushing back the feelings of boredom and sadness. I actually think I entered a bit of a twilight phase: I felt sad and lonely, but didn't really want to be with anyone else and didn't feel comfortable with the idea of talking about how I was feeling. Who’s interested in meeting up with a friend for lunch who only wants to talk about how miserable they are 10 years after their mum died?! Most people want to avoid talking about death and facing up to their own mortality. Unless they have experienced the shift in the universe of losing someone truly special, it’s so hard to comprehend the depth of feelings that still exist 10 years down the line!

So it’s clear I have issues with grief!

Fortunately, the philosophy of yoga is always there for me and I will often sit down and read through my favourite books to find passages which, although I may have read them dozens of times before, still help me to find new answers. A truly brilliant book called “The Inner Tradition of Yoga” by Michael Stone has this passage:

What would happen if, instead of undertaking whichever activity you turn to when experiencing the growing or even acute feelings of sadness and loneliness, we sat down and paid attention to our breath? Yoga asks us to stay with feelings without seeking to avoid them. This does not mean dwelling in or indulging feelings indefinitely, rather it means that we stay patiently and with an acceptance of whatever is occurring in the present moment as it arises, unfolds and passes away.

Believe me, this is easier said than done! But in order to move on, we have to accept that good things don’t last forever and sometimes bad things happen, and we have to make the most of every moment, of every breath.

Here’s another quotation from a strange and cynical book about grief, “Grief is the Thing with Feathers”, by Max Porter:

Grief.

It changes all the time.

It is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

In one of his last poems, "Late Fragment", Raymond Carver offered this truth in concise terms:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth