Grief can be profoundly disorienting and traumatic. Yet it can also open our hearts, strengthening our empathy, affection and compassion for other people. It may even open us up to new forms of joy.
In his book, The Gift of a Broken Heart, Bryan Welch movingly recounts his own journey through deep grief at the loss of his 25-year-old son to addiction. In searing detail, the book describes the pain of parents trying to grapple with an adult child's mental illness and, finally, his death in the throes of the disease.
As he begins to recover from devastating parental grief, Bryan becomes aware that his new vulnerability gives him unexpected feelings of warmth, kinship and compassion toward his fellow human beings. This, as much as debilitating grief, is part of his son's legacy and he begins exploring practical, psychological and spiritual ways of honoring that legacy and sustaining a more compassionate, less egotistical view of his world.
Grief is a part of every human life. We desperately try to avoid it. But it can provide profound instruction about how we can experience life, and love, more deeply.
The Gift of a Broken Heart explores how the simple acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability can help heal the traumas that separate us from one another, and might lead us toward a more loving, less divisive human world.
For Bryan Welch and his wife Carolyn, the worst thing imaginable did happen. They lost their son. Cut off in the prime of life. The veil of invulnerability, of invincibility, was ripped away. It was a deep wound they felt they might never recover from. And, in some sense, they never have.
That's what this book is about. Bryan reflects now, a decade on, about what he has learned, what he is learning-guided in large measure by his commitment to spirituality and a contemplative way of living. One thing he seems to have learned, and that I'm learning from him, is that while you imagine this deep wound will scab over someday and you will return to normal, it doesn't really work that way-and that is, surprisingly, for the best. While deep grief is incapacitating for quite a while, the gradual return to capacity-which for Bryan has meant running the farm that he and Carolyn live on and working as a social entrepreneur-doesn't mean a return to a false sense of normalcy. It also doesn't have to mean facing the stark knowledge of vulnerability by numbing (though he admits he's been known to do so). The wound, rather, remains open and is a gateway to compassion. A broken heart is an open heart.
In these pages, Bryan expresses in intimate detail how he's been learning what compassion might really look like, beyond being a big fancy noun. He doesn't profess to know for sure what it is and how it works, but he's committed to learning, and making plenty of mistakes along the way. He has no interest in letting the wound scab over or the heart be mended.
This is not a book about healing. It is, in part, a book about recovery-in the same sense that people describe being "in recovery" from addiction. They acknowledge that they will always be addicts, and they will always be in recovery.
Grief is with us. The deaths of our loved ones, our own disease and death, the end of a treasured relationship or some sad disappointment in the state of our world-grief has many points of origin, but it is here. And as long as we live, it will be.
