Grief Shrine

My Grief Shrine

I’m just back from Coming Home Constellations camp and I’m tending my grief shrine, with fresh flowers and a new candle. This shrine has been such a comfort these last few years. Life is constant grief. Each day that passes represents a loss.

The shrine has become an altar to my guides and ancestors. I spend time, most days, in gratitude or expressing my longing, my deepest desires, at the foot of this shrine.

Bert Hellinger said the dead are complete, once we let them go, while the living are not, so we can use the dead as a resource, and ask for whatever we desire from them.

The shrine is there for the many griefs I feel, not only for my dead relatives and friends, but for the daily losses I experience as a human being in a world of love. Francis Weller names the first gate of grief “Everything we love we will lose.” Summer is drawing to a close, maybe a little early for some of us to bear, I felt such a deep sadness when I realised earlier this month that the swifts had left. I had lost my time of sitting in the garden while my heart soared with their squeals of delight in flight.

At Constellations Camp this year, Naphia Reggiani and I facilitated a grief ritual. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge the depth of our grief, I sometimes feel shame about even going there, let alone releasing it. My sorrow sits at Weller’s second gate, “The places that have not known love”.

This year fresh grief that was buried 30 years ago has bubbled up to free my heart. The grief I feel about the loss I experienced back then is evidence that it meant something, that I loved, and that it is only right I should grieve it. And so I added a photograph of young, beautiful Poppy to the shrine, for now, to honour who I was, what was lost, and to re-member her and it.

Every passing moment is a loss that our culture demands we store away in our very tissues. The shrine helps me to warm it, and move it up and out of my body, with ritual blessings and gratitude for the life I have.

Do you have a shrine for your grief, or for your ancestors or guides?

Can you see anything in my shrine that resonates with you? Last time I posted a photo of my shrine, I got such a beautiful response, I’d love to hear how this moves you, if at all, now.