Letting Grief Bring Growth By Wally Klatch

By Wally Klatch

Grief-Growth

Grief is blackness. Grief is what was and will never be. Grief comes from the loss of many kinds of things. Grief accumulates with age. Grief can lower a person’s ability to function or can even be incapacitating.

Grief is a hole, and a hole is emptiness. But a hole is also a space. What had been in the hole will not come back, but now there is a hole for something new to come into, something that had not been there before. What does this mean? It means that if we are ready for it, and if we let it, grief can bring something new to us. Grief can lead to growth.

I’m in grief because my life is being destroyed, and my family’s life is being hit very hard. I was diagnosed with dementia three years ago, and at that time, my grief was black. It was not even conceivable that I would have any connection with dementia, a condition that eventually leaves people non-functional and without connection to the world around them, and leaves their families devastated. That was the only thing I saw in front of my eyes. I had two words in my head: “death” and “dementia”. That was black grief, and that was all I had in my world. There was a big hole where my world used to be.

Then something happened, a very small thing that has gone on to become important for me. It was the very first appearance of what I have called “Grief-Growth.” What happened was that one day, within this terrible grief, I realized that I was still alive. It was startling. Yes, my future will be as I saw it coming, and yes, I’m not really dealing with my grief in any way, but now I realized I was also still living. The hole had opened up, and in addition to seeing the emptiness, I started to realize that I could begin to fill it in.

Starting to fill in the hole of grief by creating what my life was to become was a particularly appropriate way for me to deal with my grief. “Doing” had always been my basic orientation, and although “feeling” was about to become much stronger as my dementia developed, I very much felt that “doing” was needed to deal with my grief. This was fertile ground for the development of Grief-Growth, in which the feeling of grief and the doing of a growth activity come together to help me face the situation.

As time went by, I realized that my living and dying were affecting each other; that knowing I am dying made my living richer and knowing I am living made my dying more meaningful. This was a new realization; it hadn’t occurred to me before. And my Grief-Growth didn’t stop there. My living and dying weren’t just affecting each other; they were dancing a “duet” together, and I realized my role is to play the music for their duet. I call this concept of Grief-Growth, which led me to realize that living and dying are dancing a duet in me, LivingDyingDuet.com. 

My grief from living with dementia has increased, but my Grief-Growth has also clearly increased. My mind is working much less than before, which is very difficult, but that has opened up a place for my feelings to grow to be much more a part of me –  Grief-Growth is right here happening. Like LivingDyingDuet, I had to make up a new word for something I had never experienced before, so as an addition to Mindfulness, I created Feelingness: Feelingfulness.com. My grief is as dark and as urgent as ever, but my life is much different, as I have the opportunity to at least partly live it in the world of Grief-Growth for as long as I can.

Let’s talk more about the difference between Grief and Grief-Growth, since I believe they are two different things. Grief comes to us against our will, and we need to decide how to relate to it. Grief-Growth requires attention and even nurturing, since, as my problems are due to my dementia, it always makes my grief larger and stronger. I have to flow with my grief first, and I take my feeling of grief as a measure of my deterioration, and only then can I explore relating to it as Grief-Growth.  

Allowing Grief-Growth to accompany my grieving has also led me to other unexpected places. A time of grieving is naturally a time of reflecting, along with the presence of inner feelings about what is important to me and what is not. At this moment, Grief-Growth helps me distinguish the noise from the authentic in my life. Awareness of the fragility of my life opened me to talk about remembrance and Epitaphing, which is how I want my memory to be expressed.  

Grief comes from what happens to us. Grief-Growth is one of the many ways we can respond to grief. May we each find how growth can help us deal with the grief we are feeling.

Wally Klatch, 71, was diagnosed with Early-Stage Dementia in October 2022. He received his undergraduate degree from Indiana University and his Master’s Degree in Management from Purdue University. He worked as a Management Consultant to large and mid-sized companies in the areas of Organization and Operations, and spent thirty years living in Israel. Since being diagnosed, his condition has been connected by several neurologists to different brain conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease and brain spikes, among others. While his thought functionality is declining, his emotional awareness has increased, and he maintains functionality even while his relationship to himself and to his world is shifting. If you have any questions or comments for Wally, please feel free to reach out to him through agebuzz editor Connie Zuckerman at [email protected].