Writing about the spiritual side of grieving

Abstract

The Collins Dictionary defines ‘spirit’ as ‘the force or principle of life that animates the body of living things’. ‘Spiritus’ is the Latin word for spirit and also means breath. A bereaved parent in Finkbeiner’s study (1998: 238) says, ‘If children are part of parents they are not arms or legs, but bones andbreath.’ Rudolph Steiner (1973) believed that during the first seven years of life, a child shares its mother’s spiritual energy in the same way it shared her blood in the womb. I would add to that by saying that in my own experience, and in the experience of many bereaved parents, the spiritual connections with one’s child do not end with the death of that child. Although much has been written about the mental, emotional and physical aspects of grieving, discussion of the fourth aspect of the quadrant, the spiritual, is discouraged in western society, where spiritual experiences of the bereaved are accounted for as part of the psychology of grief. This paper examines the spiritual side of grieving and the challenges of writing about it in a creative writing PhD. It draws on research about after-death communication and near-death experiences that aim to determine whether human consciousness survives death. It also reflects on my own writing which argues that the bereaved need not accept the pathologising of their experiences.