I Have Experienced So Much Loss That Becoming A Grief Coach Could Be My Next Era

Grief Coaching? I may have finally found my calling, and it feels like more than a random idea. But how do I write that kind of resume’?

I have more experience with grief than I would like to have. Of course, at my age--59 in November, which makes me a death-and-all-things-dark-obsessed-Scorpio--why wouldn't I have experienced loss? I have been over-burdened, starting at a young age, by grief, and I am lately coming to grips with the losses of my life as I lived it before Covid and Long Covid took away so many things I took for granted about how I wanted to live my life.

I deeply identify with the idea that our dead remain somewhere near, on a different plane of existence, and that they can be called upon when they are needed. I have evidence for making this claim. Let's just say I have my own proofs. But even if they're here, I still mourn their loss from this plane of existence.

I am still in the process of grieving leaving my life in California, for real this time around. There will be no moving back to the Bay Area. It has been five years and I feel both there and not there.

I simply cannot afford to ever return to that life, and years after being forced by circumstance and a pandemic to leave it, I am in a much better place emotionally and mentally--and financially. Being home ill and middle-aged at my mother's has put me in a place to be able to have Medicaid coverage.

Currently I mourn the days that I could sustain a work life, a social life, and a busy schedule. For now, I am learning to rest.

And yes, even over thirty years later, I still think constantly of my late father, and my late friend, both of whom died suddenly three months apart, in the spring and summer of 1993.

My world has been different ever since then. I have been different since then. I may even have had some chronic illness issues over the years that stemmed from the shock of those deaths. I reacted badly. I reacted, as my mom said recently to my neurologist, with “inappropriate mourning.”

Of course I don't think any of the things I did while in the early days of mourning were inappropriate, I just was coping with the tools my 26 year old brain had become used to using: making questionable decisions and ignoring my feelings by covering up with drug usage.

It never worked perfectly, and it only lasted a few years, but the remains of that phase of my grief are forever a part of how I react to new trauma. Even after having moved on, I still feel that time very deeply, (and you can believe my subconscious hasn't forgotten it either).

Striving. That's a good word for conveying a sense of moving towards a goal. And my goal, broadly stated, is to get better. Slow going, with small rewards. Pacing myself. Both in my health recovery and my grief recovery, all I have ever done was to put one foot or day in front of the other, and kept walking through that door. Some days are better than others. Some times I feel a little guilt at the thought that who and what I miss may become forgotten if I heal my grief, but that's never going to happen--although there is guilt associated with those feelings.

I came across this grief coach idea on the internet, very late at night when I should have been trying to sleep. I'd heard of personal coaching, and have even been coached in the past, with the goal of developing my small sustainable crochet business. (Alas, that venture is on hold for now).

But what was this? Coaching the grieving? That I could do, I said to myself. Not even a single doubt in my mind.

Here was something I had an excess of experience in--grief and loss, of persons, places, things, and time lost in the past. I Googled it, and found a new vocation.

I have been studying grief and loss by living with it since my childhood, so here was something I knew was for me.

A purpose, finally. A way of looking at the world that at times has been slow and sadly difficult to see past, but also a way to identify myself, and why I have been so subjected to loss.

A lifetime of loss, of starting over, of new beginnings. That's what I have lived. And that's how I identify: in a state of grief, moving through the world.

This does not mean that I'm depressed! No, quite the opposite. I have learned to let myself feel loss and to acknowledge it, and eventually comes the aha! moment, when I see how I have been shaped by this sensing what's missing. Who I am missing, and the places I am missing.

A grief coach does need to be trained in the specifics of how to guide clients through the grieving process while helping them to find meaning, even as they live with their feelings of grief, sadness--but this is just skimming the surface. There is a certification process that is a part of the educational program.

It is not the same as being a counselor or therapist. Those are professions I have deep respect for. Both have helped me in my grief and addiction journey over the years. But I don't have the time, money or brain bandwidth to study with for what it takes to become a mental health professional.

As I am really just now reading online about grief coaching methods and ways of training to become a professional certified coach, I am processing how to make a decision as to which school of thought I can study under. And there are as many angles to that as there are bagels in a bakery. Or, you know what I mean…

What it amounts to for me is: I have lived most of my adult years feeling some form of loss, grieving a thing--or person, or place, or way of life--while trying to make it, mostly on my own, through this lifetime.

As I am researching this possible career path, I am also writing and reading about grief.

I get it. Not everyone is comfortable with discussing grief. Some think it's somehow wrong to talk about losses. But I live with losses every day. (You would not believe how deeply I just sighed, twice, while writing this paragraph). I get it. I live it. I will continue to write about it.

I am currently reading blogs--and journaling!--and have read some other publications dedicated to grief work--and as it turns out, I was already reading Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.

I believe in foolish miracles (to paraphrase Ozzy). The synchronicity of stumbling over the term grief coach, while reading about grief, isn't lost on me. Of course I had to explore things.

My library already contains quite a few books focused on death, loss, grief, elegies, histories, some biographies, and journals of other grieving authors--Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, et al. (I have a full shelf of William T. Vollmann books, but that's for another time. If you know him, you know).

Just reading the book confirms for me that grief is a universal part of the human experience. Any one of us can become versed in the trials of grief overnight. I myself am an example of this fact: we all grieve.

I consider the possibilities of becoming a grief coach so very doable, as I am still living with (and grieving the loss of) limitations on my energy, both physically and cognitively. I can study at home, or at the library, and eventually see clients over an online client-coach portal, or even on Zoom.

I have the work of learning yet another aspect of what it means to be human ahead of me. I can't yet say where this will go, but I consider myself on the right path.