Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go

labels matter little and love matters most.

“You know, insanity runs in my family,” I tell him, quoting from one of my favorite films, the classic Arsenic and Old Lace.

That is what matters.

It’s natural to resist the unraveling of treasured life chapters and the loss of loved ones. Yet unraveling is inevitable. Life, as known through the senses, is impermanent. Every chapter that begins will end. All that is born dies. Distinct from pain, which is our natural physiological response to unwanted and hurtful stimuli, suffering exists in

What started as a personal quest to unravel the mysteries of birth and death became central to my professional work as an adult.

Yet we can attend to such wounds. We can learn to hold space for the presence of shadow and sorrow. Learning how to live with the pain of my mother’s illness and her subsequent absence has informed my life’s work with both the living and the dying. If I am wise and capable enough to skillfully integrate the painful emotions stirred by her loss, I c

She is yelling. She is raging. I listen. “I am so angry. So angry! I hate this,” she repeats. My task in this moment is to mirror back to her the emotional storm at hand. This way I can honor both her anger and her grief. At best, she has days to live and she craves decades more. I try to sit in her hell.

Through narrative therapy, we can integrate painful events into our life story and assign meaning to them, or at least we can come to more clearly assess their impact.

According to a recent Stanford University study, 90 percent of doctors say they would forego resuscitation and/or extraordinary means of care if they faced a terminal illness. Contrast this with the fact that most Americans die in medical institutions, even though the majority of Americans desire to die peacefully at home.