I started to pitch to hospices. I had been thinking about becoming a hospice volunteer, so I took the training. I found out that what I wanted to do was in line with current thought about grief facilitation. I went forward from there.
Allison: You said you could tell you had what was needed. What sort of things were you picking up on that made you say, “Oh, yeah, I can use this?”
Gail: Good question. I was so drawn to these stories. There are stories from all over the world about people dealing with loss, about the human response to dying, death and grief – things that our culture has been uncomfortable talking about. Like the Buddhist story of the Mustard Seed, about a woman who is loved by her family, who marries and is not rich, but she feels blessed because she has a child. Then sickness comes. Her parents die, her husband dies, her child dies.
And she carries the dead body of that baby. She can’t bear to let go. And she says, “Someone please cure my child.” She goes to Buddha and he says, “Yes, I can cure your child; bring me a handful of mustard seed. I'll fashion a medicine that will restore your child to life.” She turns to go to the village but the Buddha says, “Wait. The mustard seed must come from a house in which no one has died.”
So she goes from house to house and realizes that what has happened to her and her child happens to us all. That kind of story honors what we might call denial, which gets a real bad rap in our culture, but such stories hold it to light because this is a normal human response. This is what grief looks like.
