The Stoic

I love museums. The Louvre. The Art Institute of Chicago. MOMA. British Museum. Smithsonian museum of Natural History where the dinosaurs come alive. 

At the New Mexican museum of art lives one of my favorite paintings. One that I make time to visit and sit with every trip. 

Oil strokes on canvas isn’t the why. The hook, a feeling piercing every time. 

A Native American Man hunched over walking up a mountain with hooks dug into his back dragging the heads of ponies while red trickles down his spine. Engaged in a ritual to honor his grief of whom or what we will never know. Aptly titled “The Stoic”.  

This man’s grief conjoined with his body. Visceral stabs into bone. No separation from the mind. A reminder that grief occupies every caveat. Loss a common theme in the lives of all of us. Babies now grown up leaving home. Walking down the aisle with dreams disappearing in courtrooms. Stepping away from those where neither history nor blood a tether. Then there are last breaths. The only guarantee. Grief not a comparative game in suffering but relative back to the self.  

There’s no running from it. It will find you. Fill the crevices and hollows and slam you into the brick wall leaving invisible scars measured in an immeasurable weight. Grief consumes all the air in the room until you become a stranger to the self. 

I’ve learned a lot about grief in the last two decades. Studying it. Experiencing it. Seeing it in others. I know this. Recognize and allow it in. Make space for pain even when unbearable. There will come a moment when after you have honored the grief you will find yourself at a crossroad. A decision to want to stop hurting. It is there that you slowly start to become bigger than the grief. It no longer poisons the soil. Tenderness and courage tantamount. Honesty to meet ourselves exactly where we are first requires we get intimate with our pain. It’s in that intimacy we rise, finding meaning again. As it is meaning that heals.