Showing all posts tagged grief

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Spiritual Life, Writing

Morality Still Matters

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Lately, scrolling through the news makes me so depressed that one question keeps floating up through my subconscious into my feverish mind: Does morality still matter? Is it important to care about what’s right and what’s wrong when so few people in positions of power (or their supporters) no longer seem to give a shit?

To find an answer, I turned to Omar El Akkad’s newest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s a brilliant writer, and I adore his novels, so I knew his thoughts on the ongoing hellish nightmare that is the oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza would help me unlock the deer-in-the-headlights feeling I’ve had about this monstrosity.

Not only did Omar El Akkad help me to better understand the nuances, he stirred up within my soul a twinned grief and rage that I’ve been trying to subdue, but find that these feelings have now been unleashed. And along with them I feel a blanket of shame, that I waited so long to engage my compassion and find the courage to use my voice.

In El Akkad’s book, he makes the point so much better than I could that morality still matters. That the performative noise we make in the west as liberals so we can feel like good people while doing nothing practical that could cost us personally or professionally is not only useless, it’s damaging to our souls and does real damage to people on the other side of the world.

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad writes “The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

If we can’t care about starving children shot while trying to get scraps of food, then our moral compass is broken. My moral compass has been broken, because I was afraid to access my compassion. To speak up when it might be politically unpopular to do so. To tell myself that the issues were too complex for me to understand. But a live-streamed genocide that I choose to ignore so I don’t have to get involved is not complicated. It’s simple cowardice.

When writing about how western liberals try to have it both ways, by feeling like moral human beings while doing nothing to stop these atrocities, El Akkad asks, “How does one finish the sentence: It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

I finally know how to finish that sentence. It’s well past time for action. To recognise and state aloud that my morality is meaningless when it might cost me something so I do nothing to help. Each one of us must draw a line and say we side with justice or with power. We cannot do both. The people of Gaza, like the people of Ukraine, need our help. If you are like me and you read novels about acts of courage during World War II, then we are well past our moment to step up and say, “no more.”

I don’t know exactly what this means for me, or for you, or for any of us. But I know that looking away is not an option. Choosing not to care because it hurts is cowardly. All of that apathy turns us away from ourselves, from our souls, from our shared humanity. We have to care about starving children like they were our beloved children. Because they are.

I don’t want war. I want peace. But I also want justice for those who are oppressed and starved and beaten and murdered because of politics and power. If I believe morality still matters, then this matters. Even when it costs me something, I have to be willing to act. To not stay silent. To do my part, whatever that part is, to stop this evil and to engage all of my grief, rage, and shame for taking so long and turning away so callously.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is from Angela Davis, who writes “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” And the second is from Omar El Akkad’s must-read book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?”

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life, Writing

The Long Yearn

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

The first word I chose to focus on in 2025 is deeper, and boy, did I get walloped with it weeks into the new year. It felt like unshed tears, a tightness in my throat, a pressure in my chest, and a tingling in my nose. Going deeper seemed to mean allowing my feelings their full range, and at the beginning this looked like grief and sadness.

As time went on, I thought of this process as The Long Yearn. I felt stirred up, hyper-aware of people, things, and experiences that I had yearned for since childhood and early adulthood. I missed my Granny, who died in 2008, with a keen sense of loss. I longed for the career I wanted to have in the film industry. I felt the absence of my own mother and siblings, who are alive but emotionally distant from me.

This process felt like sandpaper on raw skin. I felt up close in my own life and feelings, while also standing apart from me to notice what I missed and what was lost or too far away to grasp. The overall experience was one of grief—I saw myself standing on the edge of what I longed for but couldn’t reach.

More than once in the last six weeks I’ve wished I’d chosen another word besides deeper. When I picked it, I was thinking of it as an intellectual exercise. But our human emotions don’t function like that. What I was initially looking for was a way to deepen my work. To stay away from the surface when I wrote, to stop playing it safe and dive below into the churning mess below day-to-day life.

What I didn’t realise was what that process would cost me. It’s hard down in the depths of our being and our consciousness. That’s where the old stuff from our childhood is buried. That’s where the pain and the loss and the longing and the trapped love with no one to give it to lives. And it’s not intellectual. It’s the subconscious, which means our soul needs to feel it.

The Long Yearn is how I’m describing this murky expanse that I cannot reach with my mind. This is a feeling place. It’s dark, like the sky at midnight, with a bit of hazy purple around the edges. It’s a graveyard for lost hopes and dreams. It’s where the relationships that ended are stored. And all of these areas are swamped with pain.

I’m learning how to feel it and not crumble. I know it’s leading me somewhere. Taking me by the hand and tugging on my spirit. The Long Yearn is unveiling me to myself. I feel so consciously aware of my inner landscape when I’m in this longing space, but it requires tenacity to stay here and not to run to the safer confines of my logical mind.

If we want depth, we have to go to the depths. We have to face up to what we may never achieve, and the people who might not want to love us, and the fears we’ve tried to pretend we don’t have. It’s all here, part of this yearning expansive space inside of us, but we need courage to sit with it. I can see my failings in here. And I can also see my strengths and abilities, clearer than usual.

I’m trying not to rush this. I wanted to go deeper, and now I know how hard it is to do so. But I believe this work will bear fruit. I know that I will make it through this and get to the other side. I know this because I’ve done it before, many times over. There’s no way to get to deeper without swimming through this murky place. Most of the true things in life we can’t think our way into. The way to travel there is to feel, and to feel it all.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Travel

Another Bridge to Take

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In the song “This Ain’t Goodbye” by Train, there’s a lyric that brings me to tears. Every time he sings, “Another bridge to take on the way to letting go” I think about how hard it is to release my grip when I want something to stay the same.

But as we all know, life means change. Stages and seasons and growth and pain and learning to let go, over and over and over again. I really kind of hate this. You’d think we’d get better at this as we age, but some things give me a lump at the base of my throat, and keep me awake at night, and cause me to cry when I least expect them to.

One of those things is my youngest child graduating from high school. William has his school dinner/dance this weekend, and his commencement ceremony in a few weeks. This is a big bridge to take. When Ava graduated three years ago, I thought to myself, “William is only in grade nine. There’s lots of time left with a kid at home.”

And now the day is almost here. It’s a time to celebrate all that he’s achieved, and how bright his future looks ahead of him, but as the mom and dad, it’s also a time to grieve the end of his childhood. I’m really feeling the truth of the saying, “When raising children, the days are long but the years are short.”

With all of these significant life transitions (or another bridge to take on the way to letting go), I do my best to prepare emotionally ahead of time. I really do. But there’s anticipation, and then there’s experience. The two are never the same thing, which is another thing I hate because I have no choice but to walk through it when the time comes. Advance preparation only gets me so far, and then the only way out is ever through.

Another one of these bridges I had to take this month was when Ava decided to fly to New York City on her own and stay in a shared-room hostel near Central Park. We suggested she go with a friend, but after our family Europe adventure last summer she wanted to try a solo trip. In theory, I thought this was a fabulous idea, and very brave when you are only twenty-one. In reality, I worried about her until she arrived home safely—feet sore from walking the city at all hours and full to the brim with excitement and stories and joy from managing everything on her own.

These are important foundational experiences for our children to undertake. They have to learn that the world is a big place and they can be smart and travel safely within it. But for the parents, this involves a lot of letting go. Of being there when our kids need us, but not taking over every arrangement so they have their own chance to lead and to shine. It’s exciting. And hard. It requires us to give up some semblance of control, and to lean into trusting our grown kids.

I’m taking a lot of bridges right now, with both of my kids, and I’m slowly (so slowly!) learning to let go of them. Like so many parents, I’m proud, and I’m sad, and I’m a bit lost, and I’m celebrating at exactly the same time. We never stop learning how to adjust to these changing seasons.

Happy graduation weekend to you, William! Congratulations, and we love you.

In Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Grown-Up Kids

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In the last couple of weeks, my daughter and my son had birthdays that pushed them into a new category: grown-up kids.

I remember feeling amazed when Ava turned eighteen, and could legally vote as an adult in Canada, but at that time William was only fifteen. I couldn’t envision a future where both kids were adults. But now, Ava is twenty-one, and finishing up her second year of university, and William has turned eighteen, and is about to graduate high school.

It’s the end of raising children. I feel both weepy and thrilled, in equal measure. I can’t help looking back, and remembering when they were small and sweet and asked a zillion daily questions and begged me to read just one more bedtime story. I recall my friend with older children saying she missed their little voices in the house. I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I certainly get it now.

Every ending has a new beginning baked into it. The final chapter of anything feels like a loss when it’s underway, but with a bit of time to get used to the idea, we can begin to envision a new future. I’m trying to summon a sense of pride for the job I’ve done in being a mother to these two precious kids, and I’m longing for that pride to at least compete with the grief I feel that my day-to-day responsibility for their well-being and care is now ending.

I do know that the job of raising kids doesn’t magically end on their eighteenth birthday. Young adults have their own complex set of challenges and stressors, and they need support through these years and all of the many stages still to come. But it’s different now. They both drive, and have part-time jobs, and income of their own. William is out with his friends several times a week, and Ava lives on campus in a dorm eight months out of the year.

It’s time for Jason and I to adjust to the imminent reality of an empty nest. It feels exhilarating to imagine my children navigating their way in the world with confidence and excitement. It’s also scary, especially in those fraught moments when things don’t go their way and it feels like the road is sharply uphill. As parents, we always knew that the job was to take dependent infants and turn them into independent adults. But it seemed like such a long time from birth to eighteen. And now I realise, like so many wise parents before me, just how short those years really are.

Right before Ava’s birthday, our thirteen-year-old cat Flower stopped eating and drinking. He went from healthy(ish, as he had feline diabetes for the last two years) to weak and barely able to lift his head in a 36-hour time-frame. When I took him to the vet, the diagnosis was kidney failure compounded by a bronchial infection and his dangerously low blood sugar. Suddenly we were having a discussion about the end of his life.

Flower was Ava’s beloved pet, that we brought home as a kitten when she was seven. I had to call her in Victoria to break the news, and she walked onto the ferry a few hours later to come home so we could be together when we said our last goodbye to him. William’s cat, Little Rose, went to sleep in that same vet’s office exactly three years and six months before her brother Flower. It felt poetic that the dates lined up so evenly. Sometimes, even when we are in great pain, we can find a trace of beauty in the suffering.

When Ava went to her counsellor to talk about Flower, the counsellor said, “You said goodbye to your childhood pet and then turned 21 in the same week. It feels like the end of childhood for you.” That hit me square in the heart.

We can’t stop time from marching on. We can’t stop our kids from growing up, and turning into adults. We can’t keep our lovely pets alive forever. But we can grieve our losses, and dream into the future, and search carefully for the new beginning that’s hidden inside of whatever stage is ending.

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking

Emotion Tunnels

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I first learned the phrase “emotion tunnels” from the book Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. In the book, they explain that our emotions are tunnels and we must move all the way through them. When we get stuck in the middle of a feeling, because we are scared or anxious or try to numb it or distract ourselves from it, the emotion fails to complete and we get stuck, which leads to emotional exhaustion.

This simple and brilliant definition made so much sense to me. But over time, we forget helpful things like this (or at least I do). Thankfully, my Burnout presentation (loosely based on the Nagoski sisters’ amazing work) got booked for an Alberta teachers’ conference this month, and when I reviewed my slides I realised that I hadn’t been completing some emotion tunnels.

One morning a few weeks ago, I was partway through eating my bowl of Shreddies, when I felt an overwhelming tidal wave of grief. I counteracted this experience with my usual defences: focusing harder on the novel I was reading to ward off any sad feelings, logically approaching the situation by saying to myself, “There’s no reason why I should feel teary right now,” and attempting to ignore it.

An image rose up in my mind of a tunnel, the photo I use in my presentation, and I placed my cereal spoon into my bowl, laid my head down on my kitchen table and WEPT. It was like a storm went through me. I shook, I cried, I grieved, I scared both of my cats.

When it was over, I raised my head and took a few long, shuddering breaths. Immediately, I felt different. Lighter. Less tense and stressed. I still didn’t know why I was suddenly overcome by sadness. But it didn’t matter. This was beyond knowing. What happened to me that morning at the table was simply feeling, and getting out of my own way to allow that particular emotion tunnel to complete the work it was trying to do.

Way later, I realised why I was grieving. But the key was to allow the emotion to have its way, in a safe space, alone in my kitchen. We live in such a cold, cerebral world, where we try to figure out our feelings and experiences rather than actually feel them. Sometimes this helps us to survive, when we are in pain, but mostly it gives us a spinning wheel inside of our soul, that’s desperate to complete.

I just listened to Rob Bell’s excellent and inspiring podcast called This Must be the Void. He echoed so many of the same things I’ve been going through, and it was lovely to imagine that this feeling instead of thinking process is actually in the air – that something cool and interesting is happening on a more collective level. He quoted a phrase from a song (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the musician!) that said, “I’m wired for the new world.” I feel like this phrase is doing something in my very bones and marrow. It resonates and rings utterly true.

In the last few weeks, I’m allowing myself a lot more freedom to complete my emotion tunnels instead of blocking them or attempting to understand them. The understanding comes later. First, there’s a lot to feel, and that feeling happens in the body, not in the mind. What a ride it’s been. I feel utterly changed by this process.

What emotion tunnels do you have to complete? Are there any feelings that have come up for you that you’ve been trying to avoid? Let’s discuss!