You Are Breathing For Two Now

When someone has died they are no longer breathing. Breath is, indeed, the source of life.

It is not suprising that breath becomes challenging with grief. Our empathy with our beloved's absence of breath may effect our breath on some primitive level. It worked that way for me. Since Brian died, I have struggled with my breath.

I have been observing that breath is critical skill to work with in my grief. 

I decided that, like the old proverb of saying "you are eating for two" when you are pregnant, that I'm saying that "I am breathing for two now" - for myself and for Brian who cannot breathe any more.

I want to encourage all grieving people to breathe better.

Understand, first, the mechanics:

Imagine the diaphragm as a large, sheet that lies underneath the lungs. It works like a bellow that stokes a fire, expanding with the intake of air (inhale) and expelling air (exhale). The inhale expands the abdomen, moving the diaphragm down and massaging the abdominal organs; while the exhale contracts the abdomen, moving the diaphragm up and massaging the heart.
 
Grief can cause two results in our breathing - one is shallow breath where a lack of oxygen is very hard on the body - it can result in a low level of vitality and our lack of oxygenated blood contributes to anxiety states, depression and fatigue. The other result is feeling like you are not getting enough air - no matter how hard one is breathing. This has been called "chronic breathing" or "over-breathing" can contribute to feelings of anxiety, panic and fear.
 
To see where you are with your breath, find a time when you are alone for about 10 minutes. Count your breaths for 1 minute. Our breath is healthy at 6 to 10 breaths a minute. Are you breathing fast or slow? Observe the movement of your chest and abdomen as you breathe. When your chest moves more than your abdomen you are over-breathing.

The Autonomic Nervous System is deeply affected by breath. 

Stretch the neck muscles to aid your breathing practice. Slowly move your left ear to your left shoulder while keeping the spine straight. Extend your right arm down reaching your fingers toward the floor. Switch sides. Practice breathing as you perform this exercise.

Now, sit comfortably and place your hands on your chest, thumbs inside the armpits, middle fingers touching at the chest's center. The middle fingers should move slightly apart upon inhale. Exaggerate that movement by deep inhales for two or three minutes at a time. 

You might visualize liquid being poured into a glass, you will imagine the bottom (diaphragm) gets full first, taking time in pouring, into the middle of the glass (lower lungs) all the way up to the top (upper lungs). 

There are three steps to full breathing: Inhalation (to a count of four); Retention/Holding (to a count of four); and Exhalation (to a count of eight). 

Breathe through the nose. This warm air helps the body use more oxygen.

Our culture is focused with holding on and the act of surrender is often a difficult one. Good breath has a sense of taking in and letting go.
  
Love, 
Kim

Planning Your Self-Care for the Holidays

The upcoming holiday season can act as a grief trigger, making the latter part of the year a very difficult time. The following are some ways in which we can be supportive to ourselves when we are grieving through the holidays. Answer some of the following questions:

The most difficult parts of the holiday season for me may be the following:
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2.
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4.

People who can hear my grief are (list them):
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2.
3.
4.

Ways I can connect with these supportive people over the holiday months are:
1.
2.
3.
4.

The most difficult people to be with might be:
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2.
3.
4.

Grief triggers might be:
1.
2.
3.
4.

This year I want to include the following new activities in my holiday:
1.
2.
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4.

Ways I can honor the person I am grieving are:
1.
2.
3.
4.


You are NOT alone. Reach out. You can do it with loving support.

Love,

Possible Remedies for the Photos You Never Had

It is true that you can never go back and re-write the days you had with your loved ones - and this certainly includes regrets over not taking photos at key moments.

Once you have made peace with this fact, there are many ideas for people who are grieving the lack of pictorial archives. It is truly only limited by your imagination and what you feel comfortable with.

You might consider simply to put out a call to friends that you are looking for pictures of your beloved. It may never occur to your friends or family to look through their archives and send any photos that they possess... what is more, some might question if it is appropriate to send you pictures thinking that it might upset you, especially if it is unsolicited. Let people know that you are actively trying to increase you library and would cherish any photos they might share.

With the photos you do have in your possession... you might consider the following:
- Some have chosen to hire a professional photographer to conduct a session that includes someone holding a portrait of the deceased. It can be done as a family or individual portrait. This appeals to western cultural sensibilities and yet includes the person in the portrait. These can be formal or informal. You could go to a studio or have it done in your home or some other intimate space. Or, try what I do, do it yourself...

- Companies that take photos and create paintings from them often do what is called "composite painting". Artists can add to or subtract from the original photos you supply to create one beautiful oil painting. They routinely paint family portraits with an additional person- so as far as composite paintings go, the only limit is your imagination.

- Collage work is a mainstay of expressive arts and a great way to combine any constellation of people in your life into a cohesive visual statement. Since many of us have digital pictures, you can easily print your photos to create a 2D collage or work online to make a digital collage. If you are going from prints, you can scan your photos in (services are available at most print and copy stores) and work with paper or digital mediums. You can print with archival inks or, when the work fades - reprint the piece. The process of doing this creative work can be very therapeutic and can be done numerous times for multiple evocative outcomes.

Pro-Active Photography from This Day Forward

We all learn lessons as we go in this life. Once you lose something you are forever changed. What can we learn from loss and photography?

First, everyone should consider the importance of online hosting and another method of backing-up precious photos. For my most precious photos I have a small hard drive in my document firebox and an online host that stores these photos as well.

Next, perhaps you can schedule a time every year to think about your photos and if you have covered important categories - did you get these pictures?
Here are some of my categories:
-- On the beach
-- In the park
-- On the couch
-- Doing their favorite activity
-- In the snow
-- In the workplace or classroom
-- In the city
-- All major events
-- Playing
-- Doing something that is their habit that you find endearing
-- Group photos with everyone (use that timer and tripod! or schedule photo sessions)

What ideas would you add to this list?


Third, if we accept that photography is indeed an interpretive art, then giving yourself freedom to take interpretive liberties that serve your grieving heart is more than permissible and part of the reclaiming process. Photography can be an important part of knitting your heart back together. You should feel free to use any method to help you on your healing journey.

If you have other ideas on what people can do to bolster their visual archive, please share them with our community!

Love,

Photographs and Loss

I was speaking with a gathering of people who had experienced the premature loss of loved ones. These were not the kinds of deaths due to old age, the losses were of young people, people who had been taken far to early.

The subject of photography came up. Many chimed in that they regretted not having certain pictures of beloved people who are now forever gone. They felt an aching absence of group photos or snapshots of particular moments that were meaningful to them. This moved me very deeply, to hear the anguish of people who felt that moments had slipped by undocumented and now there was nothing to be done about it.

I have only three very precious family photos that include all five of us as a family. This is because I was the family photographer, always behind the camera. So there are thousands of beautiful, spontaneous photos of the children with their father - there are only three of all of us together when I handed the camera to a bystander. These three photos are staged, and not as evocative of feeling as most of our pictures. I enjoy them, but wish I had done things differently now.


And then, there were the pictures of our trip to Leavenworth, Washington from fall 2002. For years I grieved the possibility that I had lost those photos due to computer upgrade confusion... and was morose over the idea. When I found regular print photos of the trip in a box one day - I was overjoyed. Then I remembered that we had left on the trip without the digital camera by accident and had to swing into a convenience market to buy a disposable camera. I was both relieved and thrilled to have these precious pictures back in the archive of family treasures.

A Problem as Old as Photography Itself
Our ancestors and cultural counterparts might open our minds to different ways of understanding photography and death. For instance, it was convention in the 19th century to pose with personal items, like purses or scarves - that represented absent or dead relatives. This was a method to include them, emotionally, in the picture. Post-mortem photography (also called memorial portraiture or memento mori) were prevalent in the mid-1800s when daguerreotype made photography accessible to the general public. It was a practice of photographing the recently deceased as a way of producing a keepsake... this is still practiced in parts of central Europe. In India, it is a tradition to paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs. Culturally, these kinds of photos are not perceived of as trickery but a way to honor someone that was not present.

In America the joke about photo manipulation is the deleting of an ex-partner from a dozen years of vacation photographs with Photoshop, scissors or a magic marker, in a flurry of activity equal to Watergate.

As well, we hire professional photographic retouchers as a response to a media-saturated world. Since all images of the beautiful and famous are enhanced, ordinary people use retouchers to remove blemishes or double chins from photos to be posted on such pedestrian venues as MySpace and Facebook.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people lose all photos of beloved people and moments through disaster. Katrina victims, many of them having lost everything, find that rebuilding the photo library is among the hardest tasks. I read of a "Katrina Shower" - like a baby shower - where people gathered to shower a person with items needed to rebuild... and among the gifts were photos that others had in their collection that might have meaning to the recipient. I was also moved to read of an online image hosting company that offered free hosting to Katrina victims.

But, behind the scenes, people have hired professional photographic retouchers to create composite portraits of live and deceased people. Such manipulations demonstrate imagination born out of love and loss. Imagination and memory have never been subject to literal reality - they are always some form of revision. Photography, as well, has always participated in varying levels of distortion. The same photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by adjusting the color and tone of the image.

In the next post, we will discuss ways to deal with the lack of good photos of your beloveds.

Love,