DGIs and What We Want to Hear

I haven't really gone into a lot of the terminology that we in the "widda" community use, mostly because I really don't identify as a "widda" so much as a guy trying to live his life under difficult circumstances. But there is one term for a whole section of the populace, a section I've encountered a lot since losing Samantha. The DGI, or Don't-Get-It.

Anyone who has suffered the loss of an immediate family member has encountered someone who told them "they're in a better place."* Or, "It's been X days/months/years. It's time to move on with your life." That's a DGI.

* Really? Better than alive and interacting with a family that loves them dearly? Maybe he/she should have been allowed to choose where he/she would like to be right now. If life on Earth is so bloody awful, why do we persist in it? Anyway, you get the picture.

So I'm reading Go Go Yubari's blog and she in turn has a link to another fellow widda's blog, which contains the perfect rundown of what most of us absolutely do NOT want to hear, and what we do...

Just got back from seeing David Whyte recite from his new book (which is a huge compilation of old and new work from 1984 to present). Most of the pieces were about experiences at holy places in Ireland. But some were very personal, transformational insights into loss and the cyclical continuity of life. The autobiographical Tempus Omnia Revelat describes his father's passing with such beauty and reverance that I found myself wiping tears when he'd finished.

This part of a piece called Ancestral stuck with me:

Each life a traveler
not yet really arrived
like passing strangers,
the lanterns
half cloaked,
showing a glimmer
at the doors
of the living,
half
looking for
shelter,
half wanting
to stumble on
beyond us
to what waits,
some place perhaps
in the brimming dark
where
the story ends.


Powerful stuff, that. 'Nuff said.