2. Life’s work.
I’ve been thinking about these words. I first heard them from one of my clinical supervisors (who I admire greatly) in the context of grief and bereavement; specifically, with clients who have been unexpectedly bereaved much sooner than they would have ever imagined.
In the context of grief work, the meaning of these words really get at identity; what it means to live on after someone of great importance (or the most important) in our life, dies. Rather than a phenomenon that one simply ‘gets over’, the phrase instead acknowledges the indefinite change the bereaved person undergoes - they are forever, now, a bereaved person with all its new idiosyncrasies. Life cannot be again what it was before; this is now their life’s work.
The idea of ‘life’s work’ is also captured, I think, clearly by Louis Tonkin’s model. As a brief summary, the graphic challenges the idea (wish?!) that, as time moves on, an individual’s experience of grief shrinks and eventually disappears. Instead, the existence of grief, belonging to the now bereaved person, stays with them forever and does not get smaller itself, but gets proportionately smaller as life rediscovers its natural ability to grow again, over time, around the acquired grief.
I first truly witnessed this phenomenon whilst working with clients at a local hospice. Once I’d seen it so vividly, I then started noticing it in other clients more; individuals who had not approached me due to bereavement, but who were experiencing grief nonetheless. Relationships ending, becoming the victim of or witnessing violence or abuse, or unexpected news that profoundly changes one’s understanding of self; the experience is one of loss, of the past, present and/or future. And the consequence, well, for some it can be life changing. For some, it becomes their ‘life’s work’.
More recently I’ve been thinking about this phrase and how it also relates to so many people who would say they haven’t really had anything tangible happen to them, but something just isn’t quite right. I think this exposes a commonly held myth that, in order to ‘need’ therapy, some sort of obvious event must have happened. However, it just doesn’t work like that for everyone. I’ll do more on this another time.
For now though, it seems very few people get through life unaffected, in some way, by life’s experiences and events. And, of course, these vary in severity and significance, and so are relative to each individual. Nonetheless, I’m specifically interested in the idea of the critical period; the first and most influential years of our lives. Here, the blueprint of our existence and understanding of the world is sketched out. It’s by no means that everything is set in stone from this time; we can certainly create a different floor-plan over the top of the original.
Yet that paper still contains the dents of the original sketch; thin lines that, if we stop to notice them, are traces of our pasts. Some people decide they want to address these, and for those who do, this is where their life’s work begins; to create that new floor-plan, and to etch out something powerful enough to fade the original sketch into obscurity.
Sure there are traces if you know where to look, but it’s certainly no longer obvious to the naked eye.
None of us is perfect - we each have our individual ‘life’s work’, should we decide to take it on. The things that did (or didn’t) happen to us, have subtle or obvious, but nonetheless profound, effects on our sense of self and how we operate in the world. Whether it’s something you’ve chosen to do, or whether you had no choice in the matter at all, I have a deep respect and admiration for all of you undertaking our own, individual, life’s work.