Posted on by johanne_marais

Allow yourself the freedom to grieve

“… In the end, maybe absence is just an invitation for something greater: a chance to leave the dead alone, to put new flowers in a vase. All this lack just leaves an opportunity to atone, to adore.” – @hammuraber

Life is a series of moments between birth and death. Across all cultures, the beauty of how life begins and ends is acknowledged differently. Death could be celebrated as a rebirth, or a divine returning. The constant is that life – at least as we experience it – begins and ends.

Life is also an amalgamation of cycles: cellular division from one cell to two to four and eight; infancy, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence. The great golden glow of sunlight, the 28-day moon dance, and the celebration of a year every 365.25 days all reiterates the cyclical nature of what it means to be alive.

To be in symbiosis is to be in association with another. In this breath, symbiosis is a constant reconstitution of matter: organisms borrowing molecules from each other; fungi doing the ever-important work of decomposing organic materials; new life sprouting from the substrate of what once was…  What an honour it is to be in association with the world around us – to be born and know that our fate is to return to the ground that facilitates our liveliness. I welcome the reality that this may be the ultimate freedom: not that death is a part of life, but rather life is a part of death.

Please do not think that I reduce the heartache and weight of loss to be light, or bearable, or even tolerable. Loss can feel cruel. You spend your time building a sandcastle made of memories, laying the most meaningful ones as bricks in towers where they are surely safe. Without warning or consideration, grief – with the impact of a tumultuous tide – disintegrates every instant of joy you have ever known. I imagine grief is where life and loss are in symbiosis.

Grief is embedded within the death of a loved one, but also in the change of seasons or feeling the end of a long-term friendship. I have lost stored data and grieved nostalgia’s absence in flipping through photographs. You may need to grieve the job you dreamed of but weren’t offered. Even as we adopt new behaviours, we may grieve for ourselves no longer being the last to leave a party. Mourning is akin to a mirror of celebration.

The neuroscience of grieving supports that grievance may be considered a type of learning. As you acknowledge how much adaptation is required in accepting one’s new reality, it makes sense that this is learning how to find peace in mourning. The attachment pattern needs to be reworked as the brain reconstitutes a new symbiosis with the subject and context of bereavement.  This adaption engages networks of the brain involved in self-soothing, emotional processing, remembering, and imagining the future.

Psychology derives that there are seven stages of grief. Though these criteria have value, I maintain that to stage grief implies that the experiences are not personalized, cyclic and profoundly overwhelming. Grieving is non-linear. It unravels without time, without a clear beginning or end. It washes over the griever in waves.

It is common practice to relish milestones like birthdays or victories. We may even celebrate freedom of movement, expression, choice… On paper, the South African constitution outlines these freedoms as human rights. Why then, do we often shy away from grieving transparently; rather, convinced that we must be our own lifejacket as we struggle to stay afloat?

I offer myself this: “Allow yourself the freedom to grieve.”

Create freedom for yourself around the why and how and when. Let the pragmatic thinker be soothed as you exercise your birth right to feel. Engage on the ritual of remembrance that comes with grieving, for active participation in honouring what you have lost yields the immortalization of love and memory. It births a capacity to recreate.

In grief’s ebb and flow, we are not free from temporary suffering. We are not free of emptiness. Rather, the freedom comes from feeling our grief completely – without time, without a clear beginning or end.

Posted on by michellebeeslaar · 2 Comments

Freedom or Fallacy: A collage of South African perspectives. Where are we 26 years later?

Annually since 1995, we commemorate Freedom Day which marks the first South African non-racial, democratic elections held on 27 February 1994. The first democratic president, President Nelson Mandela is quoted as saying ‘for to be free is not merely to cast off one’s own chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others’. In 2018 in an article for the Sowetan Live, Prince Mashele, urged South Africans to reevaluate what the day means in their own words, within their own communities and without the influence of political rhetoric. Last year, our country celebrated 25 years of political freedom. As we go into the next chapter, it would be amiss to this generation and the next, not to assess in an iterative, non-partisan and fair manner, the progress made to the upfront acknowledged challenges of inequality, poverty and unemployment. 

Instead of conveying my evaluation, a purposive selection of societal commentators across professional and personal backgrounds had the blog title put to them and asked to sum up their assessment in a paragraph. The views are their personal reflections and not of their employers, organizations or affiliations. This is South Africa of April 2020. This is South Africa constructively dialoguing.

Cameron Mackenzie, a former Johannesburg city councillor from 2009 and current member of Parliament since 2014 for the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, advances that ‘freedom, unless you know how to use it, is only a word’. He acknowledges the political progress made from the repressive Apartheid state to a constitutional democracy in 1994 however cautions that the current state failure in education and healthcare, amongst others, perpetuates the cycle of freedom not being a lived reality for the majority of South Africans. 

Tessa Dooms is a sociologist, director at Jasoro Consulting, a Nelson Mandela George Washington Fellow with several other professional accolades. She notes that South Africa’s democracy is maturing due to an increased plurality, willingness to challenge and test powerful leaders and institutions. She is mindful that our democracy remains fragile due to the failure to deliver development and transform lives. The result, especially amongst youth,  is a distrust of our democratic leadership and more precarious, democratic processes. She suggests that the next phase must see us building and unleashing the abilities plus agency of young people for political, social and economic development for all. 

According to Russell Rensburg, an expert in healthcare and current director of the Rural Health Advocacy Project, the preamble of the constitution commits us to improving the quality of life for all citizens. He recognizes the significant progress to education and healthcare access but argues that the access is derailed by the quality of services and general commodification of public goods which have delayed the overall realization of freedom. 

Nkanyiso Ngqulunga, a law student and exceptional young contributor to decolonial thought, asserts the question highlights the dichotomy inherited from colonialism and Apartheid. For him, the democratic dispensation is a neo-Apartheid version, still unable to understand or meet the needs of the majority, who remain in permanent dispossession and poverty. He calls for socioeconomic justice premised on an African-based transformational philosophy and spirituality that denounces and breaks away from past crimes against humanity to truly fulfil a clean slate of human rights recognition. 

He is a management consultant but Melusi Maposa prefers to describe himself as someone who knows a little about a lot of things and a lot about a little things. He responds that 26 years it is not a question of freedom or fallacy, rather both. He emphasizes the immense achievements that are often forgotten e.g. 10 million households electrified since 1994 and the millions with never before, access to running water. In the same breath, he talks of the continued gross inequality and widening socioeconomic divide. He urges us to surge ahead to deliver freedom to those who have as yet not fully experienced it for not to do so lies the peril of our nation.  

Mzwandile Manto is a lifelong student of philosophy and an experienced contributor to international public capacity building. He reminds us that freedom is the ability to self-actualize which includes our health and human security. The inability to self-actualize is a failure of political freedom. Our system of so-called proportional representation is representative of the self-limitations we have imposed for freedom to be achieved. He continues that in practice over quarter of a century, these system “representatives” have proven that they are allegiant to their parties not us, the citizens, the electorate who provide them with the mandate to serve. He bluntly states that the majoritianism in place, mocks and bastardises our freedom in the current political system and to be truly free, means to tackle the system first. 

The prolific current events commentator @linley_sa prefers to be engaged through this handle on Twitter. He argues that without human dignity, there can be no freedom. Pronouncing political freedom does not equate to releasing the chains of those that remain modern slaves by virtue of hunger, unemployment and squalor. The only release is true socioeconomic freedom. 

My work particularly with the homeless and un/under employed has set me on a path to advocate for an active citizenry. As Freedom Day 2020 approaches, with COVID19 showing up the fault lines of our grossly inequitable society, I realize that in our eagerness to give up the ghost of Apartheid, we gave too much power to the ANC-led government, a movement I generally support. The power corrupted many of them and in turn our people suffered a new oppression – knowing they had rights but being unable to access them. If COVID19 teaches us anything, let it be that from this, our Freedom Month, we cannot continue business as usual. 

We need to change trajectory, check our ideology and privilege at the door, pragmatically evaluate the last two decades and usher in a new system of governance. I say governance because the time of government being our leaders must be over. We the citizens must take our power back, elect representatives, hold them directly accountable and release them from duty if they do not perform. A new social compact is required, one where equality of opportunity and access to services are not rights in a story told to us in 1999 but a lived reality for all. For me, the answer is that we have political freedom but it is a fallacy as it is limited to a class that simply isn’t reflective of how the majority of South Africans live. My question to you, is simply this, freedom or fallacy: where are we 26 years later?