Your Radical Grieving Assignment – 3 Letters

Letter 1—To the Deceased

Even though you are writing to the deceased, this first letter is all about you. It is the one in which you get to fully express your pain. It is the equivalent of the first two stages of grief as well as the first two stages of Radical Forgiveness. It is about how the death has impacted or is impacting you now, emotionally, physically, and mentally.

It’s in this letter that you allow yourself to spill out all your feelings of sadness, anger, or fear of being left or abandoned. You may well be feeling victimized and wounded by the death. If so, express your outrage.

If the death was untimely in the sense that he or she was still young and had a lot of years ahead of him/her, express your feelings about that. If it was an accident caused by his/her carelessness, berate him/her for being so irresponsible. If it was a disease brought on by a self-destructive lifestyle or addiction, let him or her know how you feel about that and how it has impacted you. If it was a suicide, make clear how you were hurt by him/her doing that and resent having been left to deal with the pain and the aftermath.

Grief is never one emotion. It contains them all, especially those that were unexpressed when the person was alive. It also can contain all the holdings and emotions you may have buried over the years in those parts of your life that were unlived in some way.

So don’t be surprised if a lot more, other than the death experience itself, comes welling up from somewhere deep down. If it does, continue the writing as a stream of consciousness and don’t censure anything. Include it in all the letters.

Remember, this letter is only for you. No one else is going to see it, that is unless you do want to share it with someone you really trust and who is willing to listen with an understanding of where you are coming from.

It is also important to realize that in writing down all these thoughts and feelings, some of which might seem mean and less than loving towards the deceased, it is in fact the most loving thing you can do, not only for yourself but for him or her as well.

Don’t imagine that because they are on the other side they are not having to deal with the separation just like you are. Doing these three letters facilitates the spiritual release that will allow him or her to move deeper into the light, as well as for you to move on with your human life.

So whatever you write, no matter what it is, it will not be “against” him or her because the truth heals, and it’s exactly what they want to hear. So don’t hold back. Keep writing until you have nothing left to say.

Letter 2 – To the Deceased, About Them

In this letter, instead of the focus being on you exclusively like it was in the first letter, you focus on the deceased. It’s all about them.

You will express how you will miss the person and why. In what ways was he or she important in your life? What qualities did you admire in him or her? It is where you get to acknowledge them and the life that they lived, no matter how they lived it. It is where you withdraw all your judgments and your expectations and find yourself able to write about how you can accept him or her unconditionally.

You are looking to see the very best in the person, while at the same time acknowledging his or her weaknesses, recognizing that that was who he or she was and that’s how God made him or her or how the experiences of life had forged him/her.

You also recognize that there were some things about the death that make it easier to bear, such as the person died doing what they loved or were born to do. Or, if it was cancer or some other debilitating disease, you can see that he or she was tired and death was for them a release. Or that he or she was so troubled that death may, understandably, have seemed to be the best way out of the pain.

If you had to make some decisions about the manner of his or her passing, you did what you thought was right at the time. If you were the caretaker, it could be that you are feeling a sense of relief, and that you are grateful to be relieved of the responsibility.

What you are doing in this letter, then, is reducing the suffering by beginning the bargaining process as well as the collapsing the story stage in Radical Forgiveness. When we believe that a death is a failure, or shouldn’t have happened, or is tragic and untimely, we are only giving ourselves reason to suffer more than necessary. It was vital to go through it at the beginning, but as time goes on we can begin to see a few of the silver linings behind the cloud.

That’s the purpose of this letter.

Who Was to Blame?

Now, before going on to do the third letter, which you should only do after at least 24 hours have passed, you need to be totally honest with yourself about who you might have blamed for the death. It may well be more than one person or entity. It can even be the deceased. It may be yourself. Make a list of all those who you think were responsible for the death.

Letter 3—Resolution and Acceptance Stage

This is going to be the hardest letter to write because mostly you’re going to have to fake it. How much you will have to fake it will depend on which of the world views you most identified with earlier, but unless you chose #6 or gave #5 a pretty high score, then you will have to write things you don’t necessarily hold to be true. But we want you to trust us on this.

You see, your beliefs are mental constructs and such things are ruled by the mind and mediated by your mental intelligence. The part of your psyche we want to activate is your Spiritual Intelligence, which is the intelligence of your spiritual self. (Emotional intelligence is the wisdom of the heart.)

So, even while your mind is rejecting some of the things we want you to say in this letter, your Spiritual Intelligence will know the truth behind the statements and will begin the healing for you. It is a form of prayer, you see, though we call it secular prayer since it references no particular religion.

This letter equates to the Resolution and Acceptance Stage in the Grief model and the Reframing and the Integration phases (numbers 4 and 5) in the Radical Forgiveness model.

So in this letter, you are going to say that, even though you sorely miss being in the presence of the dearly departed, and you still feel sad about losing him or her, you nevertheless recognize the perfection in the situation. You will say that you realize that you are both still connected at the spiritual level, and that you will meet again on the other side once you have made your own transition.

You will write something to the effect that you know that it must have been their time to go, and that it was their choice to go at that time, otherwise it would not have happened that way. And you honor their choice.

Also, that there was a purpose contained in the manner in which he or she made the transition, though you don’t know yet what that was, and probably will not know until you get to the other side and see the bigger picture.

You will explain that you know now that, even though the death may have appeared to be untimely and before his/her time, that the age at which you die is irrelevant and may well have been determined prior to incarnating. The person died exactly when it was the right time to die.

They may have made it more of a struggle than they need to have done by resisting going over but that’s OK. It was all part of the experience. It was time to drop the body and go home.

If there was another person involved in causing the death or implicated in some way, you will tell the deceased that you realize it was all part of the plan, and that he or she had made a soul contract with that person’s Higher Self to do what was asked of him or her.

If the death was painful and distressing, notwithstanding the fact that much of that pain was due to holding onto resentment and anger, and being fearful of dying because of what his or her religion had taught him or her, this was actually part of the divine plan. There were lessons to be learned at the spiritual level in that experience.

Finally, you will say that you know now that, just as Jesus and other Masters tried to teach us all, life and death are inseparable and part of an existential continuum.