The OPEN QUESTION category of posts of GRIEVER’s BALL is meant to give you space to reflect and react to a specific idea or set of ideas. Those posed here, today, are about the grief we feel for the things we cannot or will not ever get to do, and the possibility of radical acceptance there. —LSC
The other evening my friend R. and I were enthusiastically carping about the fact that therapy was essentially non-existent when we needed it most. I pinpointed the year 1987— the year of my most major of major surgeries, the year I seemed to have spent more time in the hospital than not, the year I could no longer outrun all that I was hiding from my family and myself—as the ideal year to have regularly lain myself sideways on some PhD’s proverbial couch and been prompted to find feelings and language for all of it. But essentially no one I knew was going to therapy at the end of the ‘80s (ditto for R.)—certainly no one our age, not out here on the West Coast anyway. It just wasn’t a thing and if that sounds wild, well, yeah, growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the ‘80s was kind of wild.1
Later that night, reflecting on this sore spot and just how much time I’ve spent over the past few years falling into and digging out of the deep, wide sink hole of grief around my unrecognized teenage trauma, some pocket of my psyche offered up this idea of the Shadow Bucket List. An appendix of the things I wish I could have done. Of things I wish I could have done better. Of things i wish I could have done differently. Of conversations, opportunities, incidents, and exposures I wish I could have the embodied experience of, even though I know for certain that due to the current constraints of the time/space continuum, they’re not possible.
Where a bucket list item would read, “I’m going to explore the tropical islands on the south side of Thailand,” a Shadow Bucket List item would read, “I’ll never know what it would have felt like to be seen and understood and supported through my illness and abuse.”
Similarly, someone asked me yesterday how they might deal with the guilt and shame they have around the death of someone they didn’t get a long with. A perfect Shadow Bucket List example, if you ask me. If you can imagine being in that scenario, imagine a Shadow Bucket List item that says something like, “I’m never going to experience a close and loving relationship with _________ in this world.” I made it that specific for a reason: to leave room for whatever might happen outside of this world, and to narrow in on what it is that’s happening in the here and now.
Can you relate to either of those? Can you move backwards across all the things that have and have not happened and identify desires and regrets and wished-for, longed-for, needed moments along the way?
Maybe those experiences show up as missed opportunities, or maybe they read as ways you feel wronged, cheated, neglected, misunderstood—or ways that you yourself have wronged, cheated, neglected, or misunderstood someone else.
Maybe those things are from recent years—possibilities that the pandemic annihilated. Maybe those things are from your childhood. Maybe those things have to do with someone who’s died.
Can you imagine how a list of those items could be like a first step in making peace with them? Of somehow settling the unsettled, anxious, unright feelings they inspire?
Why a list?
Well, why do you make a grocery list? A to-do list? A wish list? We group like things together because seeing various items as a set gives us an idea of their overall scope and shape. Seeing like things together, particularly things as meaningful and powerful as longings and regrets, helps us understand the collective impact these things have had on us and will continue to have on us. A list encapsulates the task and opportunity at hand. A list helps us see how Thing #8 was directly influenced by Thing #2 and how both of them layer into the tone and tenor of #11, #13, and #17.
Further, we start lists in order to finish them—or not finish them. A certain kind of list (made by a certain kind of person) begins and exists so its maker can come back to the list again and again and cross things off. Another kind of list (made by another kind of person, or maybe the same kind of person in a new and different situation) exists as a never-ending compendium. A running tally; a collection that grows in homage, comfort, or warning. In the work I do with groups and individuals, a list is a kind of map.
Because a bucket list is a record of the amazing things you plan to do and places you plan to visit before you die, a significant degree of joy and savoring and anticipation accompanies that record. It’s a can’t-wait feeling.
So what then is the feeling that accompanies the Shadow Bucket List? In my current thinking, ultimately it’s a kind of acceptance—a radical acceptance—that certain opportunities and experiences are lost to time or just too far out of reach or in some way not meant to be.
Before that acceptance, however, pacing through and living with a Shadow Bucket List is at first going to feel like shadow work; like sharing a too-small bus bench with your biggest fears and sorrows.
This New York Times primer on Radical Acceptance with beloved meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach is worth finding a way around the paywall.
“Life regularly and inevitably involves emotional stress, anger, fears around health, shame around failed relationships,” says Dr. Brach in the article, “but anything short of fully accepting our human experience will keep us caught in those emotions.”
The Shadow Bucket List—and radical acceptance itself—isn’t about just blindly agreeing to keep feeling the pain we feel. Rather, it’s about learning to allow life to be what it is (an essential life skill not generally taught widely enough) so we can find new experiences that please us, heal us, and help us life more fully from here on out.
And so that moving forward, we might have more insight and faculty around avoiding regret and longing where and when it’s possible to do so.
So here are my questions for you:
What former possibilities and experiences are now lost to time? What is it now truly too late for? What opportunities have come and gone? Where do you most feel longing and regret and what actions and inactions do those feelings map back to? (NOTE: You’re going to need to factcheck yourself along the way; for instance, make sure you’re really only listing that which is physically, tangibly no longer available to you. ie: I can’t be 13 in 1987 again. But what about something like, “I’ll never make it to law school.” It’s probably more true that “I can never be a young adult entering law school.” In other words—and this is a good practice, always—study your sentiments and stories and make sure you’re not giving up too much or making heartbroken overstatements and generalizations that will ultimately only break your heart more.)
How might a Shadow Bucket List and all its sorrows yield new opportunities? How might it sharpen the focus on what’s available right now? How might it instigate movements that lead toward new possibilities? How might it act, in the future, to inspire you to say the difficult thing, to make the challenging move, to ask for what you need and want?
Finally, there’s a lot of grief in recognizing what you’ve done without and what you’d love to fix and re-do if you could turn back time, so—as always—take good care of yourself when entering into exercises like these. If you’re looking for tips with that, I like this list which includes breathing, humming, listening, and gentle movement.
Images by Antti Pääkkönen, Annie Spratt, and Weston via Unsplash; photo manipulations and collage by me.
The way a void or a vacuum or a dark cave is wild.
Yep. I like this. I’m gonna try it. Thanks Laura.