Grief after losing a child to addiction can open the heart instead of closing it, though almost nobody tells you that while you are in it. Bryan Welch found it out slowly, and at enormous cost.
His son died at 25. In the months that followed, Bryan could not find a single reason to care for himself or for much of anything at all, and the only way forward he could see was to learn how to care without a reason, which is another way of saying he learned to love unconditionally. What came back to him eventually was not just survival, but a strange and unmistakable joy.
In this episode of The Miracle of Healing, Lisa Campion talks with Bryan Welch, a business executive, writer, rancher, and practicing Buddhist who spent nineteen years running Ogden Publications, home to Mother Earth News and Utne Reader, and who now raises grass fed cattle, sheep, and goats with his wife Carolyn on their farm in Kansas. His new book from New Harbinger, The Gift of a Broken Heart: How Our Grief Can Connect Us, is the unflinching record of the years after his son’s death.
This is a conversation about grief as a teacher rather than a problem to be solved, about how loss takes apart our illusions of safety and separateness, and about what becomes available to us once we stop trying to get over it. If you are carrying a loss of any kind, whether the death of someone you love, the end of a marriage, or the quieter grief so many of us feel about the state of the world, this one will meet you where you actually are.
In this episode you will discover:
- Why the grief we are most afraid of is the grief that connects us to everyone else
- What Buddhist practice has to offer a heart that has already broken
- The particular anguish of loving someone through addiction, told honestly and without cleanup
- How vulnerability becomes the doorway to compassion rather than the thing that ruins you
- Why if we love, we will grieve, and why Bryan no longer considers that a tragedy
Website: www.thegiftofabrokenheart.com
Book: The Gift of a Broken Heart: How Our Grief Can Connect Us, available wherever books are sold
