Author Copes with Grief Through Awe and Wonder
“An experience of awe and wonder, where your breath is taken away, can open up your mind and help you see life differently.” – Val Walker
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
Val Walker is a Boston-based, award-winning author and an experienced rehabilitation counselor.
“I was a counselor for about 20 years,” Walker begins. “I got started in the grief rehabilitation field through working with people who had cancer. Back in the early ‘90s, a lot of my patients were terminal, and there were grief support groups for the victims, families, and caregivers. A lot of people were dealing with disenfranchised grief, where you feel different from everybody else around you.”
The Art of Listening
“Even though I was a group facilitator, I learned how to be receptive and to listen, which is an art that takes some practice. I had to learn to not only listen, but to use my empathy and to be curious and interested – to say, ‘Tell me more.’ I learned how to engage with people through their stories about loss.”
Walker struggles with her own grief from being unable to have children. “It was part genetic and part autoimmune, and I had to deal with the grief attached to that. I went to support groups for women who had premature ovarian cancer. I ended up co-facilitating support groups around this.”
Walker’s first book was The Art of Comforting: What to Say and Do for People in Distress. “So much of what went into it was true, honest-to-God experiences of sitting with people with AIDS, HIV, and brain cancer. I had veterans’ groups for people coming back from Iraq after the First Gulf War. Support groups gave me a lot of wisdom. In graduate school, I got a lot of great training as a rehabilitation counselor. We studied motivational interviewing and person-centered techniques on how to tune in to the individual instead of labeling them, or coming at them like you have all of the answers.”
In 2011, the Nautilus Book Awards recognized Walker for The Art of Comforting with a gold medal for a work on grief and loss. “I am honored to say it spoke to lots of people, because how do you talk about this? How do you reach out to somebody who has just lost a loved one, or a job, or can’t have kids? It’s all about knowing how to tune into people, let go of your agenda, and learn how to open up. To be comforting, you have to let go of how society has conditioned you to fix things, to control things, to have answers, and to render results. We don’t know how to be in a mess. We don’t know how to not know what to say.”
Addressing Isolation
“In 2019, I wrote a book about how to break out of loneliness and isolation called 400 Friends and No One to Call. It was an extension of the grief work. There are a lot of situations that isolate us, including grief, illness, and disability. It was based on my own experience of being isolated and stranded in the hospital after a hysterectomy because my friends didn’t show up. I had no family around, nobody to take care of me. I felt really ashamed. I had lined up a good friend to pick me up from the hospital, but she had a crisis of her own as well as family members dealing with opioid addiction.”
“It is ironic how one isolating situation can isolate another person. It comes around and goes around and spreads. I realized that you have to be really proactive and say, ‘I’ve got to do something,’ because the world doesn’t come to you when you’re alone. You have to push your way out of it. A lot of times, what helps people achieve this is service to others. You volunteer somewhere, you join a cause, or find some sort of a purpose. Oftentimes, when you do this, you meet other people who were just as isolated as you were.”
Currently, Walker writes a blog for Psychology Today based on the premise of her second book. “What’s great about writing this blog is it keeps me up on my research. I was doing a bunch of research last year about awe and wonder. There is an entire science behind the phenomenon, and it is finally backing up what mystics have known for thousands of years. Thanks to MRIs, what happens to the brain when it is in a state of awe can now be studied. There are scientists such as Dacher Keltner, who wrote a book called Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. He writes for The Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley, CA. He is one of the biggest researchers behind the study of awe.”
Pursued by Abuse
Walker is currently working on a third book, inspired by a personal experience, which originally sparked her interest in awe and wonder. “An experience of awe and wonder, where your breath is taken away, can open up your mind and help you see life differently.”
“I was only 22 years old and feeling suicidal because of domestic violence. I was running away from the first love of my life who ended up being a very dangerous person. It was 1978, and in those days, there were no safe places for women to go who were trying to escape abuse. This person chased after me for an entire year. I was literally running around the country.”
“I had given up trying to find shelter. I had bummed off too many people – sleeping on their couches. I hadn’t been able to keep a job because my perpetrator would show up and threaten me. I had no place to go, and I ended up homeless. I wasn't even living out of a car – I didn’t even have that. It wasn’t just the fact that I was running from abuse, and I felt like my life wasn’t worth living. But I had asked mental health people and other professionals for support and protection, and they really didn’t know what to do with me.”
Life From Above
“I was in a campground next to the James River near Richmond, VA. It was late September, and I was ready to end my life. I was able to get a hold of a jar of Valium. I wanted to leave the planet, just go, just get out of here. It was twilight and I had started to swallow some of the pills. The sky was that beautiful deep blue color, and a small crescent moon was rising over the river. Out of nowhere, a huge, gorgeous, giant blue heron circled over me and landed about 10 feet away. It turned and looked right at me, its piercing eye staring right into me. It was magnificent in the moonlight with the river behind it. It almost looked like an angel, a bird-angel.”
“I was completely spellbound and I couldn’t swallow any more pills. The gorgeous bird, the sky, the moon, and the river were too beautiful. I swear to goodness, the moment lasted about 30 seconds that could have been 30 years. Soon, the bird took off; it had done its thing. My grandmother had died two weeks before this happened, and I was very close to her, and I wondered if maybe there was some connection with her spirit. I suppose I will never know.”
“The thing about an experience like that is it leaves an open mystery in your life. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Why, at this particular time, in this particular moment, would a wild bird land so close to me? It got me out of my current reality long enough to see another perspective.”
An Enduring Lesson
“I started feeling a connection with God, with something divine, something powerful. It was bigger than my own human drama. It was bigger than me, it was bigger than somebody else’s bullshit. Whenever I was near the herons, I always felt better because I learned from them. They taught me about dignity – the way they hold their heads up – I learned how to hold up my own head higher. They made me feel like I had the right to be here. They helped me want to live and want to get out of abuse and shame. Later in life, they helped me deal with all sorts of complex PTSD, loss, and big-time grief.”
The working title for Walker’s forthcoming book is Healing with Wonder. “My story is only going to be one part of it,” she says. “It will also include stories from other people who have suffered from grief, trauma, or addiction and how an experience of awe and wonder changed their lives. I have yet to see a book about awe and wonder which taps into the lives of trauma and grief survivors.”
In the meantime, Walker has begun an adjacent project by the same name. “Robyn Houston-Bean of The Sun Will Rise Foundation and I have set up a YouTube channel called Healing with Wonder,” she explains. “We are inviting guests to tell their story. It could be a candlelight vigil or a moment at a concert – everybody has a story. If people feel like an experience of awe and wonder has had an impact on their life and helped them heal from grief, addiction, violence, or trauma, they are encouraged to share it with us.”
Anyone interested in sharing their personal story of awe and wonder can email Val Walker at [email protected].