Then I remembered that Abdul died. Taken away without warning by a heart attack at age 64. Abdul, the patron saint of used car owners as I used to call him, had kept each of my ancient cars on the road for the past 20 years – Harriet the Honda, Tallulah the Toyota, Tina the Toyota… “Only two cars,” Abdul would often say, “Honda or Toyota.” The only two makes worth having. He was barely five feet tall and his motor was always running. He never overcharged me, he never made me feel stupid for being mechanically dyslexic, and he never let me down. He was savvy, efficient, and sharp as a tack. A shy, humble man of few words who ended conversations before they had barely begun, his good heart resounded like a temple bell and still does. His heart tolled his love and pride for his family, his gratitude for and pride in his home, his caring for me and his other clients. His heart tolled so loudly that his bereaved family has been besieged by visitors and well-wishers, and my mother who’d never met him, upon hearing of his death, felt as though she’d lost him too.

Such losses must be honoured. Luckily, my instincts to do the simple, life-giving things like make chicken soup, fertilize my orchid, light a candle and call Abdul’s son, Shahreem, and speak about the gift of his father’s life, spoke loudest yesterday. When we take the time to mourn, we pay homage to the living as well as to the dead.

My favourite spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, says that grief is “an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent. We don’t know what to do with our pain, and we never have. We have been told to bury our feelings, to keep a stiff upper lip, to ‘get over it and get on with our lives’ as though loss were not an inevitable part of life.”

According to Levine, disregarding our sorrow “inhibits intuition. We come to trust ourselves less. We cannot ‘feel’ the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as ‘a bit unplugged.’…This quality of grief can slow our creativity and ‘dumb us down’ a bit.”

Our creativity demands that we pay tribute to our grief. It is no accident that great loss often gives birth – or new life – to the artist within. In my book, Did You Know I Would Miss You?, written after my brother, Steve, died by suicide in 2004, I speak of how acknowledging our unattended sorrows can free up our life force and our capacity to create. If you sense unattended sorrows clouding your heart and blocking your creativity, you might want to try this exercise:

Reflect on your own unmourned losses, using some or all of the following:

I have never acknowledged the loss of…

I had forgotten the loss of…

I can begin to heal the loss of…

And in the meantime, may you be inspired by the Abduls of this world. May the temple bell of your heart and of your creativity toll loud and long.

This phrase from the Bob Dylan song (from his 1997 album, Time Out of Mind) has been on my mind from the moment I woke up this morning. It took me until noon to figure out why. Five years ago today, my brother Steve had been goin’ down the road feelin’ bad. Five years ago today, he drove his well-worn red truck into a gravel pit on the outskirts of Kindersley, Saskatchewan, Canada, and took his life.

Bob Dylan was his hero in life. Bob Dylan’s music is Steve’s emissary in death.

In 2008, I launched Did You Know I Would Miss You? – A Healing Journey, a memoir/guidebook about mending the heart after losing a loved one to suicide. (I’ll be giving a talk about it at Banyen Books in Vancouver on May 13 6:30-8:00 PM.) Having felt pretty light ever since, I have assumed that I no longer needed to walk the healing path.

It didn’t take much to bring on the tears today. Just a CBC Radio story featuring Clarence Asham, a 56-year-old blind man with an IQ of 32, a musical savant, master accordion player, and the subject of several documentaries. He had been separated from his older brother, Hal, when Clarence was taken from his family and sent to an institution at age 6. The brothers were reunited as adults and Hal, a volunteer at the Carnegie Centre, a vibrant gathering place at the centre of Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside, asked Clarence if he would give a concert there. Everyone was moved by a performance that, in the words of a woman in the audience, “reminded us that every human being is valuable.” As a footnote to the story, the producer said that shortly after his concert, Clarence’s proud, once-estranged brother, Hal, passed away peacefully.

I burst into sobs. Anything that reveals the mysterious, enduring tenderness of the human heart has been reducing me to tears lately. It’s about Love. In a world where the judging, worried, fearful, gossiping, nagging, deceitful, merciless sorcerer of an ego tells us that our bank balance, career, or squabble with our neighbour are what matters, the lessons of Love need endless repeating.

There is no greater teacher of Love than death. Especially death by suicide, which tears us to shreds and abandons us at the threshold of the Heart, our only sanctuary. When my brother died, I vowed that I would bear witness to his death and to his journey thereafter. I didn’t realize that this vow was lifelong, but of course it is. His suicide was a painful act with profound reverberations. The Earth still weeps for my brother. There was only one Steve.

I can never deny Steve’s death or the pain of losing him, when it arises. I walk a healing path, where there is no escaping Life’s sorrows or Love’s lessons, and where every human life matters. My brother is not here in body, but my love for him and his for me has never left and never will. That is the gift of Steve’s life. It is the gift of Steve’s death.

(I wrote the above piece this time last year. For some reason, I didn’t publish it. As this May’s anniversary of Steve’s death approaches, and my heart feels heavier, I take comfort in my own words. For more stories and wisdom about the loss of a sibling, go to this wonderful website, The Sibling Connection.)

So how do we deal with this loss that knows no bounds? From a loss that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is comparable to surviving a concentration camp? Recognize that it’s bigger than our will or our egotistical insistence that we’re immune or have transcended it. Acknowledge it, breathe into it, and see it as a reminder of our humanity. Suffering is part of the human experience, at least for most of us. When we try to deny that, or gloss over it, we separate ourselves from our loved ones who are still living, and from other wounded humans. At the heart of our suffering is our love. Something we have never lost and never will. Let’s send love to that inconsolable part of us and to all others who have suffered loss by suicide or by some other means. Let’s send love to our brothers and sisters who couldn’t bare the pain and took their lives. Let’s share the love that also knows no bounds.