I really don’t sit around grieving all the time. Only some of the time. I rather feel permission to spend some of my waking - and no doubt some of my sleeping - hours indulging this grim quietude, given the fact that I have suffered the loss of both parents in the last 12 months - my mother, at 90 years of age, and ten months later my dad at almost 97. One can hardly feel short-changed by those lifespans. But it isn’t injustice I feel in the wake of their deaths; it is grief. It is the ache of loss; it is the deafening silence of the absence that has replaced a lifetime of presence. It is a truism, I recognize, that I have never known life without these two in it. They have variously been everything, the anchoring center, and like the stars in my orbit, in turn proximate and peripheral. But always there, in the room or on the other side of the house, across town or on the other end of a telephone call.
And now they aren’t. And I haven’t found the blueprints for constructing a new world absent those raw materials.
In the forward to C.S. Lewis’ book, A Grief Observed, Lewis’ step-son notes:
“In referring to this book in conversation, one often tends to leave out, either inadvertently or from laziness, the indefinite article at the beginning of the title. This we must not do, for the title completely and thoroughly describes what this book is, and thus expresses very accurately its real value. Anything entitled “Grief Observed” would have to be so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement.
This book, on the other hand, is a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.”
I assert here that same particularity. I can’t speak for anybody else. I don’t know what their grief is like, clumsily amateurish as I am just now feeling out the contours of my own. It is, after all, new to me. It is, come to think of it, new to most of us in this culture so averse to discomfort and fixated on prosperous pleasure that we cloister the ugliness of death in the mortuary, under the capable hands of the funeral director, and after the requisite “celebration of life”, “move on” as quickly as possible. If once we bathed the corpse of our loved ones and laid them out in our living room for a time of relational support and introspective comprehension, we moderns happily leave all that to the trained professionals behind their closed doors. And so it is that we are much more practiced at moving on than we are at grieving. As uncomfortable with our own morosity as are our family and friends, we quickly return to the more socially acceptable business of getting happy.
The rush to bliss is especially conspicuous in the faith community - the very environment which has nourished and shaped me from infancy, and ultimately employed me in adulthood. Christians have been talking about eternity since the time of Jesus, and death and dying have inevitably been topics in the conversation.
In the abstract. Precisely as “topics.” Rarely as experiences. We don’t talk much about grieving. We don’t linger over Jesus weeping at the death of his friend, skipping past to quickly arrive at Lazarus’ subsequent resuscitation. Similarly the disciples’ traumatization following the execution of Jesus. Portrayed nowhere in the gospels as spiritual luminaries, their grief has the odor of one more disappointing ineptitude. Let’s get on with Easter. Grieving in the church has come to seem implicitly untoward - a spiritual immaturity if not an outright deficiency.
I say, then, somewhat confessionally how empty all the theological affirmations I have espoused in funerals throughout my ministry land with me just now. I don’t eschew them; I am not experiencing any loss of faith. I still hold fast to the assurance of eternal life in the complete fulfillment of the Creator’s intention. I am simply, quietly acknowledging that, in this season of loss, I don’t find it comforting. More than one devout soul in recent months has assumed celebration with the rhetorical question, “Isn’t it a joy that your mother, your father are with Jesus face to face?” And of course I smile and reply with a slight nod of my head, but the real answer is, “No, ‘joy’ is not at all what I am feeling right now. I am hurting. I am grieving. Trusting in their eternal well-being does not take away the pain of their loss.”
Lewis, in observing his own grief over the death of his wife, noted something of the same realization.
“Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief...
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
Yes, I believe. I also hurt, and just now that pain occupies the foremost ground. If that is selfishness, so be it. It is, after all, MY grief. If others process their peculiar losses differently I bless them. I can only own my particular experience. I am not suggesting that the death of my parents is an evil or an affront. They lived beautiful and beautifully long lives. Their deaths were perfectly natural. I give thanks that, unlike so many who endure a slow and painful decline accompanied by all the mechanical accessories that extend our breathing but not our living, my parents’ respective deaths were quiet and mercifully swift. They died as they had lived, with dignity and grace. And they have now, I trust, received the life for which they had prepared.
And I, while affirming the goodness of that consummation, hold my sadness where I once held them. Let me just say that it’s not an even trade.
It isn’t anger I feel, or violation; just sadness. Neither disability nor deficiency, merely a powerfully new -to me - natural and inevitable experience.
This, I trust, is a passage not a pit. I don’t know what time will do with my grief, but though I have every expectation that it will do something, it won’t involve eliminating it. Life - at least the life I have experienced - is bent toward living. And I do continue to live, even as I continue to grieve. I want to attend to this latter precisely because I believe it to be a nourishment to the former. If the garden has taught me anything it is that flourishing and dying are not opposites, but inseparably intertwined - something like the relationship between notes and rests in music. Hardly enemies, the silence and the sounds are partners.
“How long will it take,” I am newly realizing, is the wrong and misguided question. Grieving and flourishing move hand in hand. And so grieving, I also lean toward the fruiting, unable to imagine what it will look like; toward the music, even if I can’t imagine the sound.
