The Way Over is Through - How We Grieve

Reading: 1. from Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter (in part): I could write a handbook on mourning….And the ache that you treasure, that unique wrenching ache that you hoard: you go looking for it. Contrary to what so many people try to tell you…you want to dwell in its presence, you want to protect it from this heartless, future “time” they promise you is on its way, you want to dwell in the presence of the pain, the mystery of its hold on you.

The Sermon: A quotation from a grief journal: “It is almost four months now. I have just been through a month of depression, exhaustion, after facing the fact that I am not back to normal’ as I tried to believe I was—at least I believed I could do all I used to do and handle all I used to handle. I cannot. And I got stressed and worn out trying…. So I give up. It hurts to know it takes so long to heal…. His presence makes a great absence. Paradox of death’s reality. I am meeting my goals. I am tired.” I wrote that in a grief journal 18 years ago as a way to get through my grieving, after the man I expected to marry died, and I continued all the activities necessary to finish divinity school, get ordained and find a church.

I’m like so many of you. Sooner or later we all, if we live long enough, fall into the pit that engulfs us when someone we love dies and we are left alone with the job of “getting over it”. We may move between the desire to get over it quickly, and the desire to “dwell in the presence of the pain, the mystery of its hold on you,” like Gail Godwin’s protagonist. If the pain were magically removed, our relationship with the dead beloved would seem to go with it, and we want to hang onto that. Meanwhile, it is exhausting—whether you fight or give in, whether you grieve openly or in private, whether you keep busy or not—your energy is used up. Grief just takes you down to the bone and wears you out.

I thought I would move through my grief in the predictable “stages”—shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. I’d be functioning normally in two or three months, still sad of course, but “over it” in a year or so. Yeah, right. The stages got all mixed up, sometimes several at once—except for the peace of acceptance. Someone said I’d feel angry at him but I never did. I did, however, yell at God, “OKAY! I’ve had enough! I want him BACK now!” So much for my rational, liberal religion!

Standing with countless bereaved persons over the years, I have never seen two people do it the same way. A friend, widowed at the time of my own loss, took a leave of absence from her teaching job, while I attended classes and children’s school events and sorted my loved one’s belongings. She did what she needed to; I did what I needed to; it was different for each of us. People told me they worried I was doing too much and warned me to take time to do my grieving. “Don’t worry,” I said, “when I go home tonight, I’ll cry plenty.” I have learned not to interfere with how someone grieves, and to say to those who suffer a loss, “Don’t let anyone tell you what you should be experiencing.”

Anyone who loses a loved one gets hurt by things people say in an effort to make the pain go away. They want to make it go away because they don’t want to experience it. “I know how you feel” really means, “If I can stand the idea of your grief, maybe I’ll be able to stand mine when it happens to me.” “You’re strong, you’ll get through this” means “I’m scared of your pain—you handle it.” “At least your mother’s death wasn’t as bad as my mother’s was” means “I can’t bear to believe what you’re feeling is as bad as what I felt because if it was, I’d have to stand with you in that terrible place.”

It turns out the best balm for a grieving soul is not explanations or comparisons or even reassurance that it will be OK. It is just knowing someone is there and cares. It is someone not being afraid to be in the presence of your pain. When Job’s friends first came to see him—before they got pontifical and annoyed him to poetic heights—they simply sat with him for seven days and nights, and said nothing, as the Bible says, “for they saw how great his pain was.” In those seven days and nights, they accepted his pain and allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by it with him. Sometimes it takes no words. A hand on yours, a look, a bit of help with something practical. Despite my calling, I know a casserole is better medicine than a sermon on grief. Maybe I should have brought a tuna noodle casserole today and just put it up here on the pulpit and not preached at all!

Some may try to convince you, either that your loss has a meaning for your life, or that you “needed to learn something,” or that your loss will clear the way for a brighter future. These things will happen, but at that moment, they are beside the point. And they are not the reasons for your loss. These explanations are a way of denying the power of your loss. One of the most helpful things said to me was simply, “Don’t look for any meaning in this.” What a relief. Imagine. Everyone is telling you, you have to “work” to extract meaning from something that is killing you and along comes someone who says—like the Buddha—You don’t have to understand it. It just is. You just have to endure it. You will find, or create, your meaning in time, and your life will re-open before you. But for now, all you have to do is endure, and believe me, that is hard enough. When you are grieving, you deserve a gold star just for getting up in the morning.

And let me say here that grief is not only about someone dying. We mourn other losses so deeply—a job, divorce, illness or injury, the child who leaves for college. For months I couldn’t drive by the house where I raised my children, after I sold it for the happiest of reasons—marriage, a new home and a new ministry. I had to grieve the creaky old place because it was part of my soul.

The danger of grief—and people do die of broken hearts—is not usually that we’ll get lost in it for too long. That can happen—and when it does, it is to be hoped we can accept some help. The danger of grief is that we will dash through it with our eyes and hearts shut to avoid feeling it. Ann Lamott says about her own grief, “All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately.” The great palace lie! That is how we harden our hearts, shrink down our souls. Or we make terrible mistakes, like replacing a beloved person or job or home with another that promises to be like the lost one—and of course, never is. Parker Palmer says, “…only as we allow death to hollow us out will we be filled with life’s presence.” [Let Your Life Speak] Grief to which we are faithful scoops us out, hollows and empties us, opens us up. It makes more room in your soul than was there before. And when there is more room in your soul, you will be filled with things you never imagined. I can’t tell you what they will be, because that is particular to each individual. I can only tell you, having lived through it more than once myself, that there is a reason to have faith in the process.

I wonder whether as a nation we ever really grieved the deep losses of September 11, 2001. We were accused of wallowing in our grief—and surely we wept, and held vigils, and talked. But did we confront what our loss did to us? Not to claim that I fully understand this, but I do think this would involve shifts of recognition about our international policies, our privilege and power, our loss of immunity from the terror common to others. In a self-protective reaction against our stunned grief, our rush to vengeance bespeaks an inability to confront the shock to our national consciousness. We narrowed down, hardened our collective heart, and set ourselves on a course of destruction. What if, instead, we had lived faithfully through our grief, allowed ourselves to be hollowed out and emptied, allowed a space to grow in our national soul—perhaps even finding ourselves led into a path of real greatness as a leading nation in our world?

Having said this about the importance of allowing the process of grief to occur, I have to add that sometimes we are almost too enamored of what has come to be called “processing our grief.” If you’ve lived with grief, you’ve probably been instructed to “process” it, as if your grief were stuff to throw in a blender and get whipped up fast so you could drink it down and get it over with. I was told I would need a therapist because I’d need to work through my grief with someone. But I didn’t need to work through it. I just needed to learn to live without my beloved—a large enough assignment. That’s the underlying necessity of grief: you have to learn to live without the physical presence of that person in your life—and all that entails. Sometimes it will entail therapy or counseling. Sometimes it will entail a sleeping pill so you can get a good night’s sleep. Sometimes it will entail just listening to the quiet song of your own heart learning to sing a solo instead of duets.

Sometimes it will entail losing your faith. You have heard: “I can’t believe in God any more. What kind of God would do this to my child—to my friend—to me?” Elie Wiesel tells of someone asking, as a young boy was hanged in a concentration camp, “Where is God now?” His answer was, “God is there in that boy.” His image of God shifted there in that moment, not to explain or soften, but to encompass that horror. Grief can shatter our faith. But it may make room for a larger and deeper faith. Death has opened up my mind to make room for a sense of the cosmos that does not end at the boundaries of our physical realities; and loss has opened up my heart for gratitude for the continuing unfolding that I have come to know life to be.

What I discovered about grief is that you don’t process it at all. You aren’t even in control of what happens. Grief takes you up, rips you open, breaks your heart, and throws you down broken for a while. For months, every time I drove somewhere I hadn’t been before, with all my maps and directions, I would lose my way and pull over to the side of the road and be unable to figure out how to find it again. A friend explained, “Well, you see, you’re disoriented.” In grief we truly lose our way. The whole world turns upside down. For a time, you aren’t in charge of charting your course. It is out of your control. And that’s the hardest thing to accept: we can’t control it; we have to give ourselves over to the process of grief in order to be re-oriented and made whole.

We do not get “over” a loss. As a widow said to me, we just get used to it. The hole in our life remains; but it softens with daily acquaintance. Grief creates a new way of relating to the beloved. We lost the beloved—but we do not lose our relationship to the beloved. As we continue to live, the relationship lives in us. And as we find a new way to live in the world without what we have lost, we find a new way to relate to what we have lost.

We do not process grief. Grief processes us. And like any process, it turns us into something different from what we were before. We do not get over grief. We only get through it—by going through it. If we are faithful to our grief we will be changed by it, and we will bring to life something we never before have had. There will be new power and wholeness in us, and with these we may bless the world.

I give the last words today to William Soutar, a Scottish poet who lived from 1898 to 1943, just 45 years. His poem, “From the Wilderness”:

He who was a river into the wilderness
Is now come back from misery to bless
The hounding spirit.
He who was rich and now so seeming poor
Owns an inheritance which was not his before—
Even his self.

This was the gift from the dark hour which thrust
Him forth to solitude;
Which laid him in a grave while yet the dust
Was under him; while yet the blood
Water’d the withering march ‘twixt sense and sand.

He knew the hour of nothingness when the hand
Is empty, and empty is the heart;
And the intelligence, with its keen dart
Of reasonable speech, slays its own pride.

‘Twas thus he died;
Suffering his solitary hour beyond the world of men:
And it was there, alone, he found the flower
Of his own self;
Which yet had been only a flower of stone
Had he not brought it back into the world again.

[from the Choice is Always Ours: The Classic Anthology on the Spiritual Way,
ed. Dorothy Berkley Phillips, Elizabeth Boyden Howes, & Lucille M. Nixon]