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March 5 - March 17, 2024
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” —Edna St. Vincent Millay
I often neglected the significant toll all this sorrow had taken on me. I’d spend my days denying my own brokenness, circling the sorrow, unwilling to truly approach it. Then, I’d spend my evenings in fits of weepy rage, despairing and wondering why I felt like I was going crazy.
Western society at large has developed a deep aversion to pain. We are experts at numbing hurt, drugging discomfort, and palliating narratives that offend our sense of comfort or safety. We speak in euphemisms. We think in euphemisms. We put our best face forward on social media. We avoid silence and boredom at all costs, fearful that the quiet and stillness might force us to confront our own hurts and emptiness.
If we don’t feel okay, we pretend. The self-help industry has convinced us that we can “life-hack” our way to ease and blessedness.
there is no life hack for grief.
I learned to serve, to pray, to worship, to study, and to love. But I never learned how to lose someone. I never learned how to grieve.
The ability to grieve deeply is a survival skill, one we’ve come close to losing as a society. The only way to experience sorrow is to do so wholeheartedly.
Most holy axioms surrounding bereavement are cruelly reductive.
The truth is you cannot think your way out of grief. You cannot perform your way through it. There is no wellness routine or therapist that can get rid of it. You cannot pray it away. You cannot numb your feelings forever or circumvent the sorrow and go straight to the redemption. Sometimes we have to allow grief to have its way with us for a while.
We need to get lost in the landscape of grief. It is a wild and rugged wilderness terrain to be sure, but it is here that we meet our truest selves. And we are met by God. The wilderness makes no space for pretense or facade. The language of platitudes and trite niceties are of no use to us in the wilderness. In the wilderness, we speak what is primitive and primary. We say what is true. We say what is hard and heartbreaking. We wail.
The degree to which we mourn is an indication of the degree to which we loved.
To know yourself is a gift.
Pride makes a terrible companion on the road of grief.
Truths I once held dear no longer seemed reliable. My theology felt shaky. Faith narratives began to give way under the weight of so much bewilderment. In many ways, when it came to my beliefs about God and myself and the world, I felt like I was starting again from scratch. Minuscule doubts became colossal; tiny uncertainties transformed into monsters.
Grief is like water. It follows gravity. It finds the lowest part of you and hollows it out even more. It exploits your weaknesses. Grief goes where it wants with or without an invitation. It seeps into the empty spaces. It cannot be harnessed or redirected, at least not easily. It branches out from the headwaters of the main event into hundreds of tributaries. Few areas of your life remain untouched. New losses are discovered almost daily. Life progresses without the one you love in it, and you miss them all over again with every new season and every turn in the road.
I do not think we can say of grief, “This, too, shall pass.” There is no going back.
C. S. Lewis, in his renowned opus on suffering A Grief Observed, wrote: “No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.”
This precarity that grief introduces casts a long shadow. For a while after a sudden loss, nothing feels good, and nothing feels safe. Innocuous situations can suddenly feel like an existential threat. The simple medical procedure is an opportunity for calamity, the long-awaited vacation is a plane crash in the making, a relaxing family picnic is the inevitable calm before the storm. It’s all a bit like some grim Rorschach inkblot test. Where others see happiness, I see a disaster waiting to happen.
the reality is that if I don’t lose her, then she will lose me. I will die. Either way, this ends in grief. Sometimes the thought of it is just too much to bear.
Our inclination to explain away suffering is an indication of how reticent we are to simply lament as a society, to admit our weakness.
It takes a lot of courage to simply be sad, to relinquish control and call off the search for an explanation.
God had disappointed me—not in the rainy Saturday or middle school breakup kind of way. He had disappointed me in the soul-crushing, life-altering kind of way.
Church people have a way of approaching hardship with an air of pretense and a load of half-truths that don’t get you very far when you are in the throes of bereavement:
To embrace my pain was to admit the hard truth that God was not who I thought He was. That my life was not what I thought it was. That I was not who I thought I was.
Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. You can reconstruct a new life even if it isn’t everything you thought it would be. You realize you can experience the presence of God even in the absence of peace.
Death must be trespassed upon. In shivah, fear is interrupted by friendship. Loneliness is interrupted by love. Pain is interrupted by presence.
Many people report living in a state of heightened awareness and stress for many weeks after a significant loss. Some say it feels like panic.2 Persistent, prolonged panic.
Studies show that bereavement is associated with elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that is linked to cardiac risks, reduced immune function, and overall reduction in quality of life.
In fact, an increased risk of mortality exists for individuals suffering from grief, up to 40 percent for a surviving spouse.
I wonder who in the church would have dared to scold or charge with indignity the “excess” of our Savior Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, whose own anguish became so manifested in His physical body that His sweat became blood.
The morning after a miscarriage is hard to describe. The air feels heavy. Languid. Time stands still.
Miscarriage is a peculiar kind of death. It is a death that lives in your own body. The fatality is a part of you. A life has expired within the depths of your own anatomy and yet you go on living. A myriad of feelings ensue. Disbelief, guilt, shame, the feeling of being unclean, the feeling of being betrayed by your own body.
It’s hard to know how to pass the time that first day after a loss so significant, the in-between of the death and the end. I felt like a walking corpse. The baby was still with me but was gone.
Nutritional psychiatrists note that serotonin, the ever-important neurotransmitter that mediates mood and inhibits pain, is primarily produced in the gastrointestinal tract.
“Death ends a life, not a relationship,” Mitch Albom
The world has done a thorough job of teaching us to be angry. It has not done such a good job at teaching us to be sad.
Miscarriage is perhaps the only death you mourn in which you have no past with the loved one you lost. You have only an imaginary future. You grieve someone whose face exists only in your mind and whose name exists only as a hope.
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her beautiful work of fiction Lila, “An unborn child lives the life of a woman it might never know, hearing her laugh or cry, feeling the scare that makes her catch her breath, tighten her belly. For months, its whole life would be all dreams and no waking.”13 For some, there will never be a waking.
many women mistakenly feel that a lost pregnancy represents a failure on their part, that they did something wrong that led to the loss of their baby. In reality, we know that most pregnancy losses are due to chromosomal abnormalities, something the mother, and the father for that matter, has no control over.
To me, miscarriage is an appropriate name, not only for a pregnancy loss, but for all sorts of losses. We make plans, live life with a person or a dream, and the future we hope for never comes to be. The outcome we anticipated is wrecked by an unforeseen cause, stolen incrementally or meteorically. We live in an alternate reality of the one we really wanted.
Jerry Sittser, who in one evening lost his mother, wife, and daughter in one devastating car accident, wrote, “The difference between despair and hope, bitterness and forgiveness, hatred and love, and stagnation and vitality lies in the decisions we make about what to do in the face of regrets over an unchangeable and painful past.”
to honor your own sorrow, you must love and accept yourself no matter the mistakes you’ve made.
Life doesn’t exist as a snapshot. It’s more like a movie reel, moving from frame to frame, from joy to sorrow over and over again. Time takes us all to death at some point.
Photographer Susan Sontag wrote: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
We must fight with all our might to maintain the joy of our memories. In reality, the past and the present are all we actually have. The future is never promised to us.
Cling to reality. Reminisce rightly. Because no matter our striving, our preserving, our imagining and reimagining, all things pass. All things are fleeting. Death is the common denominator of our shared fragility. Memento. Remember. Mori. You must die. Remember.
Phrases and sentiments that once felt like a familiar buoy of hope can feel like betrayal when leveraged at the wrong time.
Never is it more important to tell the whole truth than in times of deep sorrow and confusion. If we are going to speak to the hope of a situation, we must also speak to the pain of it, the agonizing sorrow of the loss.
Cynicism is a cruel companion in grief.
absence is more painful than someone’s imperfect presence, and silence is more wounding than someone’s awkward attempts at offering comfort.
