A Reflection on Grief
This reflection on grief is an addendum to Remembering Joan, a forthcoming book of poetry and remembrance in tribute to my mother-in-law, Joan (pronounced Jo-ann)
I once stuffed the grief of a failed marriage and the loss of my mother-in-law Joan’s friendship, but choosing life requires facing grief and moving through it. It took time and courage to learn to ride into and beyond recurring waves of painful emotion and memory. Eventually, I came to accept, or at least to recognize and tolerate, my chaotic and unwanted feelings. In the grip of pain or sorrow, I often imagined myself on the cross, dying with Jesus and moving with Him into resurrection life. For many years, I pictured Him, hanging on the cross, experiencing my feelings and taking them with Him into His death. With time, I learned to simply give Him my feelings as they arose. I found I could trust Him to take the destructive ones and replace them with His own health.
As I chose to release grief and give it to Jesus, God began to heal me and set me free from the dreary weight of loss. Healing is ongoing, for when a loved one dies or leaves us, our love for them remains. While traveling a familiar road, sensing a whiff of once familiar perfume or shaving lotion, opening a loved one’s favorite jam or peanut butter, strong feelings of loss may uncontrollably rise and fall, surge and resurge.
I learned that I must not hold on; I had to let go. Holding on brought the risk of defining myself by pain and loss, of becoming codependent on my suffering. Another risk was developing a friendship with an invisible demon of grief, an emotional specter or ghost, created by substituting feelings of loss for all that was gone and cherishing the pain as a final connection with departed loves.
In the process of letting go and finding acceptance, we move forward, backward, and sometimes swirl in eddies. Loving others changes us. In trust, we give part of ourselves to them; they give to us; and neither of us are the same. Loss, then, can subjectively feel like a betrayal of trust. Feelings of betrayal can lead to a sense of abandonment; if abandonment can saturate our thinking it will, until our senses are confounded and we are knocked out of orbit; distracted from our own purpose in life. Truly, grief can become either a pitfall leading to despair or a ladder to greater empathy, sensitivity, and compassion.
Grief wears many faces. It can intensify our vision, enhancing the lines of nature and art and the sounds of music with new richness and meaning. It can also dumb-down or numb our understanding—and numb and dumb-down us as well. Agreeing with grief, we can become more sensitive, but we can also shut down and become too opaque to receive or transmit any light or love to anyone. The light of those we miss eludes us. We remember and long for lost companionship. Half alive ourselves, we “carry on,” some of us diverted by daydreams and fantasies, some of us by becoming more responsible, more useful, and giving our lives to fulfilling the visions and hopes we once planned together.
Fortunately, such intensity won’t sustain itself. We either grow hard or yield and heal. As Yeats wrote in “The Gyres,”
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
I was slow to learn that life is more than recycling unfinished pain and repeating Good Friday. Grief tempted me to idolize the ones I’d lost and to succumb to self-pity. For a while, I caved in; but today, looking back, it seems to me that grief eventually did a good work in me. Owning and releasing its pain taught me a bit about love. It heightened the miracle of individuality in friend and foe alike. I came to see that each day brings a second chance to honor and cherish others. I learned that without God’s light, the most vibrant unique colors on our tilting planet look drably muddy and grayed. I learned how emotional self-absorption can become narcissistic and turn people into things, commodities that are useful or useless to our selfish purposes.
As I came to see that God alone is my light and my salvation, I became increasingly grateful for men and women like my mother-in-law, Joan, who carry His light within and transmit it to others. They are His lesser lights and point others toward Him. When Joan died, I was in transition; I believed in God, yet I was still healing, still emerging from the darkness of doubt and unbelief, still being saved. In a way, salvation is day by day for every one of us. We choose light, one choice at a time. Fortunately, Joan was not The Light; she only carried her bit of the light that overcomes all darkness. Eventually, I discovered that only in God’s light can I, or anyone, see clearly. As the Psalmist wrote,
For with You is the fountain of life:
in Your light shall we see light. Psalm 39:6 KJV
When God becomes our light He opens the eyes of our spirit. Spiritually awake, we see eternal colors that are pure, transparent and pulsating with the living light of life itself. Although experiencing suffering, grief, and loss often opens our eyes to glimpses of eternal life and light, suffering and loss by themselves do not turn on the switch to His light. We must choose Him, we must choose faith—or, as some mystics might say, Faith chooses us and we receive—not always without struggle.
Choice is essential. The sufferings of my generation and of my parent’s and Joan’s generation before me, the depression, the holocaust, the pogroms and wars of the last century, did not generate a holy, spiritually awakened generation. They turned many away from God.
May all who read Remembering Joan find grace to give all loss and grief to God. May they cherish their memories of what was and choose to embrace the realities and challenges of what is. May each reader receive the capacity to cherish memories, to trust God and to live today.
For two centuries believers have been inspired by the memories of a man named John who wrote of his beloved friend, Jesus, “We beheld His glory.” And “In Him is life, and His life is the light of mankind.” May all who read my witness of Joan’s light and life also be lights within our darkened world.
