Grief
Gregg’s Reflection
I remember a conversation about grief with my pastor, Tim Smith, who went on to be Bishop in the NC Synod of the Lutheran Church. He told me that he thought grief was a well, a deep wound that never fully healed, it just scabbed over. That is why we can have an outsized reaction to the death of a pet. Each new loss just rips off the scab, and reopens the grief well.
I don’t think I properly grieved my father’s passing. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I had lost my father, but he was a hard man to love. On the other hand, now my brother and I could put our own stamp on the business, and no longer be reigned in by our headstrong father. For fifteen years, we had worked with him and chaffed at the bit to make our own way in the business world. With his death, we were finally free.
With our mother, there was no ambivalence. She had loved us well and as she began to slip into dementia, I began to grieve the mother I was losing at least a year before she died. While I thought I was prepared for her death, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was surprised how hard it hiT.
Genie and I have recently been grieving another loss that is coming. As we age, we recognize that living off grid an hour away from medical care is a risk. I have fallen several times on the ice this winter, and am still dealing with the consequences. When a medical scare came during a blizzard, and it took an hour and a half to get to the hospital, it was a wake up call. When our son and daughter both pressed hard for us to consider moving, we were angry.
We bought this land in 2000, after we sold the business, and built our dream log home off the grid, surrounded by National Forest, looking at Longs Peak, Mount Blue Sky, the Continental Divide and Rocky Mountain National Park. We named our land Eagle Peak, after a small peak behind the property.
For 25 years, we have put our heart and soul into this land. It has become a Thin Place, where heaven and earth come close. Pastors have done sabbatical in the loft over the garage. For five years we hosted a men’s leadership retreat for our church. Each year, pastors come here on retreat. While the primary gesture of the spiritual journey is letting go, it has been excruciating to think through letting go of this place.
We have slowly reconciled ourselves to the idea of moving up to Estes Park over the next couple of years. It has been quite a painful decision, accompanied by many tears. We are getting accustomed to the idea, and see many positives through our tears. Grieving is never easy work, but tears are cleansing to the soul, and reflect how much we have loved what we now have to let go.
Another form of grief hit me when a project I had invested five years in creating crashed and burned. I felt pain in my chest that I realized was a broken heart. I was grieving over the loss of something very important to me. Much too important, actually, and that is why it hurt so much to admit failure and let go.
Walk with me into the world of grief, and acknowledge the role grief has played in your life.
Blessings, Gregg
Journaling Prompts
When was the last time your grief well opened? How have minor passings brought pain that seemed so much deeper than the small loss? What was it like when you did not allow yourself to grieve properly? How have you learned to grieve well?
Scripture
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:8
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants.
Psalm 116:15
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
Psalm 147:3
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Matthew 5:4
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in Spirit and troubled.”Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept.
John 11:33-35
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or pain, for the old order of thing has passed away.
Revelations 21:4
Ancient Writings
Grief eats away its heart for the loss of things which it took pleasure in desiring, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away. Even though it clings to things of beauty, if their beauty is outside God and outside the soul, it only clings to sorrow.
St. Augustine, Confessions
Life is a misery, death an uncertainty. Suppose it steals suddenly upon me, in what state shall I leave this world? When can I learn what I have here neglected to learn? Or is it true that death will cut off and put an end to all care and all feeling? This is something to be inquired into.
But no, this cannot be true. It is not for nothing, it is not meaningless that all over the world is displayed the high and towering authority of the Christian faith.
Such great and wonderful things would never have been done for us by God, if the life of the soul were to end with the death of the body. Why then do I delay? Why do I not abandon my hopes of this world and devote myself entirely to the search for God and for the happy life?
St. Augustine, Confessions
Grace transforms our failings full of dread into abundant, endless comfort … our failings full of shame into a noble, glorious rising … our dying full of sorrow into holy, blissful life. …. Just as our contrariness here on earth brings us pain, shame and sorrow, so grace brings us surpassing comfort, glory, and bliss in heaven … And that shall be a property of blessed love, that we shall know in God, which we might never have known without first experiencing woe.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
God withholds Himself from no one who perseveres.
St. Teresa of Ávila
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
Modern Writings
The Blessing Hidden in Grief.
What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything is constantly shifting and changing. . . .
But in the midst of all this pain, there is a strange, shocking, yet very surprising voice. It is the voice of the One who says: “Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.” That’s the unexpected news: there is a blessing hidden in our grief. Not those who comfort are blessed, but those who mourn! Somehow, in the midst of our tears, a gift is hidden. Somehow, in the midst of our mourning, the first steps of the dance take place. Somehow, the cries that well up from our losses belong to our songs of gratitude.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 11/10/23
Death cannot be dealt with through quick answers, religious platitudes, or a stiff upper lip. Grief is not a process that can be rushed but must be allowed to happen over time and in its own time.
Richard Rohr
Jesus wept, and in his weeping, he joined himself forever to those who mourn. He stands now throughout all time, this Jesus weeping, with his arms about the weeping ones: “Blessed are those who mourn,for they shall be comforted.” He stands with the mourners, for his name is God-with-us. Jesus wept.
“Blessed are those who weep, for they shall be comforted.” Someday God will wipe the tears from our eyes. In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep. If you watch, you will see the hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one.
Ann B. Weems, Psalms of Lament
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
Oscar Wilde, DeProfundis
Bereavement is a response to a loss. It’s a process, walking through it and integrating it. Sometimes depression is bereavement that gets stuck. Sleep disorder, loss of energy, loss of appetite. Feelings of isolation and hopelessness, worthlessness, that there’s some flaw that if people knew, they wouldn’t love me. It can be unprocessed trauma from childhood.
Jim Finley intensive
My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue is unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving.
My heart my actual, physical heart, nothing figurative here is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief, p. 67.
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.