I should have published the usual Sunday Sidebar yesterday, but chose to get up and move instead, followed by getting under the covers and hiding from the world for the rest of the day. Sunday Sidebar’s are for me- they pertain to grief and the journey back to life- but they are directed from whatever emotions are sitting on my heart at the time. Raw. Unedited. And I didn’t have much good to say yesterday. My prayer: God I know you are real, I know I am made in your image, I understand how you see me, I think. But today I have anger in my heart and I don’t know what to do with it.
People say give it to God a lot. What exactly does that mean? Hand it over mentally? Ask him to take it? Will it into his hands? All of the options sound like the promises of terot card readings and crystal balls. What if my anger is not only at myself, but a little at God? There is shame that comes with that feeling. God, I’m a little angry with you. Do you want to take that? I know he doesn’t deserve it. How dare I even ask. But David did. And God sure loved him.
“O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look hte other way?” Psalm 13:1
“How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my hear every day?” Psalm 13:2
So, I don’t know what people intend when they say give it to God. Mostly, because it implies he will take it away. And that is not typically the case. He will, however, join you and channel your passion for something better. Not necessarily better than what you lost, but better than your current bed of anger. C.S. Lewis said he sat with anger long enough until she told him it was grief. Something like that, anyway. The point is that anger comes with grief. And it is the last to leave. Especially when we admit there is a God big enough to save people, marriages, relationships, entire populations. And yet, here we sit doing everything and giving everything inside us to our pursuit of him with nothing but what seems like a new plan. I am angry that it is any plan other than the one I thought he blessed me with before. I’m angry it can’t be put back together. But all he wants is for me to share that anger with him. To allow him to show me where that comes from and what I can do with it.
Tomorrow will come and his mercies will be new. Sometimes you have to hide under the covers until the morning comes. And start again. One. Step. At. A. Time.
Romans 10:11: “As Scripture says, ‘Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.’”
What an awful, miserable, journey the death march of grief. To suffer the loss of love is to suffer the pain of death a hundred times a day: with every memory, hope, and dream. To suffer shame in grief, is to suffer the pain of death of the person whom you loved a hundred times a day: with every breath, every thought, every wandering moment. By the time the chaos of the mind slows, you are too far along for denial to protect you any longer. The anger and bargaining oscillate at a lower frequency; simple small electrical discharges in random moments throughout your day. Acceptance has visited you as if in a dream but remains an illusive apparition. Yet, now, there lies an opportunity to be still and to know.
In those moments, rather than pleading “why”, there is a chance to ask the real questions. Your conversations with God have been raw and exhaustive. You’ve shaken your fist, spit, screamed, cried, begged, praised, worshiped, fallen asleep, and woke up with sun every morning. And each morning his mercies were new. But even then, I had to ask: Can God see me through all of this shame?
So, I asked him, “God, can you see me through all of this shame?” “Can you even look upon me and recognize me?” I look in the mirror and I see the man that failed. I close my eyes and I witness my mistakes. I feel my emotions and they tell me I am a failure, beyond redemption. I am scared. Scared of what it is hard to say: loss, never having my person again, repeated failure, my reputation, my legacy…I’m scared that I am unredeemable. As I closed my eyes and shared my fears with God, I found myself in a beautiful green valley, surrounded by tall green hills, the fire burning off to the side, neatly maintained, and Jesus standing there with his arms held out. Our place, the safe space he created for me to see him and hear him where my thoughts quiet and my heart is open enough to receive.
God spoke. “I see you. I see only you. I made you from myself, a reflective piece of my body, innocent the day my spirit conceived of you. I named you before you were born. And it means ‘Bold’. I see a compassionate man, with passion to heal others. I see a love for my creation, a joy in the beauty of nature. I see only the man I created and the purpose I created him for. I cannot look upon your sin. I only see you in truth. Your untruths and your sins were forgiven and redemption was purchased, not earned, but given by my sacrifice. I feel your sadness, I feel your hurt, I feel your grief. But shame- I despised the shame I took upon myself at the cross, and it died with me, and I rose again so that you do not have to carry that burden. Your story is not over. I am the way, the truth, and the light. None of these can be obtained without the other. Follow me in truth and you will live in the light. Joy will fall upon your heart again. My kingdom you will serve. My peace I will give you beyond your own understanding. You serve the one true King and you are a jewel in my crown upon the throne I sit. Get up and start moving, I will be your strength in weakness. I see you.”
I cannot tell you how real my experience talking to God has been. That what he promised he has continued to fulfill faithfully. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, a once staunch diest who never doubted a creator or believed he was interested in intervening in my life. But as I stood up and moved, he consistently performed miracles in my life. I am still sad. I still hurt. I still grieve. And often I find my mind wandering, accumulating fear, whispering to me how disgusting of a failure I am. So, I return to that valley constantly, and he is always there, reminding me of my true identity.
“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.” — Stephen King
There are some things worse than death: loss of true love and separation from God. The pain exists in the space between the connection had and the seemingly endless future of connection lost. Like a ship lost in a storm with no sails and no rudder, we are at the mercy of the wind and waves, we drown below the surface of the deep waters, or succumb to the pounding rain above. One or both may never recover. One or both may. Only one is not reliant on the limited forgiveness, love, understanding of the will of man. That of the connection of God cannot be permanently deleted. God doesn’t walk away from us with his back turned because of hurt and anger. He cannot. He is part of us. And that connection is always a choice of our own, unlike a covenant between two fallible people.
I always thought that choice was a one time event. That forgiveness was available but not free. That it required some significant strength or quantity of faith and belief that had to be satisfactory to the cosmic police to get me into good standing. That confession meant saying “I am sorry”. None of that is found to be true when you are moments from being a corpse, with nothing that made you who you were remaining, your life in utter ruins. Sorry, did not connect me to God. Honesty did. And it wasn’t my strength, or quantity of faith, that led him to start picking up the millions of pieces. I know because I had no strength or faith remaining. I was on my final breathe when he stepped in to lift me up. Surrounded by angels. And even if we are still on life support, when he comes because we were honest to him and asked the right questions, we are at least no longer lying in the grave.
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Before the dawn of healing can arise, we must survive the traumatic wounds we suffered in our loss: the acute bleeding out, sudden broken bones, the shock, the pain. While the pain doesn’t subside with the healing, we can hope that every day has improved our chance of survival. We can accept that this really happened and wasn’t only a bad dream, waiting with longing to jump from your sleep. It happened. We were actually ejected through that car window at high speed, glass shattering, head on into a still standing tree. The past we had still smolders in mangled metal and leaking gas, rising smoke and dying flames, wrapped unrecognizable around it’s trunk. Our body lays only feet away. We can see our wreckage, but we cannot return to it. We cannot, despite our deepest wishes and most anxious desires, rewind the accident that occurred to the moments before the crash. We close our eyes, the enormity of the suffering washes over us, we wish for deliverance.
While the wounds begin to heal there are many things to keep in mind. The first, is that in our trauma we can persist in that state of fear and withdrawal, continually hunkered down in fear letting the suffering claim our every moment. That is absolutely a state we can remain in forever. The problem is that the wounds will heal in time, but on their own. And without the proper attention and care they will heal into deformities that will claim you disabled for the remainder of your time. The memory of this loss is debilitating enough, God knows. Why add further dysfunction and suffer the loss of quality of life?
The second thing to keep in mind, is that the wounds of grief, denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and all the emotions they bring with them may dissipate but the pain is going to be there no matter what choice you make. If you sit with the pain, it hurts. If you get up and try to rehabilitate, it is going to still hurt. The poison you choose does not take away the immediate pain. For all I know, nothing will. Pain is still a constant in my life. But the distraction of healing, the goals you set in recovery, the changes you make so you can experience the best of what is left in life- they can bring hope and at least a little more peace than sitting at the site of the wreckage hoping for what will never come.
Finally, remember that the suffering you feel while sitting beside your wreckage praying for that car to reverse back into a whole piece with all the survivors in tact is reliving the acute and sudden pain in a way that will only intensify the suffering you have been damned to endure in this life. The suffering you will feel while you heal, and heal well, will at least be suffering with progress. That accident, the loss that destroyed your life, has been recorded in time. It has already affected the timeline of everyone and everything. Let it be remembered, not relived.
“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one your book.” Psalms 56:8
This all starts with honesty. Ironic, as a lack of honesty often put us in our darkest hole. But even if your tragic loss was just an accident or the sadness of death, the start of a healing journey requires the same honesty. The truth about your pain, its existence, your role in it, the justice in it, the injustice of it, the inevitability that the change in your reality will never return to what you had once found your greatest peace in life. Pain cannot be hidden. Suffering cannot be avoided. The truth cannot be held captive. We fear that taking an honest look at the monster will hurt us beyond what we feel now. But the suffering of what we imagine only prolongs the suffering that must come.
We are going to have scars. We will never forget how we suffered. When Jesus was resurrected and showed himself to his followers, he did not come back from his suffering scar free. They were there. Evidence and memoriam of the pain that had to be endured in a long journey to healing.
“Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe.” John 20:27
Most often I find myself praying to forget. Despite them being my fondest memories in life, they are what cause me the most pain. Those treasured moments burn like hot coals in the morning and keep me from sleep. If only I could focus on the troubled times, the hard parts, the things that didn’t bring joy. If only the worse times with her weren’t better than the best times anywhere else. I would gladly have the operation to remove every memory from those years. To go on with a hole in my memory where all my hopes and dreams once lived. Unnoticed. Unaware.
Grief is a sign that you loved deeply. And the deeper the grief the greater you loved. The greater you loved the more painful this unnecessary torture of life’s experience will be. There is no way around it but to feel it. And there is nothing good about what you will feel. It is too big to bottle up and hide in the corner. It is to grande, too much, to deal with in quiet rooms alone. It is evidence you are capable of huge love. And therefore, at risk for greatest loss. When love is in front of you the risk is worth every bit. When it disappears, and you feel the pain of generational loss, the gamble seems unfair.
I grieve because my heart was honest about my love for a person.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider who pace is fast enough” Theodore Roosevelt
Though the luminary icon he was, Teddy Roosevelt, suffered great losses, as well as, great sadness. The history books are full of his wisdom, stories of adventures, and themes of perseverance and hard work. But the famous quote about outrunning the profound grief that plagued him was more a reflection of his hope to mitigate the pain than a success story of his escape from its prison. It did plague him his entire life, and it followed him into the mountains, down the rivers, into the plains, and at every turn in his personal and professional life. It led to feelings of insecurity, shame, and defeat superimposed onto his great victories. Depression is not a rider on a journey, it is the weather front we must ride through. We must ride through because there is no going back. The journey on the road of time has no turnarounds, no rest stops, only forks and bends, and ups and downs. What President Roosevelt illuminated in his honesty about his grief and depression, however, was the truth that the only real option is forward.
We lost what we loved the most. We woke up outside our world and watched it burn to the ground full of every hope and dream that we held so dear. The driving force behind every step, the reason for every morning, the joy in every night- gone at once. Depression didn’t show up behind us and jump on the horse, depression is space that exists outside our collapsed universe. It is the black hole behind the galaxy of your hopes and dreams. There is no outrunning the air you breath. It just is. And the depression that comes with grief is the air you will breath, like it or not, and we are assured to not.
In the initial moments of despair there is no way to find your bearings. There exist no compass for grief or this new world in which you find yourself living. Fear is unavoidable. It is scary. The air is heavy. It is dark. Chaos. During these initial moments, we have only a few limited choices in this regrettable life experience. First, we can try to stay put, roll up into a ball, stay in the moment, shelter in place. And we all do for a variable amount of time during the early moments of shock. But we might choose to stay right here hoping to be as near to that old world as possible. We accept our fate, so to speak, and wait for the monster to devour us. But the path of time will keep moving forward and every time you look up that old world, in its remnants of ashes and dust, will appear further and further away. You cannot stay near what was lost no matter how hard you try. Your reality is gone and what you replaced it with is not real- the world you will inhabit is the matrix of proximity to a world that no longer exists.
Second, you can exit this life. People hate talking about this, avoiding it and condemning it, but nearly everyone has found theirselves in a place of pain so great it seems like the most passionate and merciful self actionable option. It is not weakness. It is not a sin greater than any other. It is a moment in time where the human spirit has been so badly beaten that any spark of life has been snuffed out and no hope remains. And it demands compassion. An attempt to deter someone in such great pain that ending their life feels like the only option with the fear of eternal hell as punishment is useless. We are in hell. It feels eternal. And God has already taken what seems like great pleasure in punishing us here on earth. How many have called out to God before pulling the trigger. How many times has God stood in the way of that bullet?
We know that if we can get that rider back on their horse time will move forward and they will find enough hope to realize their belonging here on earth. We know that any persons absence in this world leaves a tear in the fabric of time that is severely underestimated by the suffered. And only love will help move them forward. And only moving forward will give them a perspective outside of the hell they are living in now and hope for a possible future. The person sitting in the ashes of who they were as a person is unrecognizable to themselves. They cannot see their value in this world. All hands on deck. Share your own spark of humanity with them until enough of their own light burns bright enough to see the path ahead. And if you, the reader, are in this place now- I love you. Truly. Do not underestimate what your absence would do to this world and to those that love you AND those who will love you. This option will fix nothing, it will only broaden the scorched earth that has befallen you, and pull others into the hell you will leave here on earth.
The only other option is to be the rider in the storm. That heavy dark cloud of black care is relentless, but the only road available is time, and the only way through is forward. Be the bison, lower your head, and walk head on into that storm. The most difficult thing in this moment is to love yourself. But you need that the most now. And you deserve it. As someone who has had great faith much of his life, and searched and believed in miracles, and still fears God and is certain of his existence- I do not see God in these moments. I don’t say that to suggest seeking God for strength is hopeless. On the contrary, I think it is often our only hope. But I say this because those who find themselves here should know that now is not the time for a dissertation on God’s involvement with mankind. It is survival.
I have no quote or scripture to end this essay today. I only have a heart for anyone hurting the hurt I have felt. The deep despair that is all consuming. The sensation of burning alive. Worse, watching the person you love burn alive and being unable to save them. No matter what, you have value and you belong in this world. You don’t see God? Look inside, there is a spark of creation there. You don’t see hope? You are the hope. You are loved.
Might I suggest that there was one bullet God did take for us- on the cross. And perhaps, though it’s hard to see now, the scene of that crucifixion will appear on the other side of this forsaken storm.
“Bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?” Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief
The hardest part of mourning my deepest loss, besides the loss of the person themself, is the compulsory crying out to God and quiet waiting for my life to come back together, only to wake up in the morning still crying and broken. Begging for repair, hoping to the point of actual belief it would happen, watching it grow further and further away.
Bargaining is a stage, or part, of grief that feels more reflexive than any other desperate emotion during the process- it flows out of us as an offering or a sacrifice in a plea for deliverance. It is that one piece of the grieving process that is most woven into every single other stage we may progress through, and what, I believe, keeps us the furthest away from acceptance. For what should I concern myself with the embrace of my new reality when I have the hope of a lifeline? Instead, we often find ourselves graveling at the foot of the person we lost, our God or higher power, or both.
“Bargaining is a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” Sabrina Romanoff, PSYD
The hopelessness of bargaining is like pissing into the wind and calling it rain. The problem with bargaining is that the alternative is to accept every single hope and dream that just died an unjust death and changed every inch of your reality will never be known again. To those of us who grieve, that would be a most certain death sentence. So, we tell ourselves we will change, we do change ourselves, we continue to do the little things around the house that our loved ones used to appreciate, we beg those around us, we offer deals to our accusers, and we offer God anything he so chooses and a lifetime of service if he will just do this one miracle. I went so far as to offer God my life for just one more year. Nothing. Then it was one more day. Still nothing. Then it was my life for the pain I was left with- obviously, nothing. Until there is nothing else, acceptance remains a step away.
Our friends and our family encourage us to trust in God’s promises, and rightfully so; they love us and have the same desire for hope and recovery that we do. We are certain those promises must equate to his willingness to give us back what we lost. And there, again, lies the difference between reality and expectations: disappointment. But this disappointment is a loss of what little hope we are able to conjure, a cosmic let down of cosmic scale. Even in this cycle of hope and hope lost, over and over again, I’d rather to have hoped in those moments to something greater than myself than to have lost it all without a fight. The underlying hope that will remain, that must go unseen amidst our pain, is the hope that bargaining leads to self-reflection, change, and a relationship with God. Each time, a little better than the days before. We can hope.
Can God perform a miracle and put what you lost back together? I don’t know. If your grieving death, no. How is a cold heart any different than the dead? A person’s free will is a death to God as a beatless heart is to a person. Can God give you the strength to carry on? I think so. I hope so. In these times, you know the weakness and inabilities of being human more acutely than any other person at any other stage in their life. And for some reason, in these times, we crave God’s strength. And we carry on. We hope there is something to that.
Bargain with hope. But remember we have nothing much to give in this bartering than what we have left inside of us. And eventually, our sight of the scope of the damage around us needs to become bigger and bigger in every effort to accept that nothing taken away will be given back the same. Hope as we know it now may not be the hope as we know it when it is all said and done.
“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is evidence of things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1
“All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
From the depths of utter despair sits the loneliest man beneath the constant storm of grief. Raging winds of desperate sadness. Pounding rain of despair. Crashing thunder of fear. Dripping wet with self-hatred, the cold discomfort is at least feeling something the hole in his heart cannot devour. If anything might assimilate the emotional experience of our grief with a physical representation, it must be that of a storm. The sudden rising nature, seething momentum of approach, relentless surging with intermittent moments of quiet reprieve and false hope before it’s wrath returns again. Yes, it stinks of the commonality with grief except it’s occasional beauty that can be appreciated from a covered porch or beneath a warm blanket on the couch. There is no such beauty in grief. No such sanctuary from it’s elements.
It sounds like anger, too. But anger is only a symptom of the storm- the clapping loud thunder that startles us from our seat and shakes the windows to our soul. It is the rising flood, an unwelcome guest in our home, the leaking ceiling that suddenly collapses beneath the weight. Anger. So much has been made of a misunderstood secondary emotion. Our panic and anxiety and fear, they all get mistaken for anger all of the time. But in grief, this anger comes from the deepest part of the soul. From the depths of whatever spark of creation existed before us. Primal. The gnashing of teeth, the tossing of the temple tables, the casting out of an arch angel. This anger is part of grief. And perhaps it is where you are at now but not where you will be tomorrow. The only certainty is that it will rise again.
But there are many lies about grief and anger. The truth that there are healthy ways to relieve it get’s muddled by every person with a keyboard and an opinion telling us that its a hot coal that burns us. Likening it to the drinking of poison, uselessness, dangerous- as if it were a damned choice. The only thing more maddening about anger is someone, in their comfy peaceful perch looking in from the outside, claiming we should drop our anger and join them out there in the real world where you no longer exist. You might as well be speaking from another dimension. Welcome are those few people who have felt such great grief before, who recognize your place, who see the storm around you and fear it as they once survived what they care not to endure again, and offer the advice of no advice. They offer encouragement. Feel your anger rise and understand it’s place. Anger has to emerge and find a target. You cannot keep it to yourself- and therein lies it’s danger.
No person deserves to feel the anger that torments you. So, choose your target wisely. It is natural to target God. Especially, when you choose to seek only him in your loss. Exactly what scripture leads you to believe will be your saving grace: a sole dependence on God. So you turn there in an act of obedience. And at no moment will you feel the silence of a closed door more than, very often, that moment you show up at his doorstep. Eventually, you move from: take this pain from me, to please stop letting them hurt me, to please stop hurting me, to…striking back.
But perhaps if we serve a God as big as every person hopes a creator will be, he can take our anger. Take our wild swings, our screaming, our crying, as we crash into him with the hope that he will take hold of us until the violence ceases and we are reduced to crying in his arms. Anger in grief is not a choice. Our target is. Exercise, art, writing, our pillow, our God…they are safe. The person who hurt us doesn’t need to be hurt back. The person we hurt doesn’t need more hurt. It will provide us with nothing but more emptiness. Living creatures are not an outlet, our pillow is. “Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32. “God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4. And the anger that comes in waves is a natural part of your mourning.
Everyone who grieves feels the sting of shame and judgement. Everyone who is familiar with grief feels anger. Grief is not a course of linear steps. It is a waxing and waning, a back and forth, the rise and the fall of the tides of the ocean of despair. Anger will rise and it will fall. It is not a reason to feel more shame. But it is a hammer that can destroy more of the reality around you. So, we must be careful where we swing. We must find something that doesn’t feel pain to absorb it’s energy, or someone big enough to know what to do with it. And no living creature is big enough to deserve absorbing our own anger. But God is. And so is your pillow.
“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief”. C.S. Lewis
