God still speaks to us. Why is God silent when we need him most? He isn’t standing by. He isn’t teaching us something through silence. He isn’t sadistic. The answer is chaos. There is so much chaos. So much pain and loss that terror fills every part of us so that all we can hear is the echos of our screams. For the same reason we are unable to see someone’s love and commitment to us when it is right in front of us and we make choices that contradict our true identity- we don’t see that we are standing in our own way while God speaks. He speaks: through feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, words, visions… But if I am so surrounded and filled with FEAR, I cannot hear the voice in the storm. Fear of losing what we had forever. Fear that we already know it will never return to “normal”. Fear that what God will say we do not want to hear. Because only one thing, one single response, would do. And that is what we want most and most what we cannot have. And fear is so damn loud.
My vision comes to me in low resolution, like an old television, bunny ear antennae straining in different directions to pull in bits and pieces of the image across the screen. Christ kneeling in a garden. It’s dark. It’s dark all around in the trees that surround him with a single torch burning in a small clearing. He doesn’t look at me. I cannot see his face. I see his clothes. His robe- brown and white, his low resolution bare feet behind him but I cannot make out his toes. Odd that I look every time. I hear him praying quietly, desperately, and with fervor. He is sweating and it drips to the ground. I hear him praying. And I hear him say “come sit with me”. He doesn’t pause his prayer, he doesn’t turn to say anything to me, but I hear him.
This is where my journey with him often ends. He doesn’t speak any further wisdom to me. I have nothing profound to walk away with. Nothing to change my life back to whole. Only an invitation to kneel by him and suffer beside him. To witness the pain on his face as he prepares to lose everything he has known in life. His friends, his family, his hopes, his dreams, his comforts. Only an invitation to hear his desperate whispers. To be still. And to know.
“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
“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love”. George Eliot
As often as this is the case, that we save our deepest look into love at the agony of our parting, I can honestly say it was not always the case for me. I found myself laying next to her feeling so deep, my love for her, I knew she must feel it radiating off my skin. I prayed for her. I celebrated her. I never thought I deserved her. But even still, the depths of that unconditional love for another person that I experienced once in a lifetime did not even scratch a shallow surface of the depths revealed to me in the agony of loss. It is an eternal abyss. We stare long into the darkness until their face fades away and all we see is our reflection.
Of my anger and loss, the greatest of these is the hatred I carry for myself. For in the end, we have no person to blame but ourselves. The shocking dichotomy of knowing your heart for a person and the love you have and the monster you see in the mirror cannot be reconciled. You start to forget all the sacrifices you made, the acts of love, dedication and commitment and you start to see yourself solely in the few bad moments and mistakes. A yoke of regrets dropped heavy around your neck you plow the fields of shame. The memories you grow hurt. The footprints you leave behind share no company. The depths of love reveals how far it will go by taking your heart into the abyss as company. Falling.
It is hard to say goodbye. It is impossible. Acceptance that every hope and dream is gone will come. But saying goodbye to a person you truly loved only returns to you as an ever present haunting ghost. Who are we to know if that even ends with the grave or will persist through whatever eternal life awaits. Maybe it is saying goodbye over and over again, head down toward the plowing of the field, bearing our yoke, feeling the pain, until each goodbye is easier. Or perhaps, as long as we continue to plow and seed that field we will continue to harvest the pain of loss. Without something or someone yoked beside you, you will only turn in endless circles. If there is any hope that God can deliver us it is in the hope that he may take up that yoke beside you and help you move forward and through the field- for as long as it takes. But even then, if the creator cannot take away the pain of your loss, how can we expect to ever truly say goodbye. Our penance is continually surrendering to God and feeling the pain of the hole left in our chest.
This is the reality of life. That some will love little and go on to live relatively happy carefree lives through every loss. And that some will love great and never fully climb from the grave they dug for themselves. “I will never forget this pain” it says in Lamentations. Nor should we. If you are ever fortunate enough to remove that yoke of regrets, never be the fool who returns to that field of shame again. Remember how you suffered. The ghost that visits you. The pain you harvested for so long. I will never forget this pain. Or this shame. Or this sadness. Loneliness, grief, disappointment, anger, abandonment, heartache, hopelessness, exhaustion, hatred, fear. These are the deep waters on the other side of true love. Their depths can certainly drown you, and at best, leave you changed for the rest of your life.
If this sounds painful, it is. If you have lost and don’t understand the depth of this pain then you never truly loved. Avoidance is not a long-term cure for walking away from someone or losing someone. It is the root infection that will one day bring you right back to your knees. It is hard to say goodbye when you still feel every bit of your loss. But, as it has been said, unsaid goodbyes and those left unexplained are the most painful. So say goodbye every morning. And say goodbye every night. Do everything you can to stop seeding that field of shame.
“As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.” — Anna Brownell Jameson
As grief drags on, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, the constant torture of uninvited memories begins to fatigue the ounce of will that remains in a bleeding soul. The longing to not hurt anymore becomes the pain of an itch left unscratched around the nose. Pleading and begging, praying and crying, bargaining and changing: all fall on the deaf ears of a cold hearted person and a distant God. Anyone who says in those early moments of grief, God brings me peace, are suspect and questionable that they truly loved what they lost at all. They have not felt the burning iron piercing their side, day and night.
The literature and devotionals are thick with the grieving in the silence of a Creator. Who has ever successfully explained this? “God’s silence does not mean his absence”. How I loathe those words now. Does this mean he sits near and and speaks nothing while I suffer? Does he stand over me, towering above, not reaching out a single hand of comfort? His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. I understand. But still, how the longing grows from I want my person back to I want my God to be real in this moment. Eventually, we will break. Our will cannot remain forever beneath the weight of our grief. A crossroad has appeared and the options are narrowed. Which is the correct path, in my own personal suffering, I will not pretend to know. One path goes with God and the other we travel alone.
I see God as the option that offers me the most hope. And in these moments, it is hope that is our rarest commodity. A precious metal, water in the desert, rumor of a cure for a horrid disease. If God is real, then he has not judged me for questioning him. He has not hurt me for throwing my punches in his direction. It seems, on the contrary, my punishment comes only when I direct my frustration on myself or others. Daniel wrestled with God. How we adore that simple quote. Perhaps, we do not understand the full weight of what is meant by “wrestle with God”. From the painful words he cast at his Lord it was not the playful tussle of a father and son. It was an angry child on the playground, hurt so badly he did not care the consequences of lashing out at something bigger than him. And yet, that was part of his pursuit of God. It was him becoming, and being, a “man after God’s own heart”.
“Oh Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God! Restore the sparkle in my eyes, or I will die.” Psalms 13: 1-3. Or I will die…does that speak to the grieving heart?
That is David sitting at a crossroad at the very bottom of life. That is David declaring he doesn’t understand, that he is in great pain, that he reaches out and nothing is reaching back. Sound familiar? But it is also his declaration that if there is to be any hope, in his hopeless life, it cannot come from anywhere but God. David cheated on his wife. He committed murder. And he is regarded as the epitome of the kind, loving, Godly, servant. He had shame. He had guilt. He felt as though he lost everything he had to live for. He had depression. He had profound sadness. He had anger. He grieved. And as he cast all of those emotions onto God, I imagine he finally fell exhausted with no will remaining but to eventually be picked up and carried by God to higher ground. And that gives us something to hope for.
Hope still eludes me nearly every day. So much so, that I find myself longing for it, dreaming of it, willing to cut off my own decaying flesh to obtain it. Why? I do not know. I just know that I could use someone holding me close and walking with me, and no person will ever do the way they did again. So, I need something more, something bigger, something cosmic. I need a God that is willing to hear me, to tolerate me, to see me. David sang praises again after surviving the worse life had to throw at him. I suppose, I want that, too. For myself, and also for you. And while acceptance may remain in the periphery, this is a step in the right direction.
“‘Hope’ is a the thing with feathers-” by Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers- That perches in the soul- And sings the tune without words- And never stops- at all- And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard- And sore must be the storm- That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm- I’ve heard it in the chillest land- And on the strangest Sea- Yet- never- in Extremity, It asked a crumb- of me.
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.
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
The haunting thick fog of depression that settles in through the cracks of our grief and loss and persists well beyond its welcome holds a horrific grasp upon our mourning. If you are looking for a more cheerful and motivating take on the suffering of this Black Care, today is not the day. Perhaps, tomorrow, a more helpful and hopeful essay on the rise from its clutches will evolve. But depression, the most massive stone that falls upon our hearts, mandates that an honest description precedes prescription. And for all its weight and all it’s persistence, there is much to say.
There is a cold and quiet shock after loss, that moment when you sit, somehow still inside yourself, while you shake in terror somewhere far outside your body. Every small background noise, once unnoticed, falls deafening upon your ears. Even your anatomy seems to shift in fluid form, melting: stomach into throat, tongue to roof of mouth, heart toward intestines, heartbeat into your eardrums, and eyes somewhere across the room watching. The amorphous mess you are in the suddenness of loss.
While every other emotional stage of grief seems to come and go, depression settles down upon you and fills your pores like smoke. When does bereavement transition into depression? Who cares- besides your therapist. These early moments, while the mind buzzes and ceases it usefulness, is when depression takes the opportunity to fill in all of the gaps in your shattered reality. While you deny, rage in anger, and bargain for your life back, distracted by the chaos, those blue devils are settling in for a long and lonely stay. Waves of every form of grief come and go from your shore, but this great sadness has anchored itself mercilessly to your soul.
As the shock slowly fades, and the flames calm to embers and ash, the cold empty version of you will be all that remains. How long must we suffer at this great affliction? Taste has abandoned your tongue, swallowing and deep breath become a conscious effort, focus will evade you at every routine task. Depression never brought a single answer, but a thousand questions. How? How can one person have the power to wreck my existence, my entire human experience? Why? Why would a loving God stand-by in our greatest time of need? Who? Who have I become in instant unawareness? When? When will this empty pain become tolerable? What? What will become of this broken heart? Job asked a thousand questions. But we don’t suffer as Job. For in his story, God finally answered, and restoration was paid for his obedience. No, our depression gathers at the corners of our lips as jealous anger toward Job and his loving God. What is depression? It is everything. It is you now. It is the eternal echo of the hammer against anvil reverberating off the canyon walls. It is embedded into your DNA to pass on for generations.
Nobody tells you that the depression that overlies our grief is a hungry beast. We feed it out of desperation, at first. The stage of mistakes- looking for a quick fix in another person, place, or thing. Later we make sacrifices to it- all things that once brought us joy. But hungry still we face it’s gaping fangs to wonder what might satiate this creature. Wise and shifty, depression never speaks, it introduces thoughts and feelings using your own voice. When it bears down upon us in this very moment and we hear those familiar words- “what I, Depression, crave to consume is you”- it is time to resist. With every last bit of self. With every hope you still might have in God. Resist. Depression doesn’t deserve your life. Somewhere you are something more than this beast upon you. Fight. Keep going through hell. One step at a time.
The very real fear is that in our grief we will become our depression. A cancer consuming every healthy cell. “[b]ecause wherever I sat- on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar). It is an ever present air that we breath. It fits like heavy wet clothing. It is holes in your socks on a cold winter night. How do we resist it becoming our identity and following us to a welcomed grave? I don’t know. All I know is that what eventually feels the best is throwing everything back at it- striking that beast in the mouth. We have little control in this new world of grief. Giving up and letting depression define us is one more loss that we, perhaps, cannot afford. Look to the literature, the historical figures who suffered, your family, your God. Look back at that happy person you were before the Black Dog grabbed him by the throat. You owe him something. He has suffered more than he deserved.
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.” Rene Daumal
Once, while married, happy, and safe, I lived my entire day for the promise of bedtime. That glorious moment when you gather the bedside waters, vitamins, and books. Fan blowing across the bed, dogs curled up, and your partner in her glasses reading, you feel your day melt away as you crawl beneath the comforter between soft clean sheets. I still remember how my heart rate would slow, her hair in my face, rubbing feet as an early but welcomed sleep would fall in a quiet dark room. A fresh morning would await. Enter the shock of grief: the grim serial killer of restorative rest. It isn’t merely the loneliness of the bed that once was filled with a covenant of love, it is the intrusive and unwelcome memories like ghosts haunting throughout the night. Sleep will allude you now, quiet will haunt, and rest will be a thing of the past like a fading childhood memory that you are unsure if you experienced first hand or simply heard the story so many times it seems like it was at some point real. Those nights of tormented sleep, hungover mornings despite sobriety, are when we notice the violence of the storm the most intensely.
It is not only the early days of our grieving that plague our sleep. This sick disease goes on for months- sometimes years. God’s love is certainly not evident that one person can sleep soundly with their choices while the other one writhes in pain month after month. No more than the question of the ones we love who died whereabouts in the comfort of an afterlife. For that requires a little more blind faith than the miracles we will witness here on earth, or so it seems. None-the-less, we were designed to persist. And we owe the world our persistence. So we move on like the grittiest of endurance athletes. If only grit alone would bear our trials and deliver us to the other side of this horrific storm. What to do when our perseverance lets us down, and it will, and we fall back toward our last camp on Grief Mountain?
Summits and safe descents are made on the planning and timing of the weather windows in our storms. With grief, we sit longer, we think longer and deeper, we find ourselves snowed in and enclosed from the outside elements. Everything we do to prepare for that short break in the weather makes the difference in our progress up and down the mountain. Who can command the storms and quiet the wind? To whom shall we call out when the waves threaten to overturn our boat?
“The disciples went and woke him up, shouting, Lord save us! We are going to drown. Jesus responded, why are you afraid? You have so little faith! Then he got up and rebuked the wind and waves, and suddenly there was a great calm.” Matthew 8:25-26
So often, in our most painful time, it seems that Jesus sleeps while we hold onto the boat for dear life. We scream out for him to awake and rebuke the wind and the waves. The grit we have is there to help us hold on while we await his awakening and take command of our storm. And for every break in the weather, every time God quiets the rain, we move further to the back of the boat where one day, we hope, we might find rest beside him.
We are driven to the summit because we have seen it before. Though it’s beauty evades our eyes, it’s memory lives on in our hearts. We prepare for that window in the weather: we pray, eat, clean up our lives, slowly grow accustomed to the pain of the cold wind, in-by-inch, until the storm ceases and we emerge ready to climb. Knowing with every step the weather will again change, but stronger now because we prepared a little more with each passing storm.
“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
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. … Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
In the opening of the brilliant novel, The Goldfinch, by the literary genius, Donna Tart, the young Theo Decker finds himself in a tragic and sudden transition from the safety and freedom of a loving mother to the literal and figurative aftermath of an explosion in an art museum: left confused, surrounded by the rubble of walls, ceiling tiles, dust, smoke, and body parts he is thrust into a lifelong journey through grief. Walking into the museum that day his mind never ventured to imagine life without his mother. Why would it? As he wandered and worried about the trouble he had caused in school and the disappointment and anger his mother may have, his thoughts never led him to believe at any moment it would be his last opportunity to say good-bye, or I love you, or I’m sorry. He couldn’t imagine the guilt of leading his mother into that museum or the pain of losing her. For days he sat in the apartment certain the phone would ring and it would be her, she would walk through the door with dinner, seeing her, hearing her, smelling her. First a constant sea of denial followed by waves of remitting and recurring denial, anger, sadness, shock…always an underlying fear.
Denial is not a large body of water. It’s not even fluid. It is the small raft your mind strands you upon in the midst of terror and loss of reality for the sake of survival. The edges of that raft, it’s borders and size, are simply determined by what your mind can handle in the moment. An emotional buffer between the safety of your previous reality and the new reality of loss and pain. In the aftermath of tragedy everything slows down to a survivable pace- the silence of the house, the growing pile of dishes in the sink, the sounds of the settling house and the clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick, tick… We move slowly, we breath slowly, we wait for that person to call, walk through the door, seeing them, hearing them, smelling them.
That is denial. A slowing of the pace of reality: the brains desperate attempt to restrict how quickly the painful realizations of your new life are absorbed, like a nozzle on a firehose. But there is no permanent comfort on this small raft. While it may protect us in those early days, to stay here and dine on the lotus flower of Calypso’s island is to damn yourself to a life of pain and sadness that will live forever beneath the surface, giving way to an even greater loss- our souls.
In the movie, Braveheart, William Wallace is visited by his deceased wife, the love of his life, during a dream. There is something sad, sweet, and very real how he begs for her to remain when he says: “I don’t want to wake. I want to stay here with you.” Her reply is what God is telling us softly with each growing day: “And I want to stay here with you. But you must wake up.” His reality is no longer there with her and his journey must go on, he must fight, fueled by her memory but not remaining there, defenseless, within it’s company.
I believe C.S. Lewis was right, and that his gutted portrayal of his grief is amongst the greatest in literary history, when he said don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion, what was taken away will never be given back. That is the underlying etiology of the fear beneath our guilt and grief and why we find ourselves in denial. We don’t want to wake up. We don’t want to say goodbye. The only quiet glimpse of consolation during this period of loss is the silent image of the cross, the hope in a Savior, a garden of prayer. And all of those things are still fleeting for some great time. Waves of consolation broken on the rocks of a sudden memory. But if you are to step off that raft and try to fight, to continue your journey, it will be those moments of His consolation that may sustain you the most. You will never rid yourself of the pain. You are hurting even when you deny it exists. You will hurt when you open your eyes and rummage through the pieces, too. That pain, if you were genuine in your love, will remain: you cannot rid yourself of it, you must change your relationship with it.
“I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.” Lamentations 3:20. “Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion because of the greatness of his unfailing love.” Lamentations 3:32
When you are ready to look around at your new reality, start by sitting on the edge of the raft with your feet in the water. Feel each emotional current pulling and pushing. And ask God to be with you before you are submerged and swimming toward the shore. Ask him to remind you that your feet will stand on solid ground again. Move. Stroke. Fight. And breath.
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Carl Jung
Before we start this journey together regarding surviving our loss and dissecting the evolution of grief, it is necessary to first take the most difficult step: identify exactly what we are grieving. Grief isn’t a vague process that proceeds through natural stages on its own, and if we do not say out loud what we lost and what we mourn then we will become stuck in any particular phase of grief; a breeding ground for what you might call “past trauma” that one day wreaks havoc on the future. And since this step is so important and perhaps the most difficult, and because in writing it I feel like a bit of the pot calling the kettle black…I’ll share my own pain biopsy in hopes that some vulnerability is both therapeutic and beneficial to someone out there somewhere, as well as, myself.
Do not be surprised to find that taking ownership of your own mistakes and faults, as well as identifying the hurt you caused, may be easier than identifying the non-organic specific losses and hurt. Unless your loss is due to a death, we have blame to accept. And we will. The journey we took to the bottom, however, led us to care so little for ourselves that it made self-judgement and conviction much easier than acknowledging the broken promises or physical losses that we now mourn. But if you are going to grieve and have a hope of healing, admit what you are grieving- a step in the right direction of honesty is being honest with yourself. Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain”, and “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The pathology of our pain and nearly every stumble we have ever faced is rooted in fear. The most amazing humans have made the most horrible mistakes. And those who look amazing without fault have only hid them well and acknowledged them less. It is much easier to assume a persons identity with their worse moments while seeing our own identity as our greatest attributes. In other words, our assumption of a persons identity is often dishonest and our assumption of our self identity is often honest. That is until you find yourself in the ashes and all you are able to see is all of your ugly parts. The entire system flips on its head along with every other thing in your life. Self loathing. Self distrust. Self hatred. And therefore, flows the ease of accepting your mistakes and the difficulty in naming the things you are grieving most.
Two things come to mind that lead to painful grief. One is the loss of something vital to you. Death of a love one. Separation and divorce of your person. A prodigal child. You have no control of any part of the loss. You cannot bring someone back to life. You cannot make someone love you. You cannot change a persons will to make bad choices. The other is the loss of something that confirms your insecurity. Abandonment. Distrust. Feeling unsafe. All of the insecurities. And a successful pain biopsy must address both types. Both are often tied together. You not only lose your spouse or your child, you lose every hope and dream woven into the fabric of your previous reality. And that is exactly why it hurts so badly, for so long, and why we get stuck in the worse of it.
For example, the severity of my pain seemed obvious to me at first. I lost the love of my life. Similar to having an argument, causing them emotional pain, and then moments later they die in an accident- you never see them again, you never get to say you are sorry, you never get the chance to rebuild what was broken into something greater and more indestructible. Only in this case (and thank God, of course), it wasn’t an accident. And while those wounds remained open the person who I loved the most in this world was out there moving on and healing without me- her sworn best friend, husband, safe place- replaced with worse friend, ex-husband, unsafe person. When the person you love more than any human in your lifetime disappears you feel like you are perpetually stuck in the initial moments after the fall when the wind has been knocked out of you- gasping for breath, chest tight, panic, fear. I was mourning my greatest loss. A person. And that part will stay with you forever. But that can become more generalized with time and confusing and the pain seems to worsen instead of easing and become manageable. The biopsy only included the largest lesion. And with that lesion were the metastasis that turned up at every dark corner of my heart. I not only mourned a person. I grieved deeply for our time. Early mornings, dinners after work, random texts, sending flowers, planning our weekends, cuddling on the couch, reading in bed and hearing her breath and feeling her cold feet. The small things began to add up to seemingly infinite losses. Sitting in the bathroom while she showered and vented about her day, dinners with her family, walking the dogs, jump scares and pranks, teamwork, dancing in the kitchen, sharing a song. But it didn’t end with the direct losses that shunted off of the experiences with the person. It included our future. The dream and planning to bring a child into the world. I mourn the loss of child that will never be born. Finding our “forever home”. Dreaming of pets and farm animals. Dreams of travels and adventures. And I mourned my final day, just before my final breath, when she would hold my hand and say “we did good”. I mourned promises lost and broken, of lifetime together, and for better or worse and sickness and in health. And after weeks of identifying those individual things we grieve, only then can we begin to say goodbye and hope for healing.
There is no recipe to feel better. And our greatest misconception is that time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. In fact it makes them worse. Every trauma you carry with you was time not healing a wound. Stuck in the cycle of grief. Intention, steps forward, feeling the pain, hard work, praying, and the mercy of God are the only hope we have of healing any wound. A pain biopsy is painful. But the only way through loss and grief is the eye of the storm. You must travel directly through the storm, walk through hell, to get to safer ground. There was a point in the movie, The Odyssey, that resonated deeply with me in regards to this very point when Calypso is seeing Odysseus off on his makeshift raft heading home over uncharted waters. What she says describes what we must eventually face on our journey if we want to get home. And it is a lesson that an attempt to control every outcome in the pit of despair will only prolong your suffering.
“You are a man that likes to control your fate. But this time you can’t. You must give yourself to the storm. Give yourself to Poseidon. Take your punishment.”
A pain biopsy is painful but necessary. You don’t just grieve, you grieve the loss of many specific things. And failing to identify them and not allowing yourself to feel the pain will lead to getting stuck. And those demons will show themselves again in many forms years down the road. So, take a deep breath, do an inventory, hold on tight, and biopsy.
