“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 same yawning. I keep on swallowing.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
A shocking truth about grief and mourning is that it is a chronic disease. That mourning resembles the time of day only as a heterograph, but better approximates eternity as a synonym, is undesired irony. The clinical picture is constant aching pain with fluctuating intensity described as waives of aching and stabbing pain, nausea, lightheadedness, and emotional lability. There is the inability to eat or sleep despite the oppressive weight of fatigue and sudden loss of motivation to get off the couch. And yet, we are expected to wake up each morning, go to work, take care of our family, maintain our health, concentrate amidst constant uncontrollable waves of memories that tear at the edges of our gaping wound of loss. This is the misery of grief, that in moments as time progresses we try to convince ourselves that we will be okay and that life will move on. We will string together, at first, a few minutes to hours of emotional reconciliation: only to, unprepared and unaware, be speared into pieces by a sudden fleeting memory. Sometimes it is triggered by something you shared together. Sometimes it arrives like a thief in the night to rob you of your will to live. There is no good mourning. There is no sensible mourning. Grief is the most painful human emotion, but is the least human experience.
Perhaps it feels the least human because it is the emotion that brings us closest to God. Or, as we often feel in the moment, the absence of God. Either way, whichever side of the spectrum you find yourself from one minute to the next in these volatile circumstances, it is when one cannot help but at least desire a divine presence. Help. Comfort. Peace. Deliverance. Forgiveness. Healing. Resurrection. Death. I am wary to offer the word blessing behind any intention of grief, for blessings are unwelcome in a cloud of darkness so thick. However, perhaps the mechanism behind the pain could be an eventual choice of blessing rather than immediate gratification of death. It is during the early moments of grief and mourning that we tend to underestimate our worth in this world the most. We made enough mistakes, don’t make that one.
There is one constant in our mourning during grief. A deep void, or absence, left in our entire being. By entire being I mean this sensation of a missing piece is experienced physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. As the primary result of the massive portion of our being ripped from our chest, we experience indescribable pain. I believe that is why denial, the first phase of grief we will soon explore, is the most logical and desperate starting point in a rush to self preserve. Our whole world construct, the entire reality of the life we created, has just collapsed into the ashes in a single moment. If our reality ceases to exist, so does our acceptance of the circumstances. We deny that reality exists, after all it no longer does as we conceived it, and we rush to fill that void desperate to stop the hurt.
I was told by someone the fastest way to get over someone is to get under another. What a desperate false hope. Adding a poison to an open wound. Taking the few remaining pieces of your soul and giving them away until the void covers you in entirety and you are unrecognizable as a person. I have felt, myself, the desire to use alcohol or drugs to manage the pain. A liars crutch. Adding more chaos to chaos. Pouring gasoline onto a raging fire. No, there is nothing that is big enough to fill that void, that undesired painful emptiness, except something greater than our human experience. There is nothing big enough to fill that void but God. And perhaps that is evident, at our lowest, when we first feel the unimaginable pain of loss and we rush to pull ourselves from the fire that we so often think, God help me. Perhaps it is the spark of the divine that is written in our very DNA that points us to the only real answer. Perhaps, when everyone you loved has turned away and all is lost, God is the only one left beside you. And perhaps it is because He is reaching for you, pulling you in, because this terror is real but so is He.
God is not the absence of mourning. “I dress the skies in darkness, covering them with clothes of mourning.” Isaiah 50:3. He is the hopeful presence among it and the pathway beyond it. “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy.” Psalms 30:11. There is no doubt that this pain will be remembered for a lifetime. But a life is both too short to remain in our darkest moments and too long to be defined by it. God understands this is the most severe and complex human emotion. He understands this pain is more than we can bear. Sometimes, the severity of the pain is unnecessary and if only the other person involved would look to God in the same way it could be healed and joyous. But their will is not yours and their needs are their own. Sometimes, the other person is no longer living and you are left to heal without the hope of their return. Whatever it is, however it came about, our first lifeline is that despite our greatest loss God will continue to write our story. Take comfort in that He is an author who only writes happy endings for those characters that choose His pages.
There is no good mourning. The pain that comes with grief will dissipate, but even now as I write, memories and fears of the person I lost come and go and feel as real and painful as the day it occurred. They may be dead, or they may have moved on, they may have patched their void with another person, place, or thing. But your hurt is uniquely yours. And it is going to show itself for a longtime to come. So our focus belongs not on the fears but on the only hope we have in the person of Jesus Christ. If we gain anything from the ashes of this fire it is that we are not our few mistakes. We are the children of God who have loved deeply, cared freely, grown immensely, and are of the highest value to the Kingdom of our creator. Why else would he be the only one there in our minds when we look up from our greatest tragedy.
The cost of love is grief. The cost of anything worth having is great. And when we realize that cost it is only natural to feel bankrupt because we don’t have the resources to manage this type of transaction. But that high cost of pain can be covered on our loving Father’s account. No strings attached. No interest. Paid in full before you were ever born.
Living Phoenix 