Good Grief

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 27, 2015

What are some of the ways people experience and express grief? What causes grief? How can we support those we love when they are grieving?

We have had a lot of loss in the congregation this year. Let’s talk about the grief that comes with loss. Grief is a reflection of the loss of a connection. We feel connection to our work, our homes, our animal companions, our senses, our possessions, so we feel grief when we lose a job which was part of our identity, a job we’d had high hopes for. We feel grief when our homes are torn or damaged, when we have to leave a place we loved. We have experienced the loss of a beloved animal who was a member of the family. Some studies have shown that people love some pets almost as much as they love their partners and spouses. In a book I read, one social scientist asked her husband whether he would choose her or his dog that he called his soul mate. He said “please don’t make me think about that.” We feel grief as age or accident take away parts of our physicality – we can’t run any more or use our hands, we can’t see or hear the way we used to, we can’t trust that our muscles will do what we ask of them. The griefs that are most supported by our culture are those at the loss of connection with loved people.

In most cultures there are ways to make mourning visible. Mourning is what you see on the outside, the expression of a grief inside. In some cultures you wear black so people will know what situation you’re in. In Victorian times the people who could afford it wore black for a time, then purple or gray to signify “half-mourning,” before dressing in bright colors again. Our culture is a “move on” culture, a “get over it” culture. We don’t have permission to let ourselves be sad, to isolate ourselves to heal. We are encouraged to “get out there” and be around people. Sometimes folks will talk about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They’ll check to see whether you are moving through them competently. No one tells you that you move through them in a wild curlicue. Some you will visit three or fourteen times, others will make combinations like anger and denial, so you’re mad, but you insist it’s got nothing to do with your grief. One of the effects of grief I don’t see many people talk about is the grief ADD I’ve noticed. When you’re going through a divorce or another terrible loss, you have more accidents – you have to drive carefully. It’s hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time, and you tend to grind your teeth. You might worry that you’re not grieving right. People might mutter that you haven’t cried enough, that you’re crying too much, that you were laughing at the funeral reception, that you shouldn’t get married so close to the death of your father, that you made too much of a display of sorrow – it was unseemly, that you don’t seem sad enough or you seem too sad. Mourning is what people see on the outside. There is no way to know what someone’s grief is, because it’s on the inside. Folks might say “how can you still be down about the loss of your dog, just get another one and move on,” but they don’t know this is the companion who loved you unconditionally through your fight with cancer or the death of your parents, or through the awful divorce and they were your soul friend. We even tend to compare our griefs to others’ , we say we’re sad, but look at the family down the street who lost their toddler, and your mom was in her eighties and had a full rich life…. There is no point in comparing griefs. Your grief is your grief. Your pain is your pain. It visits when it wants to. When my mother died I was 23, getting ready to get married. I left from the funeral to go meet Mark’s parents. I couldn’t really feel anything but hungry. And mad. I didn’t cry much. My mom had been sick for five years, and I wondered if I had grieved already. Years later my best friend in SC moved to FL, and I fell apart. I cried every day, grieved like my heart was breaking. My life seemed to crumble. I think that was my mother-grief, triggered by this new loss. Grief doesn’t pay attention to time limits. It comes down when it wants to.

“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass – if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it’s okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”
– Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time – the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes – when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever – there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
– John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

There is pain and there is suffering. People say “Pain is inevitable, and suffering is optional,” but that sounds cruel to me. I know what they mean. Pain comes from the event and suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. Someone we love dies in the hospital, and there is pain, but suffering afterward comes from the story that there was more we should have done, that we weren’t there the moment they drew their last breath, that the last words we had with them before the accident were angry words, that we did all the patient care and our siblings didn’t do their share, so they didn’t care as much as we did. Suffering comes from telling the stories that our anger at the person for the way they died is unwarranted, that it makes us a bad person. We tell awful stories sometimes, and create a lot of unnecessary suffering for ourselves and the people around us. We just don’t know any better, and it’s hard to just sit with the pain and not make stories around it. There is a lot of guilt in grief: things we said or didn’t say, things we wish had happened, chances for reconciliation that weren’t taken. Sometimes the loss of a connection with someone with whom we had issues is hard because we lose the chance to fix the relationship. We also lose the dream of the ideal mother or father we were still somehow holding on to in our secret heart. There is fear in grief too. Who will we be without this person? Without this job? Without our good hearing? Who will we be with this illness which is taking our body? What will happen? What did we do to make it happen? Other people’s fears get all over us too as they struggle to figure out how not to lose their partner or their child in this same way. We feel blamed and shamed and evaluated and found wanting.

“Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.”
– Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, The 13th Sign

Our culture has so much puritanism in its roots. The puritans thought that some of us were blessed. That the way you could tell who was blessed was by seeing who had health, beauty and money. If the rich were blessed, then by corollary the poor were unblessed. The sick were unblessed. That must mean they had done something wrong, they were shamed by their lack of blessing. So there is shame in loss, shame in illness, shame in grief at times. How do we get over it? We don’t. The more things you’ve gone through, the more gnarled and scarred you are. That is nature. We are like trees that have endured many storms, had branches break off, been stripped of leaves and bark and had to regrow until we each have our own shape and texture. The searing pain of loss lets up, and we begin to remember with more love and less hurt. The scars are always there, though. We wouldn’t really want them not to be.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“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.”
– Anne Lamott

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.”
– Colette

“It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you’ve accepted that someone is out of your life, that you’ve grieved and it’s over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like you’ve lost that person all over again.”
– Rachel Hawkins, Demonglass

“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.”
– Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass

“You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.”
– Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections

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