It arrives unbidden. It sneaks up on us. It oozes in and then rattles us when we didn’t even know there was an occasion. Grief comes not just at the graveyard but also in the ordinary routines of life: when a best friend moves away to another city; when the last child leaves for college; when the long-awaited retirement comes and suddenly the days loom with vacancy signs on the calendar. The heaviness of loss worms its way in when the doctor says: “no more pickleball for you.” Grief and horror wash over us while watching bombs fall on our spiritual ancestors who all call Abraham the father of our faith. Grief even occupies us when a youth pastor or a children’s minister resigns, and we are not yet sure who at the church knows our story so well that they can ask “How was your science fair project? Your dance recital? Your soccer game?”
Sometimes the mind tries to shove grief out of the picture. We tell each other that change is good and presents new opportunities. And that is true. But grief wants us to pay attention to it. Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth: Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” So talking out loud about what we have loved and lost is one way to process the grief. And listening to another share his/her story of loss also helps. We are not alone in this sadness.
Grief is not a box to be checked. I like what John Irving writes in that amazing novel “A Prayer for Owen Meany”:
“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.”
Grief is our way of gradually acknowledging what is missing. In Psalm 6 a song of grief rises to God. “God I am languishing…I drench my couch with weeping…The Lord has heard the sound of my weeping…The Lord accepts my prayer”. Our tears rise to God as prayers. And Jesus must have known this Psalm because “Jesus wept” when he lost a dear friend.
This fall, we look around and see the death of nature. The leaves lose their life and fall as a red carpet under our feet. As Halloween arrives on October 31 we turn to November 1, All Saints’ Day and remember all the loved ones we have lost. And we remember how they have changed us forever with their lingering love.
