Good Grief
(from Memphis Friends Newsletter, September 2009)
When Susan’s mother, Jean, lived near us for the last year and a half of her life, every week we’d take her out to eat and she always ordered shrimp and a Manhattan Up with no cherry. To this day we can’t eat shrimp without thinking of Jean. Sometimes the thoughts are happy; sometimes melancholy.
At a recent lecture/discussion on grief I was asked to consider that the work of grief does not end but has this very quality of remembering for the rest of our lives. The speaker, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, who has lost a child, suggested that we do not “work through” grief in the sense of accepting the loss and moving on. Instead, we remember over and over again in ways that remind us that the love we felt for that person never dies. In fact, it has a way of deepening the more we remember. It is as though love is more evident to us in the absence of the loved one.
More importantly, the more we remember those whom we love so deeply, the more we experience a paradox of God’s love. We most profoundly feel the need for the love of God when we feel its absence most. Anne Lamott (author of Traveling Mercies, Grace, and other books on faith) says that the most fundamental prayer we have is “Help me! Help me! Help me!” We breathe that prayer when help seems most absent, when hurt is most dominant, when grief is deepest—when the God that we think would keep us from suffering isn’t doing very well.
Theologian Paul Tillich said that when this God who is supposed to be on our side isn’t working anymore, there is a God above God that rises up and helps us. But this help isn’t tangible like some preachers promise. (“Give to our church and God will bless you.”) Instead, it is experienced in much the way messages were conveyed in a recent First Day worship: when the plan goes wrong, let it be, and a new and better way will open. Tillich said that it is as though a voice speaks to us and says, “You are accepted by something you cannot name.” In response, you are not required to do anything, think anything, believe anything, but only to accept acceptance.
I once saw my dog hit and killed on the highway beside me. Spontaneously I fell to my knees, lifted my arms, and shouted, “No!” Later, struck by this expressive pose, I realized that I had expressed my love for that dog in that exclamation. In the “No!” I had talked with the God of love, not the God that was supposed to protect my dog from harm. The God that lets our lives be messed up is a constant disappointment, but there is a God of love that rises out of the ashes.
Though we fall apart when we feel deep grief, grief puts us back together by leading us to the very thing we want to avoid—remembering. The curse of painful memories help us affirm the beauty of the love we felt and still feel.
Once, trying to speak about my grief upon the death of beloved neighbor, I choked up, and couldn’t say but one thing, “I’m glad I let myself love him.” I wasn’t even sure why I would say that when it hurt so badly, but I did. Then someone reminded me, “To love someone is to open an unhealable wound.” Which is true, I think; but I’m still glad I love.
Ron McDonald