Preface: This community has experienced many kinds of loss over the last year: deaths of spouses, parents, siblings, children and friends; miscarriages, layoffs, collisions, and diseases,. Each loss brings pain. Each loss changes our lives in some way, sometimes drastically, sometimes minimally. In many cases the appropriate response would be grief, but grief is little honored in our culture. Between not wanting to appear weak and not wanting to embarrass others, we give ourselves short shrift when it comes to processing the pain of loss.
We experience many kinds of loss, but this morning we will speak primarily about loss through death. I remember one widow I visited a few days after the death of her husband of almost 60 years. At one point in our conversation she sobbed, once. Then she said, “Now that that’s out of the way, what were we talking about?” She couldn’t give herself permission to grieve.
She was not unique. I also remember a family of born again Christians I visited when I was serving as a hospital chaplain. They were so convinced that their loved one had moved on to a better existence that they were full of praise and high spirits. Faith prevailed, at least temporarily, over feeling. I wasn’t able to keep in touch with them, so I don’t know if they were able to maintain that elation, but my guess is that after a few days they began to feel the many dimensions of loss and that their faith had to mature. Another pious Christian woman I visited had severe heart problems. At my first visit, she lectured me, delivered a sermon really, about putting on the full armor of God when facing life’s trials. Two weeks later she was still in the hospital and had, like David in Saul’s armor, found it too heavy to be helpful. Righteousness was no aid to health. She was being tutored in submission as she tried to grope her way out of depression.
Most of us have a hard time letting ourselves feel the pain of grief. We don’t give ourselves permission. Grieving is a natural process, which our bodies know, but we usually cut ourselves off from that healing knowledge. We plug on. We stifle our grief. In effect, we never clean the wound. But if we clamp down on such significant and intense emotion, what will we ever allow ourselves to feel in the future?
Shock – Rejecting the Reality of the Loss
Death of a Friend, by Witter Bynner
I had not known, in friendly life attached,
That death cleaves suddenly yet leaves two legs
That both still bear their weight, two legs still matched
And walking still among the ashen dregs.
I had not known that the body bore so much,
That so bereaved it still would walk and thrive:
I had not known that, with no sense of touch,
An individual could stay alive.
The first natural response to the loss of someone we love or of something important to us is shock. We shut down, we go numb. Like Lot’s wife, we turn to salt. This is actually a way of protecting ourselves from experiencing too much at one time. I’ve mentioned before that on the day I was told that I had an aggressive cancer on the side of my head and that I would have to have an operation that would cost me my ear, I came within inches of having an accident four times as I drove home. I was just numb. I shouldn’t have been driving and wasn’t even self-aware enough to know it.
Parenthetically, it’s just at this time of emotional anesthesia that our culture asks us to make important decisions. At the time we are most vulnerable, we are asked to order caskets, burial plots, funeral services – an excellent reason to make those plans in advance.
During this time of numbness and shock we find ourselves obsessing about the pain we are experiencing: My loved one has died. It hurts me deeply. Part of my life has been taken from me. I don’t know what to do. MY – ME – I. As Rabbi Earl Grollman says, these are the pronouns of grief. All our thoughts center on what has happened to us. We may even feel embarrassed by this self-absorption, but it is a part of the natural process. If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? We need to give ourselves permission to take the lead role in our own drama for a few days, until feelings begin to come back and we discover that we are angry or that we find the situation we are in so unreal that we decide not to believe in it.
Response: Peace I Ask of Thee, O River - words projected on wall
Protest – Focusing elsewhere, to avoid feeling the pain of grief
Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,--
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave.
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
We refuse to be reconciled to this indignity. So we change the pronouns of grief from I- Me-My to They. We become angry at the doctors, the EMTs who responded to our 911 call, the hospital staff. They did not do enough. They didn’t try all the remedies at their command. Or they were too slow in arriving, missed the diagnosis, didn’t care enough.
We are angry at the funeral director, the priest or the minister, God.
We are angry at our loved one who has died and left us alone. She didn’t take care of herself. He put off seeing a doctor. She wouldn’t take her medications. He died and left me alone.
If our loved one has not yet died but is very close to death, anticipatory grieving can lead us to place our faith in alterative therapies that the medical establishment does not condone. It can lead us, like Terry Schiavo’s parents, to insist that life support continue long after it assists recovery. Anything that might put off the finality of her dying.
At the same time, we use gentle words to describe what has happened. – she has departed, passed away, gone over; he was called home. He expired. We protect ourselves from the finality of saying, she died. We may even keep his room exactly as it was before, the clothes on hangers in the closet, personal effects on shelves and bureaus, as though this whole experience was a bad dream and he will come through that door any moment. The phone rings and we think, that’s probably her. And we idealize the person we have lost. He was a fine person, gentle, personable, dedicated to family, never raised his voice, a good husband and an excellent father. All the peccadillos and deviancies are washed away in a flood of praise. We have lost a paragon, so our pain may be that much more vivid, as also the culpability of those who let him slip away.
Again, this is a normal way of responding to loss. It may not be reasonable, but death is not reasonable. The whole experience feels surreal. We wash our hands of reality.
Response: Peace I Ask of Thee, O River
Disorganization – All at sea in an environment from which the deceased is missing
From A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except for my job – where the machine seems to run much as usual – I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions – something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.
I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother’s death, when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are...
In a few weeks the anger turns to despondency. Nothing seems certain. We can make no plans. We may not even have enough energy to get out of bed . We stop eating, or eat way too much because it’s the one thing we can still enjoy. We may develop physical symptoms – nausea, palpitations, dry mouth, rashes, back pain, insomnia. We are certain that we have the same malady that took our loved one from us, or that we will have a similar mishap.
We cry easily. Almost anything will trigger tears – a song, a turn of phrase, a kindly remark by a stranger, a dog romping in the park, a child on a swing – there are so many reminders of the one we have lost, and we respond to each one with tears. Or guilt – for we have once again changed the pronouns of grief. We no longer blame others, we are instead looking at the quality of our relating and seeing all the times and places we might have handled it better.
Holidays and anniversaries are larded with intense emotions and we need to resist the temptation to armor ourselves against them. We are finally processing our feelings. If we can let these emotions flow, give them permission, then we will gradually ease the pain away from each of the triggers. The first encounter brought tears, the second may bring a clenching of the stomach, but the third may be washed clean of intensity.
But if we find the emotions too threatening, we may turn to drugs or alcohol for relief, replacing human dependency with chemical dependency. Or we may start thinking about joining the one we have lost, contemplating suicide. This is the time in the grieving process when we need courage most, courage to face the tears and the guilt. We have come to the edge of the abyss. What do we do next? If we flee, we will discover that the abyss keeps looming up in front of us. If we face it with courage, we discover that we the dread we had felt loses its power to daunt us.
Response: Peace I Ask of Thee, O River
Reorganization – Reinvesting our emotional energy
from In a Café, by Mary Lavin
It was the time of day at which she used to meet Richard. Oh, Richard! she cried, almost out loud, as she walked along by the railings to where the car was parked. Oh, Richard! It’s you I want.
And as she cried out, her mind presented him to her, as she so often saw him, coming towards her: tall, handsome, and with his curious air of apartness from those around him. He had his hat in his hand, down by his side, as on a summer day he might trail his hand in water from the side of a boat. She wanted to preserve that picture of him forever in an image, and only as she struggled to hold on to it did she realize there was no urgency to the search. She had a sense of having all the time in the world to look and look at him. That was the very way he used to come to meet her – indolently trailing the old felt hat, glad to be done with the day; and when they got nearer to each other she used to take such joy in his unsmiling face, with its happiness integral to it in all his features. It was the first time in two years he’d been gone from her that she’d seen his face.
Not till she had taken out the key of the car, and gone straight around to the driver’s side, not stupidly, as so often, to the passenger seat – not till then did she realize what she had achieved. Yet she had no more than got back her rights. No more. It was not a subject for amazement. By what means exactly had she got them back though – talking to that strange man in that little café? That was the wonder.
If we have been patient with ourselves and allowed the feelings of loss to heal, eventually we will find that we have begun to create a new life for ourselves. Actually, this is the part that our culture teaches us to do first, cleaning out the closets and drawers, dealing with finances, pushing ourselves into new experiences – how many newly widowed persons take a cruise within a few months of their spouse’s death because friends or family thought it would be good for them to get away for a while and meet some new people. What happens, usually, is that we build a cyst around the pain and loss. We make a new life that still must carry around the luggage of the old one. There is a better way.
To go about reorganizing our lives in a healthful manner, we need to let the new life take shape on its own, so that it becomes an authentic expression of who we have always been. When we give ourselves permission to grow our new person organically, we discover that we have many capabilities we had never developed because our partner always took care of that aspect of our lives. We find ourselves doing things we would not have done before because our partner didn’t like them or couldn’t do them. In clearing away the pain of loss, we have opened up the possibility of creating a new capacity for enjoyment. We discover the value of rest. We discover the value of solitude, and we discover that solitude is not the same thing as loneliness. Solitude allows us to take stock of our lives, to make plans, to assess our emotional health. At this point we may decide we want to work with a professional counselor or therapist – for the sake of clarity. This is not a sign of weakness. Instead, it is a sign of our determination and courage to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and to set a table on the edge of the abyss. Our cup overfloweth and we find new energy, new enjoyments, new ways to contribute to the well-being of society.
It’s not that we have left the one we lost behind. That person is still part of us and always will be, but pain has turned to gratitude, remorse to resourcefulness, sorrow to anticipation.
If we let ourselves be carried by the process....
Response: Peace I Ask of Thee, O River
NOTE: Much of the material for this sermon came from Rabbi Earl Grollman’s fine book, Living When a Loved One Has Died. The readings came from Mary Jane Moffat’s In the Midst of Winter.