Ever Hopeful Gardeners of the Spirit
The Reverend Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange, February 26, 2006

This morning I want to talk about grief and loss because I believe, as Judith Viorst writes in her book, Necessary Losses, that loss is an inevitable part of life and that how we grieve our necessary losses can have a profound impact on the quality of our living. Indeed, loss is so much a life-long human experience, that I would say that to live well is to grieve well.

Now I suspect some of you may be thinking—who wants to hear about such a dark, depressing subject? In fact when I told a friend that I was going to preach about grief today, he said just that. I don’t fault him—he was simply echoing the disposition of our culture. Ours is not a society that likes to acknowledge loss or to recognize any need for relinquishment. Ours is a culture that continually pushes us to acquire “more”—more money, more success, more things. Hardly ever does our society advise relinquishment. Ours is also a culture that espouses eternal cheeriness and youthful optimism. And when it comes to grief, we are supposed to get on with it, get over it—and pretty darn quick. A man in this church told me a few months back that two weeks after his father died his supervisor berated him for walking around looking sad—“you're bringing everybody down,” the supervisor said. Two weeks after his father died! Our culture doesn't give us adequate time to grieve. People can be very solicitous at first—they call, they send cards, they bring food; but, once the funeral is over and the covered dishes consumed, everything is supposed to go back to normal and if we don’t feel that way, we are at least supposed to try to present that face to the world. People don’t want to be, as that supervisor said, “brought down” by another’s sadness. Maybe it just reminds us too much of our own losses and our own unacknowledged grief.

Joan Didion’s latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, chronicles the first twelve months after the death of her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne. Dunne died suddenly at home one evening of a massive coronary. As Didion writes, “you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Didion and Dunne were both writers; they both worked at home; they were together 24 hours a day. And then suddenly, John was gone. Didion tried not to censor her grief—her book endeavors to be a brutally honest portrayal of what that year was like—still she found herself scouring her thinking for signs of “dwelling on it”, lest she drive others away. “Visible mourning,” she writes, “reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” A woman I know who lost her husband several months ago, told me that her friends were worried because she hadn’t yet “moved on.” “But,” she asked, “Where is the global positioning satellite that can tell me where on is?”

Our culture makes it hard for us to claim our losses, to “have” our grief. And I believe that we pay a tremendous price as a society for not acknowledging our necessary losses. Studies have shown a link between unresolved grief in children and violence. The causative effects of unresolved grief in alcoholism and substance abuse are well demonstrated when people try to narcotize themselves from painful feelings of sadness and mourning. And I think that some of the greed and acquisitiveness of our society is also due to unacknowledged losses. Our society tells us, and we have begun to believe, that any ache of longing or loss can be assuaged by procuring something else or something more. The math is simple: Been jilted in love? Go out and buy a new car! And I even think that a link can be made between unacknowledged grief and war. If we truly allowed ourselves to feel the depth of our own pain at the death of those we love, how could we send other people’s sons and daughters off to die? If we fully allowed ourselves to identify with those who suffer devastating losses, how could we bomb civilian centers filled with families and children?

What if we could be honest about loss? And what if we could be honest about our need to mourn our losses? Might we not see that grief has something to teach us?

Grief is the name we give to the process of adapting to loss. The death of someone we love is the most obvious occasion for grief. But we all experience loss from the moment we are born until the moment we die, because we are always leaving something behind or being left. We grow by giving up, through relinquishment. In fact it is through loss that the self develops at all. The first building blocks of the personality are formed in infancy when we experience the loss of symbiotic identification with our mother and internalize within ourselves a representation of that first relationship. Without separation from mother, without the loss of that initial state of union, consciousness would never emerge. Over the years, the personality is built up through a series of such incorporations of those whom we love but which we cannot fully possess.

We lose not only through death, but also through a thousand mini-deaths in growing up and maturing. The loss of childhood. The loss of earlier stages in our children’s lives as they grow. The loss of sons and daughters when they move away from home. The loss of external definitions and images of a younger self. The loss of what seemed endless possibilities as we make choices in life—as doors that once were open become closed, as paths we once could have taken fade from view. The loss of people we love, not just to death, but to separation and divorce, to relocations, to failures of relationships. “Loss is,” as Viorst writes, “a lifelong human condition.” And our gains, our growth, are inextricably mixed with our losses. Loss is a requisite of human development and so if we are to live well, then perhaps we do need to know what it means to grieve well.

“To grieve well?” I hesitate to say such a thing for it implies that I know what it is to grieve as someone else would grieve—that grief is everywhere and always the same. But, as Joan Didion, writes, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” When we are in the midst of grieving, our grief feels particularized, idiosyncratic, as if no one else can possibly know what we are feeling. I know something about my grief—about how it felt to lose my father, my mother and my two sisters, for example. And after twenty years in the ministry, I have witnessed the grief of others in ample measure. But still I do not know what your grief feels like to you. I do not know what it is to lie awake at night in the dark suffocated by the weight of absence of whatever or whomever you have lost. I do not know what it is for you to ache for the particular touch, the feel, of those who can no longer be touched or felt.

It isn’t really possible to compare one grief to another. As grief counselors say, “The very worst kind of grief is yours”—yours, whatever the grief is for. Grief is as particular and unique as individuals are. How we mourn depends on so many factors: what the relationship was like; our age and the age of the one who is gone; our inner strengths, our networks of support and our own individual history of love and loss—for each loss in some way reawakens and recapitulates prior losses. What is an occasion of great sadness for one, may bring relief for another. What feels like timely closure on a rich intimacy to one, will raise a raft of “what if’s” for someone else. Even close siblings react differently to the death of a parent, for example. And the most challenging g rief we encounter may not be from the death of a person at all, but may arise from a metaphoric death—the demise of a long-held dream or vision of the future, the destruction of our self-image through a career or business failure, or the betrayal of a significant friendship. Grief is particular; but, because loss is a universal phenomenon, grief is, at the same time, a universal experience. And since it is universal, there is some commonality to grief. Commonality which can help us to understand what it might mean to grieve well.

If it is true that “the very worst kind of grief is your own,” it is also true that the only way out of any grief is through it. There is no substitute for the grieving process. And in that process we will most likely experience a whole host of emotions in varying degrees. Shock and disbelief are often the first feelings. Death is such an enormity that we cannot comprehend it all at once. When John Dunne first died, Joan Didion was so sure that he would be coming back that she obsessed over the fact that the medics had not taken his shoes when they transported his body to the hospital. How could he possibly walk home to her without his shoes? When someone we love has died it takes the heart a long time to assimilate that awful knowledge. Shock often gives way to a feeling of heaviness or numbness. Stanley Moss on the death of her mother asked, “why is everything so heavy? I didn’t know she was still helping me carry the weight of my life.” These feelings in turn can yield to a long period of intense psychic pain—as sadness, anger, despair, guilt, feelings of helplessness, and physical symptoms all can alternate in rapid succession or be drawn out over seemingly endless days. We may spend hours weeping, or throw ourselves into a thousand projects, completing none; wander aimlessly from room to room, as if unconsciously looking for the one who died. We may feel as if we have lost our mind—and, indeed, it is normal to feel crazy, normal to suffer cognitive deficits, in response to significant loss. Anger surfaces—anger at the doctors who couldn't save him or her; anger at ourselves for not being able to save them; anger at God for creating a world in which people have to die; anger at friends whose lives are not so etched with grief; and, yes, anger at the one who died for leaving us, and, ultimately, anger at death itself, for something has been irrevocably taken away.

Guilt, too, is often part of the grieving process—guilt for things we did or failed to do; guilt for simply surviving; and, then, later, guilt when one realizes that one is slowly beginning to feel pleasure again. C. S. Lewis, who chronicled his wife’s death in four journals, wrote in the last of them, “There’s no denying that I ‘feel better’ and with that comes a feeling of shame." And finally we will confront feelings of helplessness—that no matter what we do, no matter what we could have done, there is nothing that can make death other than death. We can’t save those we love and love will not save us from death. All we can do is find the ways back to say yes to life again.

There are common emotions and common experiences in the process of grieving. But that is not to say that grief follows a predictable path. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, the great expert on death and dying, was asked near the end of her life if she had any regrets. She said, “I wish I had never come up with those damn stages!”

There is no standard way to grieve. But there are lessons from those who study the grieving process. The primary one being that it is important to stop normal functioning and mourn; to allow yourself to feel the hurt, the pain. Denial, detachment or finding ways to numb the pain, while adaptive in the first stages of grief, can lead to long term problems, such as addiction, such as losing the capacity to love again. Yes it hurts, but tears can be the rain that waters the soil of the soul so that the heart does not become parched and brittle.

But even here there are caveats, for women and men grieve differently, differences which are the result not only of socialization but which are also biologically based. Women are much more likely to talk it out, to cry at length, while men tend to do concrete things when they are mourning, often things that remind them of or repeat activities with the deceased. A man who has just lost his father might suddenly decide to rebuild that ’57 Chevy he and his Dad had dreamed of doing together. When men talk about their grief they are more likely to tell stories about the deceased than to describe their feelings. When they do reveal those feelings, it’s likely to be around shared activities with a friend or buddy, like shooting hoops, or going fishing.

But however we do it, acknowledging the feelings of loss and sadness is essential. That is the emotional task of grieving. And there is also mental work to be done as one comes to terms with the reality of the loss. New mental pathways need to be forged. As C. S. Lewis wrote about his wife’s death, “Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had her for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to her. So many roads once; now so many cul-de-sacs.”

And if there is emotional and mental work involved in grieving, there is also a spiritual task—a spiritual task, which when successful, allows us to see that hard and painful as it is, grief can lead to growth, to enrichment. The widely held assumption that grieving requires “letting go” is a fallacy. Yes, one accepts the reality of the physical loss. One does withdraw a certain degree of mental and emotional energy so that energy is available for other tasks of living. But there is also a way in which healing involves re-gaining the lost loved one. Grief counselors these days stress that the goal of grief is not to say a final goodbye, but to foster a continuing bond with the deceased—finding ways to treasure cherished memories; to understand what the person meant to us; to set up an internal dialogue with the lost loved one, to find a home in one’s psyche for their continuing positive presence. When we adequately grieve the death of someone we have loved, we literally take them into our psyche. They become a new introject in our personality, and thus we confer upon the dead immortality. They do live on in us. And in the process our souls become enlarged, more wholly one with all who have suffered and also more open to the beauty and possibility resident in the world, as the dead confer upon us the blessings of their living.

As May Sarton wrote, “Now the dead move through all of us still glowing, mother and child, lover and lover mated, are wound and bound together and enflowing. What has been braided cannot be unbraided. Only the strands grow richer with each loss, and memory makes kings and queens of us.”¹

One of the most important things that we can do as a religious community is to allow people to “have” their grief, to be a countervailing voice to those cultural messages that insist that people get over it, get on with it. At some point or other, all of us will need a community of people who accept that loss is part of life and that the depth of our grief is a measure of our love. And we will need that community to remind us that death, though real, is not annihilation, that memory and influence endure, that, in a very meaningful way, we become those whom we have loved. We all need those who will help us in our grief—not so much by what they do or say, but simply by being present—long after the c overed dishes are gone. People who will stand by us and stand with us and lean us into their arms and say “tell me about her, tell me about him; tell me about Olivia, about Jana; tell me about Richard, about George, about Frank.” People who will stand by us in our garage or workshop and pass us the wrench, hand us the lathe, and let the story unwind with its own rhythm. People who don’t run from the hurt but who know that “without darkness nothing comes to light;”² that without loss nothing comes to flower.

Loss and grief are inevitable parts of living. May we here be strong enough to need one another in our losses; sheltering enough to hold one another in our griefs. May we be “ever hopeful gardeners of the spirit.”³

1. From May Sarton’s poem, “All Souls”.
2. From May Sarton’s poem, “Kali”.
3. Ibid.