The Work of Grieving
Gone are the days…
The reactions we are experiencing during the pandemic have often come upon us stealthily. That was especially so after we passed about the fifth month of lockdowns.
For me a trigger came with surprising momentum when a song my father sang to me as a boy came to my mind. “Gone are the days….” The song’s poignant words and wistful tune made me sigh at first with the sadness and longing in the words and the memory of closeness with my father.
It was a bedtime song in the voice of an old, tired man aching for the release of death: for heaven, and for his departed friends. I can still hear my father’s voice in my mind as if it were a recording.
And then the memory unplugged something in me and I started to weep softly. Losses and grief that were separated by decades rose up in chorus together. They blended in the way moist earth and living things blend their scents when warmed by the sun. This helped me to understand why I’ve been mute in some ways, for months. I’ve been unable to give voice to what I’m discovering is a slumbering grief.
So many have lost much in this time, while some have been relatively untouched. For some, a life’s work has evaporated. Some churches are being decimated while trying to be faithful to God and those in authority, and to love our neighbors. Some school classmates have lost a spouse to the Coronavirus. So many are very alone, and experiencing significant mental and emotional health struggles. Young families are disconnected from life giving relationships while being swamped with constant contact at home with too much all happening in the same space at the same time. Of course you know all this. But though I’ve heard words that touch upon these realities in a world grieving great losses, I don’t find many places that have encouraged us to sit in this grieving and to learn from it.
We don’t simply stop to weep and mourn and lament. In our Western culture we really don’t want to go there and let grief do a work in us. We try to be upbeat, to “move on” and be positive. But bare positivity is reluctant to confront the realities of our broken world, which can help us to see more clearly the things for which we long. When grief knocks we often don’t let it in to do it’s seemingly random exploration of hidden rooms and sealed up wounds. But that’s how grief works. When it spills out it touches things we didn’t think were there. And that is good.
Great loss often turns us toward finding scapegoats for injustices, to bitterness for what we no longer have, which poisons us, and pushes us toward despair. I’ve seen it happen in me. It is striking that grieving—not merely being walloped by grief but entering into grieving—is a healing thing if we will learn from it. It is a mash up of sweet remembrances and wrenching lamentation, of gratitude and sadness, of working through anger and denial. The emotional spectrum of grieving is given to us as a gift to turn us God-ward. To entrust ourselves to the one who wept over his deceased friend, and then called him to live again.
