The minister noticed that little Alex was staring up at the large plaque that hung in the foyer of the church. It was covered with names, and small American flags were mounted on either side of it. The seven-year-old had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the minister walked up, stood beside the boy, and said quietly, "Good morning, Alex." "Good morning," said Alex, and then asked, "What is this?" "Well, Alex," replied the minister, "it's a memorial to all the young men and women who died in the service." Soberly, they stood together, staring at the large plaque. Alex's voice was barely audible when he asked, "Which service, the 9:00 or the 11:00?"
Whether or not one or both of our services are deadly dull, I leave to you. It is clear though that Alex, this seven-year-old boy, is fascinated with the large questions of life and death - as are we all, however much we may resist talking about them. And so on this Palm Sunday in the Christian world, we consider good grief on a day honoring Jesus, the "man of sorrows, acquainted with grief."
My title may seem a strange one: "good grief" seems to be either an oxymoron or an exclamation from a "Peanuts" cartoon. What can be good about grief? I once sat at the bedside of a elderly parishioner on the last day of her life. We were already grieving for we knew the end was near. I sat and held her hand as she lay sleeping. Without warning, her large, dark eyes opened wide, and I said "It's Dick Gilbert from church." And then with what must have been considerable effort she said in a voice and in words I had heard a hundred times - as if nothing were changed - "Hi, Dick!" and she immediately lapsed back into sleep.
Then others gathered around her bed, sensing the hours were short. We talked, prayed, sang quietly. Again, out of a deep sleep she opened her eyes - saw the five of us hovering over her bed and said, in a loud and almost satirical voice, "Good grief!" as if to say, "why all the fuss about me? Get on with your lives." At least, that is what I think she meant. Our grief upon her death was deep and pure and healing - it was good.
Grieving is one of the most important of our human activities. While we most often think of grief in the context of death, there are other kinds of losses that cut us to the quick as well - divorce, loss of job, terminal illness, retirement, moving from a beloved home - to name just a few of the traumatic experiences which may befall us. The symptoms are similar, if not as deeply painful.
It is bereavement at time of death that is my central focus here. We all have done it; we will all do it. Someday people will grieve over our departure - at least we hope so. Grief work is hard work and we need to help one another do it. It is not easy to know what to say to people who are bereaved - or how to accept words of comfort if we are the grieving ones. There are words that leap to our lips when we try to comfort those who have been wounded by death. When we really don't know what to say we fall back on cliché - on time-worn words we think will help.
There was a scholarly article entitled "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" which purported to be an anthropological study of some unusual rituals of an obscure North American tribe. Readers were somewhat shocked and amused by their strange customs. Then as it unfolded, they began to get a vague feeling of familiarity. Finally they recognized the joke. 'Nacirema' is 'American' spelled backwards."[1]
We Americans have strange ways of encountering death - often with denial - and expressing grief - often inadequately. As Barbara Hills LesStrang suggested in this morning's reading, "please don't tell me you 'know how I feel,' or that it's 'time to get on with my life.'" However much we have known the pain of bereavement ourselves, we can never really know what another human being is feeling. We have hints, we try to empathize, but our sorrows are ours alone and no one else can truly enter them.
The great African-American preacher Howard Thurman wrote words I often use in memorial services to convey this reality:
"I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone."[2]
There is great wisdom here: a recognition that grief is unique to us; that we cannot grieve for another, but that we can be there; we can care and convey that caring, if not in words, then by an embrace, holding hands in ours, listening attentively to the story of death told again and again. In the words of the old German proverb, "A sorrow shared is sorrow halved. . . . "
One grief counselor underscored the sheer difficulty of listening to a grieving person: ". . . we listen athletically, with one's whole attention, and it is physically exhausting. It feels like a contact sport." Ministers are particularly prone to try to comfort by explanation - theological explanation. After all, why did we go to theological school if not to learn how to explain the big questions of life and death theologically? Often we have to respond to well-meaning friends and neighbors who talk of death - especially a tragic death - as God's will. This may be comforting to some, but I find that it simply opens a theological can of worms - how can a good God allow the death of my loved one? I just can't go there. For some tragedies there are no reasons - at least theological reasons. We live in a capricious universe that often doesn't play by human rules. There is unfairness; things that happen without explanation; the life process simply unfolds, and death is a part of that process.
Rational explanations, while they may be appropriate for sermons like this one, are not really very helpful in the pain of bereavement. As the 15th century theologian Jan Hus put it: "If God expected us to understand him (sic) through theology, we'd all have been born with doctorates."
And so, when sincere people say to a grieving person, "This, too, shall pass away." "You'll get over it soon." "Time heals all wounds," they are often not helpful, and may even add to the pain and inhibit the healing. What people do by their loving presence does far more healing than what they say. The problem with these cliches is that I don't believe they are true. They often convey the idea that the grief process should be accomplished as quickly as possible so that people can return to the daily round. Returning to the ordinary responsibilities of living is of course necessary, but that happens not at the end of our grief work; it is an essential part of it. We don't get over our grief very soon and should not rush the process. When we have been wounded by the death of a loved one it is excruciatingly painful, and healing takes not weeks or months or even years. Grieving is a life-long process.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end."[3] Author C. S. Lewis remembered his wife, Joy, best after he stopped trying so hard. "I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her, the nearer I seem to her."
My father died 15 years ago, and I am still grieving. I miss him. I regret that he did not live to see one grandson marry and will not see the other finish his doctorate. There was unfinished business between us - I do not know if he knew how much I loved him. Every now and then his image flashes across the screen of my mind - sometimes I feel like crying - sometimes I smile to remember.
I am not obsessed with his death. It does not prevent me from living my life to the full. I am not guilt-ridden by all that I did not do. I am, I believe, simply experiencing my grief over time in a completely natural and healthy way. Grief at my father's death is not something I have to "get over." Thoughts of him will not "pass away." I'm not sure time heals all wounds - there is nothing automatic about healing. Real wounds leave scars; we are all scarred creatures. We learn to live with scars which make us stronger than we were before.
Our own Unitarian Universalist Poet Laureate, the late May Sarton, said it better than I can in her poem, "All Souls."
"Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
nor the gift ungiven
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 plaited cannot be unplaited
- only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light; light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven;
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us
and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end."
The mourning will not end, but life will continue. And life will continue to be good. And we will grow in our capacity to live it.
Recently I read of a little boy who was told that his beloved grandfather had died. The boy stamped his foot in anger, crying, "Who is going to take me fishing now?" Later, he was outside playing."[4] That is often our first reaction at the loss of a loved one - how it impacts our life - a perfectly natural reaction as we struggle with grief. Grief is a process and gradually, eventually, we arrange our spiritual resources so we can go on - even helping people in just such crises as we have experienced.
That six-year-old boy who asked who would now take him fishing after his grandfather's death, five years later comforted his mother at the death of her sister. "I will miss Aunt Margaret," he said, "but you will miss her more since she is your sister."[5]
There is a Chinese proverb that not only suggests something of the inevitability of grief but also puts it in perspective: "You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair."
We all have our grief work to do, and as we grow older, there will be more of it until we face our own demise. However, while it permeates us and will never be totally out of our consciousness, it is not the whole of life, no matter how deeply we have been hurt.
As usual, the poets understand this. Theodore Roethke wrote these words in his poem "The Dying Man."
"The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things."
We "dare to live" despite knowing about the "immense immeasurable emptiness of things." We take on courage to continue despite the fact of having been wounded. We know there is no way out - there are no detours around it - no way to escape the pain of grief - but we can move through this mystery and go on with our lives - wiser by far, more appreciative by much, more joyous because we know how precious is our short time on earth - in life - in living.
Grief work is part of the process of creating life meaning for ourselves. Death, separation, loss disrupt our patterns of meaning and we must reconstruct them each time. As the late Henry Nouwen said, "When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope."[6]
I take on hope from knowing that others have been there in grief before me. Ralph Waldo Emerson is known as one of America's great intellectuals, a Unitarian Universalist prophet, though most of us know little of his personal life. He lost his three younger brothers and his first wife, Ellen Louise Tucker, whom he had married in 1829; she died in 1831 when she was not yet twenty. His first child, Waldo, born in 1836 to his second wife, was felled by scarlet fever and died suddenly in 1842.
In obvious pain, Emerson wrote in his Journal on January 30, 1842, "The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awakened so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud. "A boy of early wisdom, of a grave and even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness. Every tramper that ever tramped is abroad, but the little feet are still. He gave us his little innocent breath like a bird. Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing." He concluded, however, on a note of hope: "I am defeated all the time; yet to victory am I born."[7] The language may be that of the 19th century, but the feeling is universal and transcends time.
Author Robert Ardrey explores the continuity of the human condition in African Genesis, which contains this compelling phrase - "time, death and the space between the stars." While our lives are very concrete and very specific, they are set in a cosmic context. We are creatures bound by time, limited by death, finite specks of being between the stars. We hurt and heal, confront and comfort, laugh and cry. But we go on; we must go on.
In his poem "The Green Door," John Holmes reminds us of our cosmic destiny and the invitations of tomorrow. I find it indispensable in considering good grief.
"I have lived too long to guess of dying
That death's a garden, or to rhyme its fears,
And lived so long - a twelvemonth in a minute--
I think time goes by heartbeats, not by years.
Here in my heart I hold such strong abundance.
I do not care what lies beyond that door.
Life is enough. There is always music,
Always more love, more fun, and always more.
And this beloved face of daily living
Lights in a thousand ways for me,
With brave and starry reasons for not dying:
There is too much to think about and see.
Though this be wealth I'll never taken to heaven--
High rooms in paneled wood, with beams above,
Slow green surf, a men's choir, flags, wind, running -
This is a chant of praise for things I love:
A long music, and I ask for nothing more
This side the narrow portal, death's green door,
Only to cry with mind and heart and tongue
That death at any age is dying young.
And if the green door opens on tomorrow,
And every friend still answers to his name,
A little death makes eloquent -the daylight-.
It will be glory that the world's the same.
And we have all been dead, who now are living!
Speak out the secret thing we're certain of:
We're back, we've all come back, we've all been given
A longer time to look, and touch and love."
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