Grief - a personal perspective

I thought I knew what grief was.

My father ‘Daddy’ died when I was just 12 years old. I didn’t have any notion in my mind that he was dying. My mind denying me the thought? Divine protection?

The decline was traceable. He had diabetes and eventually it affected his balance. I remember him sitting behind the wheel of the car before getting out and walking back into the house. Somehow, I knew that was the last time he would drive. Then he slipped into a coma. And, in retrospect, I know the look of death in someone’s eyes, the life disappearing, and the laboured breathing, but at the time it never occurred to me that he was dying.

I remember him being taken out of the house by two burly ambulance men and taken to the hospital from where he would not return.

I remember my sister or my mother telling me he had died. I was fiddling with the coal fire in the lounge. I collapsed into grief as it overwhelmed me engulfing me in its tidal wave power. And yet some part of my mind could not accept the truth…the American Colonel had surely been taken to some intelligence facility and would return. But really I knew. At the funeral, it was the sight of the Stars and Stripes’ draped coffin passing through the curtain that broke me.

I knew grief. It is stronger than us. We are helpless in its grip. It does a thorough work. Later it lifts, even if we struggle with the guilt that it should. At some point the sun shines again, food tastes like food, and maybe you want to listen to music or laugh at a joke or get angry over something trivial. It’s subsided. It’s over.

That’s grief.

But. But it’s only in recent days that I have discovered a different form of grief.

You are living a life ‘without __________ in the world’ and it’s hard.

St Paul paints a stark picture of the position of the Gentiles in Ephesus:

‘…at that time, you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’

If you can replace ‘God’ with someone else’s name ‘…having no hope and without __________ in the world’ then you know this form of grief: it’s the absence of someone who is still alive.

You are living a life ‘without __________ in the world’ and it’s hard. So hard.

There seems to be no relief. No one can take their place. And, whatever the reason for the absence, the only thing you can do is yield the pain to God who knows all things. Knowing Christ carried this grief in His body on the cross, that He wipes our tears, however many weeks or years we must endure these feelings, as we become, like Him, ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’.

My heart was grieved
And I was vexed in my mind.
I was so foolish and ignorant
I was like a beast before You
Nevertheless, I am continually with You
You hold me by my right hand
You will guide me with Your counsel

Ps 73 v 21-24

There is an important distinction between the first and second kind of grief. The first is disabling. It leaves you unable to function normally and in its early stages, if you are not weeping uncontrollably, you are silent and stunned. I didn’t experience anger, though I understand that is common, just deep sadness and disorientation. The second kind of grief can be distinguished from the first in that there must have been some function of the will in arriving at the position of absence: my father didn’t choose to make himself absent i.e. die. At times you are fine but simple things crack, a place, a song, a place open your heart and the absence is all there is.

Finally, Jesus said it is ‘blessed are you when your mourn; you shall be comforted’. Whatever else this means, suppressing mourning, trying to ignore it, or avoid it, or worse, looking for some form of comfort to numb the pain may seem to make sense at the time, but all we are achieving is delaying the day when we face the reality that our heart is grieved and our mind vexed. Only then can we move further on through the verses in Psalm 73 and allow ourselves, as much as we did to grieve, to be held by our right hand and guided by His counsel.