Rector's Blog: Good Grief

Half of my family moved to New England when I was 13. I visited regularly, and then joined them when I was 16, moving across the country from California and making New Hampshire my new home. I used to live there, but I don’t anymore. I used to have family there, but they have either moved or died, and now whenever I am there I am a visitor again. This road I was on, it used to be the way home.

This time I was on my way to a funeral. Her name was Cindy and she was a dear friend of my family. She and her husband Charlie had been a big reason my dad had chosen to move to New Hampshire, and they had helped him get settled when he first arrived. Our families have been connected for nearly 40 years. I was thinking about them and about us all as I drove north.

My first winter there had been brutal – the largest amount of snowfall in the history of the region greeting this young Californian to his new life. I remember one dinner with Charlie and Cindy where she asked me how I was weathering things. Inexplicably, my first response was that I just could not get over how cold the toilet seat was every morning. More inexplicably Cindy remarked that she did not have that issue. “What, do you have an electric seat warmer or something?” Cindy said no it was much better, and then she looked at Charlie, who smiled. What was I missing? Cindy continued, “I make him go the bathroom first every morning so the seat is warm by the time I get up.” I looked at Charlie, whose smile just widened. This was true love.

Charlie died a few years ago, and Cindy succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease last month. As I grew older we were not terribly close, but we stayed connected. To have both of them gone shuts another door and changes this place I used to call home just a little more.

Grief. That’s the word I was looking for to describe what I was feeling. It was grief.

I have lived a few places now: several rounds in Southern California – both in Orange County and Los Angeles, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, North Carolina, Virginia, and now Cincinnati Ohio. Most of these places have felt like home at one point or another. I am always happy to go back to any of these places to visit. At the same time, it’s just that: A visit. I need to consult Google maps to get places I used to know by memory. I imagine alternate realities where I never left California in the first place, or where I never left New England, or where I settled down in Charlotte. So many things I was, and so many I could’ve been. There’s beauty in that, and also some grief.

Grief is different than regret. I do not wish I had made different decisions, that my life was different. It’s not that. It’s just an acknowledgment of all the loss that life brings.

We have a desire to demonize grief, to minimize it or stifle it completely if possible. And when experiencing grief there is some part of us that feels guilty, like we should not be feeling this, like it’s maudlin or overly sensitive. Our goal seems to be to get through grief as quickly as we can. I wonder why that is. Christians can be particularly problematic. We will often try to short-circuit grief by pointing to God’s plan or the promise of Heaven. As if our belief that everything is going to be ok means that we should not experience grief.

But grief is not evil. Grief is a gift, because it is honest about the things that we have lost.

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, keep on the sunny side of life. The Carter Family first sang that, and I bought that for a long time, or at least I tried to. Tried to live into it. Don’t give the darkness any air to breathe. And certainly I don’t believe we are meant to be consumed by our grief – that is despair. The God of love did not create us to live in despair. But just as we do not want our grief to swallow us, we cannot swallow our grief, cannot push it down forever, ignore or avoid or obliterate it.

One of my favorite stories about Jesus’ disciples occurs after his resurrection. They have seen Jesus back from the dead. They have spoken with him and he with them. Jesus leaves them alone for a little bit, and they just decide to go fishing. A few of the disciples had been fished professionally prior to working with Jesus, but they all clearly had some familiarity with it. Some people think the disciples went back to the boat because they were unsure about Jesus, or about what was next for them all. But maybe they were still grieving. Sure, Jesus had come back from the dead, but he had still died just the same. And aside from the trauma of seeing that, they knew that nothing could be the same again. They had been moved. Maybe they needed to drive their version of the road from Boston to New Hampshire and feel their grief. Maybe they just wanted to breathe for a minute, to remember what life had been once, not with regret but with recognition of the cost of their transformation.

Jesus’ death may not have been the very end of the story, but it certainly was the end of many things. The life he had built with his friends would never be the same. There is grief there in the salvation. And that’s ok. Death is not the end of our story, but the beginning of a new chapter in our being. Just the same, there are parts of you that have died, chapters that have ended, versions of you that simply don’t exist anymore. You are living and dying right now, and you are allowed to feel some sort of way about that.

James Taylor once sang, “It’s with the holy host of others standing around me, still I’m on the dark side of the moon.” He is describing grief and longing even in the midst of love and life. The Resurrection does not erase the death. Jesus still bears the marks, his friends still carry the memories. What I’m saying today is maybe that’s a good thing – or at least a beautiful and true one. That instead of trying to escape grief or hold your breath while barreling through it, you have the opportunity to let it live alongside the hope and joy of the life you’ve chosen, the life you’ve been given. Maybe Jesus’ death can dispel more than your fear of your death – maybe it can transform all the deaths large and small that you experience along the way.

I know that there is life after death because I am living it every day. I don’t mean to be cute about this. I believe that when my body dies I will literally live again, united with God and the whole company of those who came before me. The holy host of others like Cindy and Charlie will be there in that new life. But I wonder if perhaps that death and that living again will be a familiar feeling, not a foreign one. Like the road that I recognize, the one for which I do not need directions, because I know the way, because I’ve traveled that road – it’s the road home.