I’m constantly amazed at how the Holy One works – we just have to learn to (as my Gramma Milly would say), “Let go. Let God.”
I suppose I can admit to the fact that as a lifelong “fixer” this is one hard task! I’m used to being in charge of something – I’ve trusted what I’ve known as “The Voice” my whole life, and so when I feel called to take on a challenge, I tend to step up to the plate and get to work.
Often, I’m successful in these attempts, because I believe the Holy One uses me as a tool for the good in this world. I feel humble and grateful to be chosen to help…but what happens when you suddenly find yourself on the other end of fixing?
Four years ago, real life of a different type happened and suddenly, I was the one who needed help at the deepest level anyone could know. A relationship I treasured and totally devoted myself to suddenly ended; my marriage of 22 years ran into a cement wall. I was blind-sided, shocked, heartbroken. In one day, my whole world took a 180-degree turn.
The circumstances swirling around it were ugly, very public, and it all ripped me apart. So much pain, so much doubt about myself, so many details forcing me to step into a life I truly never expected to live – on my own.
I went down a very dark hole, doing all the things another instinct tells us to do to ease the pain, and I wondered how I’d ever crawl out of it again.
This Fixer was in desperate need of being brought back to life.
Here’s the part where the God reveals just how amazing a Being God is…
At the worst time I’ve ever experienced, I was surrounded by a cloud of atypical saints, (most of them not people of faith!) and each one of them contributed to the healing journey I found myself on.
I truly was never alone.
Did you know that the God has many disguises? Do you remember that Spirit can show up in the oddest places at just the right moment (in the wrong place) to give you a poke, reminding you who and Whose you are? Did you know that getting through a life-changing event can change you in ways you never thought you would know and understand; dropping new hope, new strength, new life right at your feet?
These aren’t just buzz words thrown at us during a sermon in any church…this is absolute Truth.
I know this, because I’ve been constantly in awe of how the Holy One works – how the Holy One reaches out – always, and often when you least expect it.
With honest love from friends, family, even people I didn’t know personally, I’m finding my way back. I’m crawling out of that dark hole, one step at a time. I’m also learning about real forgiveness – God’s trademark – and true peace.
The newer me is a modified version for sure, (and a better one, I think) – and as I squint each morning at a much brighter day ahead, I find that I’m not the only one who has suffered such loss. There is so much to grieve about in this world these days…The Voice is telling me that it’s time to get to work again.
What’s different, though, is that instead of being a fixer, I’m now a “mender” because we’re all in this together. We need to patch up the torn places…and keep going.
It feels good to step up to the plate again.
Thanks, Holy One.
*Jane Jones served as the licensed pastor for First Congregational Church in Prescott from 2009 – 2015, has been SWC’s Moderator and Moderator Elect, is almost a former member of COCAM B, and currently sits in on Faith Formation ZOOM meetings. She will be one of the facilitators at the “Doing Grief Community Healing Project” at Church of the Palms in Sun City.
by Kay F. Klinkenborg, MA, Spiritual Companion, Retired RN, LMFT, Clinical Member AAMFT
I have a new phrase, “Prolonged Complex Compassion Fatigue”1 to describe our accumulated experiences as we enter the third year of a world pandemic. No one debates that it is/ has been a time of extraordinary stress from the COVID pandemic with persistent residual feelings of worn out, more tired consistently, restless and discouraged. The words, COVID/ Pandemic Fatigue has shown up in various media forms in an attempt to describe our collective prolonged response. COVID has challenged every social structure in our world. And it has impacted every person in the world.
The deaths from COVID are staggering and the tsunami leaves a wake of aching hearts with complicated grief, discouragement, fear of the future and much more. What medical health care workers, first responders and hospital/nursing home staff have experienced is beyond the scope of this article…they are traumatized with resulting PTSD…way beyond compassion fatigue.
What we are experiencing is individualized, but also collective. I chose to call this experience ‘complex’ because it has multiple layers of impact. COVID-19 has exacerbated already-existing global issues of climate change, political unrest, and systemic injustice. There is an added existential worry/anxiety. A predictable outcome from caring and loving in a time of crisis. We have done nothing wrong. Caring and loving is how we are designed by the Creator. But the prolonged intensity, unpredictability, isolation, constant adaptation and worrying about your own and other’s safety has a wearing impact. It is because we have and do care that we are experiencing this phenomena. No one is exempt.
Registered nurse Carla Joinson (1992) coined ‘compassion fatigue’ to describe a unique form of burnout that affected caregivers and resulted in a “loss of the ability to nurture.”2 This form of burnout was related to a variety of stressors, including long hours, heavy workload without any signs of potential time to rest and restore.
Dr. Charles Figley, PhD was the first professor (University of Florida) to lecture on trauma and mentioned the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’ as similar to ‘secondary traumatic stress syndrome (STS)’; resulting from over extended exposure to traumatic stresses of time in caring. He also noted that it was similar to PTSD, but that it came through a secondary source…the patient.2
From 1995 to 2005 I conducted workshops for all levels of professionals in the caring fields on the topic “Compassion Fatigue”. It also occurs in a time of disaster in dealing with multiple traumatized people in extenuating circumstances over a period of time…just like the last two years. Until now, the term has been limited to nurses, doctors, therapists, clergy: all professionals in care giving careers and care-givers of ill family members or friends.
What are signs/symptoms of compassion fatigue?
Feeling exhausted physically and psychologically.
Feeling helpless, hopeless or powerless.
Feeling irritable, angry, sad or numb.
A sense of being detached or having decreased pleasure in activities.3
I find we are experiencing an extraordinary unprecedented more complex form of compassion fatigue. It is expanded because of the prolonged, unpredictable and unknown outcome of the pandemic and added existential worries. The professional literature I have reviewed, local and national news stories and feature articles in newspapers and magazines are all reporting about this intense time of stress. I add the following complex responses:
Existential Worries
Complicated grief because of isolation when loved ones are critical or dying
Job security
Up ended routine life schedules, always adapting, no ‘norm’ to reset which is unnerving
Unpredictable health care availability, unprecedented medical care staff shortages
US divisive politics (Note: this is experienced by Red and Blue constituents)
World conflicts, potential new wars
Starvation, droughts
Loss of homes
Natural disasters on the rise: fires, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc.
Violence and hate crimes on the rise around the world
Climate change.
This is not the end of the existential worry list.1
More intense responses to prolonged complex compassion fatigue
Malaise: a mind/spirit/ brain fatigue. I can’t think my way through this.
Finding ourselves alarmed that concentration capacity has decreased
Unconsciously consumed with keeping up with news/ media; needing the most current statistics/stories; obsessed with Internet or Facebook
Free-floating anxiety; especially when outside one’s home or in groups/shopping for necessities; keeping self and loved ones safe
Depressed, feeling blue but unable to connect it to a specific reason
Spiritual questioning: “where is God in this?”; or even wondering if God exists or is present.
“The issues are so big, I have no idea where to start, self-care is slacking, demotivated, can’t push myself to do what I know to do.”
“I am one person, no way can I impact these big social issues.”1
Exhausted! Bone tired! Deep chronic fatigue that a week off doesn’t resolve. And in our retirement community I often hear: “this is not how I intended to spend the last good physical capable years of my life.” This isn’t the only age group to lose some dreams. We have all lost some dreams.
In a recent article: “Mental Health Therapists Worried About America”5, the research of 1, 320 therapists across the US, found that anxiety and depression are significantly on the rise and the most frequent reason to seek help. The rise in needs for counselors was even across Red and Blue states.5
Rise in relationship issues: couples have too much together time…no space to breath and do self-care; financial stresses are increasing couple difficulties; substance use/abuse on rise; arguing more; children at home doing school. Political disagreements increasing major stress for immediate and extended family members. One in four providers said suicidal thoughts were among the top reasons for clients reaching out for help.5
Every major news outlet and newspapers have published articles of concern about the mental well-being of our children and youth. How has this impacted their learning, their social skills or view of the world?
Suicide rates are on the rise of young people from age 11-22 years of age.5 One 10 year old boy told his therapist he was having “sad panic mode” in describing being overwhelmed.5
Just reading this article is likely triggering one or more of the above stress responses. So what is one to do to cope with Prolonged Complex Compassion Fatigue?
Back to the basics is a trite statement. Digging deeper for coping skills, exploring new coping strategies are options. But what does that mean?
I want to begin with one primary focus: developing a resilient focused mind set. How do begin to take care of ourselves with intention and practice to diminish the impact that will continue to come our way? For as all reports indict: “this isn’t over yet.”
RESILIENT FOCUSED MIND SET
Resilience is the capacity to recover from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.8 Psychologists have found these skills can be learned.7
YOU CAN DO THIS ONE HARD THING!
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor (bathos) the deep, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8: 38-39 NRSV.
I do not intend to be glib, but…you have used a lot of unidentified positive skills these first two years of pandemic and existential worries. Make a list of ‘how did you do this?’ You did make good choices. Learned to do different from some choices, but you kept moving forward. Creation is a continual evolution…we are continuing to evolve as people. If we did the last two years, we can do the years ahead of us too. Yes, its hard but there have never been any promises that life would be easy.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS!
The Bible has 365 separate quotes of: “fear not for I am with you.” If it is that frequent, obviously history notes leaning on God (Divine) has proven to be of comfort and to own we are not alone.In addition, three characteristics that remind us of our competency. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7.
The Quran shares similar beliefs: “My mercy encompasses all things.
[Quran] 7:156. “So verily, with this hardship, there is relief. [Quran 94:5]
YOU COME LEARNING HOW TO DO THIS!
Resilience requires this steadiness of mind and willingness to ‘be with’ suffering rather than turning away from it.9 As Poet Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through.”9 We aren’t supposed to have all the answers about how to adapt to crises. This didn’t come with a manual. Paul, the Apostle wrote: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” Philippians 4:13 NRSV.
Extend grace to yourself! Only then can you extend grace to others. You don’t have to know the future. You don’t have to have all the answers. Come with an open mind and heart to find a more peaceful way to be.
REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”6 Letting go of our expectations..’what should be’ compared to ‘what is’, wastes a lot of mental energy. Obsessing about facts we can’t change is sitting in ‘what should be’. ‘What is’ gives you choices about how to spend your time; what to read, etc. This is healthy movement and not being frozen or immobilized.
Dr. Michael Yapko cautions about ‘global thinking’: generalizing one thing to all things.7 An example: one rapid test clinic for COVID wasn’t using certified testing equipment; thus all clinics aren’t using certified testing equipment. Dangerous thinking pattern when you pause to contemplate this type of generalization. People who do a lot of ‘global thinking’ have a high predictability of depression according to Yapko.
We live in an uncertain unpredictable time. Learning to ‘go with the flow’ and trust that we can respond with wise choices can be a powerful confidence builder.
WHAT AM I TO LEARN FROM THIS?
Back to Havel’s quote: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”6 You can’t learn from the present, if you are locked into focus on the past.7 Whether it is locked in your childhood pain, or betrayal as an adult, it is a waste of your spiritual and mental energy to ruminate on the past. In this moment, this time this space: What are you to learn?
Who are you going to chose to be…not who was I? Step into the future.
The old gospel hymn: “We’ve Come This Far By Faith Leaning on the Lord,” was a childhood favorite of mine. It pulled me forward when I was frightened; it pulled me through intense therapy to heal deep wounds; and it is pulling me forward to be engaged, productive and repeating my personal mantra: “What return can I make?”
A resilient mind set is my responsibility; that is my choice. Each of us can practice and hone this skill set. Yes, we will ebb and flow in our moods and response to these continued stressors. I pray by the grace of God I will continue to learn from this scary unpredictable time in which I live. This is resilience!
1Klinkenborg, K.F. (Jan 24, 2022) W.I.S.E. Steering Committee Retreat for Church of the Palms, Sun City, AZ. (first use of term and defined).
2 Compassion fatigue: toward a new understanding of the costs of caring. In Stamm BH
(Ed.): Secondary Traumatic Stress: Self-Care Issues for Clinicians, Researchers, and
5New York Times, Dec 17, 2022. “Mental Health Therapists Worried About America.”
6Havel, Vaclav: playwright, essayist, poet, former dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic (1936-2011).
7Yapko, Michael. May 14, 2018. “Keys to Unlock Depression: Why Skills Work Better than Pills.” Speech for Australian Psychology Society. 8Oxford Dictionary
As we walk the hallowed halls with a deep desire to bring spiritual comfort to patients and families, there are times when we must pause to experience our own humanity. There are times when we must pause to connect with our own spiritual source for perspective, strength, and refreshment. There are times when we must reconnect with our own sense of being human. There are times when we must step back and mourn.
As we view a child’s body pulled from the bottom of a green pool, we must step back and mourn. As we witness teenaged attempts to take their own lives by hanging, gun shot, starvation or overdose, we must step back and mourn. As we witness a nurse drape a newborn baby for transfer to the morgue, we must step back and mourn. As we view the mangled body of a joyride gone bad, we must step back and mourn. As we see the skyrocketing cases of children with COVID gasping for air, we must step back and mourn. As we witness the contorted physical pain of sickle cell, we must step back and mourn. As we view the strained face of a doctor informing a grandmother that there is nothing more medicine can do, we must step back and mourn. Amid panicked fear, threadbare nerves, and lives forever changed or ended, we must step back and mourn.
Finding a private space in the quiet corner of our hearts, we bow and we weep, because we know if we do not, we will lose our human connection and become mere robots. We are trained, we are hurried, we are present, and yet our calling is to be fully human. In acknowledgement of our common humanity, there are times when we must step back and mourn. Amen.
Dr. Campbell, UCC clergy, BCC, is a Staff Chaplain at Phoenix Children’s Hospital.
by Rev. Lynne Hinton, Conference Director, New Mexico Conference of Churches
At a worship service a couple of weeks ago at St. John’s UMC in Albuquerque, visiting preacher Rev. Scott Carpenter spoke about five tasks churches need to accomplish in order to thrive. The first task was to grieve well.
This focus on grief as the first task for a faith community to grow strong surprised me. Having been a hospice chaplain for years, I spend a lot of time and thought regarding grief, regarding loss. I understand the need to honor grief but I had never seriously considered it as a necessary function for communities of faith to thrive. And yet, grief is necessary to move forward. And if we’ve ever needed to grieve in churches, it’s now.
Over 600,000 persons have died in our country from Covid 19. Businesses have closed. Churches have had to shut their doors permanently. Dreams have ended. Suicides and mental illness emergencies are on the rise. And in poorer countries, the pandemic continues to ravage entire populations. We need to grieve what has been lost, what we have lost.
In [his book] RealLivePreacher.com, Pastor Gordon Atkinson writes about going to a mountain church in Colorado as part of his annual family vacation. He goes to the little community church alone and he goes to weep.
He writes, “I cry in their church because I can’t cry in my own. I’m not suggesting that we discourage crying at our church. I’m saying I am not ABLE to cry there. Being in charge shuts something down in me, I think. So every summer in Creede I unpack a year’s worth of sorrow, joy, and wonder.
“I cry in church because it is my time to be served. I’m like the woman who prepares the meals for her family each day. One day she comes home, and her children have prepared a meal for her. She bursts into tears because it’s her turn to receive. It doesn’t mean she wants to stop cooking. It’s just nice that it’s her turn.
“I cry for those reasons, but mostly I cry because at Creede Community Church I can see the truth. Sitting in that simple pew on the back row, I see the Church Universal in all her glory and silliness. The truth is, we are not sophisticated at all. We are nothing more than children, sticking our drawings to the fridge with tiny magnets, offering our best to the heavens on a wing and a prayer. We are precious, but perhaps only in His sight.
“I think messy little boys and girls praying in church must be irresistible to God. When God slows down and licks his fingers to slick down my cowlick, I catch a fleeting glimpse of the hem of his robe.
“And a glimpse is more than enough for me.
“That is the moment of true worship, and I always seem to find it in Creede.
“And in that moment, I cry from pure joy and relief.”
Do you have a place where you can weep? Do you have time set aside in your life to mourn your losses, honor the sorrow you carry, and feel free to let your emotions loose? And do you have a place where you receive, a place where you don’t have to be the faith leader or the pastor holding it together, a place where you can be served and know the loving presence of God?
My hope, of course, is that you do and that you have been there this year, that you have wept in sorrow and relief, and that you have been received, and ultimately that you have known joy. That is my hope for us all.
Year after year on Easter Sunday we joyously proclaim, “We are an Easter people!” But, Easter Sunday 2020 came and went. We find ourselves still wandering through a Lenten desert – not knowing when or how the nightmarish suffering and everyday losses wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic will end.
Passover prayers echo from our lips as losses mount in every state and nation. We collectively grieve illness and death, economic woes, lack of resources and healthcare, and not being able to live, learn, work, play, or worship as we normally do. Every aspect of culture is full of change that brings loss, and loss that brings grief.
There is a profound gospel message to be found in our grief this Easter season that requires some real daring to receive. It is this: Our beloved resurrection story does not change the fact that our grief will always be with us. Grief is as much a part of our human story and experience as is the Love of God.
The healing potency of Easter Sunday that often gets buried in the reverie of joyous celebration is that this holiest of days is set at the intersection of the Lenten and Easter seasons. It is that place in the Christian calendar where sorrow and joy, despair and hope, life and death meet to remind us that God’s love is present with us through it all. The same is true for grief. Although grief is often misunderstood to be synonymous with sorrow, like Easter Sunday, grief is found at the intersection of celebration and suffering. So, as we make our way through the Easter season, we have no choice but to take our grief with us.
We humans grieve when we lose what we cherish. But despite the fact that grief is born out of all good things in life, we often regard grief as an enemy to be eradicated. I beg you to consider (and invite your loved ones to consider) that grief is not the enemy. In fact, grief is that part of us that serves as a motivator and catalyst for healing – if only we will give grief a chance to work its wonders.
This wisdom story from India, retold in my forthcoming book, Doing Grief in Real Life: A Soulful Guide to Navigate, Loss, Death & Change, serves as an allegory for the intense challenge grievers face in responding to grief:
A youth wanted to befuddle the elder of the village. The old one was said to be exceedingly wise. But the young challenger imagined that youthful wit could outdo the wisdom of the rickety old sage. So, the youth caught a little bird, carried it to the elder, and hiding it between young hands not yet worn or weary, the youth announced:
“I have a riddle for you, old one. Here in my hands is a bird. Tell me – is the bird alive, or is it dead?”
The youth delighted in the game. There was no way for the elder to win. If the old one ventured to guess “dead,” an open hand would release the little creature and the bird would fly free. If the elder guessed “alive,” the youth would set a fist and crush the bird at once.
But the old one looked into the eyes of the young seeker and replied with care, “The answer, my child, is in your hands.”
Such is the puzzle of grieving. Grieving is a life-and-death challenge to which our spirits inquire, however silently or soulfully: “How will we hold our grief?” Will we crush it with silence, denial, a forced sense of victory, or will we open ourselves to grief as a teacher that reminds us how to live fully and freely?”
In our culture, we mistakenly view grief as something that happens to us, like a Covid-19 virus from which we desire to quickly recover. But grief is as common to the human condition as hope or love. Proposing that we “recover from grief,” is like proposing that we recover from being human. There is no such thing as a cure for grief. There is only this: learning to grow our capacities for grieving in ways that inspire healing. Grieving and healing, in fact, are one and the same.
Most of us have only a vague understanding of what grief is and how it affects us. So, let me give you a crash course: There is no universal grieving path. Researchers have proven many times over that stages and phases of grief are a myth from the past. Even so, our foremost grief experts continue to argue among themselves about how grief and grieving ought to be defined. Each one of us (grief experts included) come to grief and grieving from our own unique vantage point.
Through three decades of studying grief and grieving, a question pounded at the door of my psyche: Given our endlessly divergent paths of grieving and healing, is there some sort of navigational tool that might prove to be universally relevant and useful to grievers and healers? For years, I doubted that any bona fide answers existed. But, the grief-related suffering I witnessed in my ministry and personal life prompted years of exploration and pondering.
Suddenly, without warning or effort, I caught the thing – my theoretical Model of Adaptive Grieving Dynamics (MAGD). It flashed into my consciousness: a picture of the human grieving process that expands in all directions. It’s a view of grieving in which all of a griever’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual responses to grief are relevant. Not a paint-by-numbers grieving model, but a picture of the grieving process that provides a sense of relational direction – whatever a griever’s unique responses to grief might be.
Engaging in all four of the MAGD’s grieving dynamics in ways that are meaningful and effective for you –is the essence of adaptive grieving. Together these responses provide needed release, relief, and reprieve from suffering, and help to recreate life and relationships as you adjust to personal, social, and environmental changes brought about by a grief-striking loss. Specific grieving responses (emotions, thinking patterns, behaviors, physiological changes, spiritual perceptions, etc.) fall into one or more of the following categories:
Lamenting: Experiencing and expressing grief-related pain, distress, or disheartenment.
Heartening: Experiencing and expressing what is gratifying, uplifting, or (even, surprisingly) pleasurable within the grieving process.
Integrating: Perceiving the life-shifting changes brought on by a grief-striking loss and incorporating these changes into everyday life.
Tempering: “Taking a break” from grief – that is, suppressing grief-related suffering, or avoiding grief-related changes and realities that distress or overwhelm a griever physically, emotionally, mentally, and/or spiritually.
As you become more familiar with these four universally relevant grieving dynamics, take note of your strengths and needs for balance in the grieving process. Learn from the strengths and growing edges of others. Be careful not to set up camp in only one type of grieving response, because just as each type of response can be a path to healing, each has its limitations. As the good book says, “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh…a time to mourn and a time to dance…a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing…a time to search and a time to give up…a time to be silent and a time to speak” (excerpts from Ecclesiastes 3:4-7). And so it is with seeking a balance of lamenting, heartening, tempering, and integrating as we grieve the losses of a lifetime.
During this Covid-19-Easter season, we write our own grieving biographies as we choose. Our grieving choices will determine whether our grief-related suffering and healing serves to diminish or enhance our relationships with one another, and with everyone and everything the world over.
Right now, as we tune into the palpable pulse of suffering at this extraordinary time in our world history, may we bravely and humbly open our hands to grief. May we allow this God-given gift of our humanity to work its healing powers. Because, we are an Easter people and we are a Lenten people, too.
Editors note: Southwest Folklife Alliance, an affiliate of the University of Arizona, recently interviewed Mary Kay LeFevour. She has graciously shared her words from the interview with us.
Grief work is very spiritual work. How do you spiritually survive losing a beloved? It’s the family members that are left after a death. Trust is the biggest thing that gets jettisoned. There’s the primary loss, of course. But the secondary loss can be a trust in the universe, God, the idea that life is beneficent.
So all those wonderful questions of spiritual inquiry come forward: Who am I now? Who is God? What’s my meaning in life? You’re now swimming in unchartered territory. For a lot of people this is the first time they’re having an existential crisis. You are in the dark night of the soul.
I’ve always loved dark. What’s wrong with the dark? As a Taoist and Buddhist, I know you can’t have one without the other. We are a society in America that denies death and denies grief. When someone experiences a death, society says, “Get over it. Just start consuming, start eating, buy something, find someone new.”
But this place of despair is a great cauldron to bubble in, to find your essential self. This is the time when I feel people are the most open to wisdom or beauty or reconnecting. They have to reinvent themselves. Some call it “post-traumatic growth.” It’s an opportunity for growth, for differentiation, for resilience, to become more of who you are or who you were. Because you have to.
Of course you don’t say any of this to the bereaved. You don’t say it’s all going to be okay, when they’re thinking, I’m lonely and I hate my life and what am I going to do? I just go, Yeah that sucks.
I might quote Victor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, who says we are happier humans when we have meaning. It doesn’t matter what the meaning is, whatever it is you have to create it. Some don’t like that because they believe there is one meaning and that they have to find it.
The trick is to let them swim in the despair or sink into the quicksand and hold that space. Sometimes you have to just let them sit in there. You can’t fix it. You can hold a branch, maybe, but people have to move through it. I just hold the grief and I don’t do anything but hold the grief.
I saw a guy this morning—77 years old, just lost his wife of 50 years. He said, “I’m okay.” He’s been grieving for almost a year. And he did sound pretty good. “I’m okay because I’ve got lots of stuff to do, he said. But it’s hardest at night, when I’m alone.”
People say the nighttime is the worst, the evening. It’s the time of intimacy, snuggling, having dinner, watching TV. That’s when you feel absence. Insomnia is most common presenting grief symptom. So night becomes the enemy, because we make it the enemy instead of the friend.
But mammals, when they’re hurt, find a dark cave and lick their wounds. It’s natural for us to want to go into a cave—it’s dark, we don’t want external stimuli. Bereavement work is not about giving people a spiritual bypass with distractions. They get that from friends and family. I’m the one person who lets them wallow. This is the tax we pay for being human.
Grief isn’t good or bad. It is a human thing. Loss begins from the time we’re born. We lose this cozy place in the womb. Loss is inherent to our life as humans. My feeling is if you can’t avoid it, then what can you do with it?
Grief takes away your artifice, every shred of dignity you’ve had and makes you this mass of vulnerability and also someone who’s open to a different way of living, one that makes sense. That’s what’s exciting to me about it. I get to be at somebody’s birth. You’ve lost and you have to be reborn. I feel like a midwife in that respect and it’s such an honor.
Sometimes you’re just hoping people don’t commit suicide before they get through the dark night. You hope and you hold and that’s all you can do. I don’t even have faith. I have knowing on my side. I’ve seen people go from being barely able to crawl into the room to having a full life again. I see it again and again. I can sit with you in the not knowing. I don’t know if you’re going to make it but I have seen the most desperate people make it.
Rather than resist, through denial, the very thing that’s going to happen–which is that we’re going to die and we are going to lose things we love along the way and we are going to lose parts of ourselves–we can reclaim the night. We may never be able to embrace it wholeheartedly, but we can aim for it. We distract ourselves so we don’t have to pay attention to grief, mortality, death. And then we are unprepared when they come for us.
Many cultures have mourning ritutals–wearing the arm band, the day of the dead, putting a stone on the tombstone, sitting Shiva. The ritual of mourning. But there are so many ways in which we no longer participate in the night. We look at is as something to get through, instead of something to enfold ourselves in.
Again, I’m not going to tell you this when you’re in the quicksand. I’m just going to hold you and tell you it’s okay to feel everything that you feel–angry, abandoned, miserable. All of that is welcome here. That’s what people need–a steady presence that radiates the idea that this is a cycle. This is a cycle. Life is a cycle. It’s going to be a roller coaster, but all things arise, develop, and fall away. All things. There’s no one thing in nature that doesn’t. And grief is that way. Because grief is part of nature.
I never liked poetry. I believed if you had something to say, just say it – don’t couch it in fancy words or with metaphors that nobody understands. Then along came a well-meaning friend who loaned me a book of Mary Oliver poems. It sat on my nightstand filling me with guilt each night that I didn’t open it. After a month, my friend asked how I was enjoying the book and I lied, “Oh, I’m loving it!” But not being a fan of lying and knowing my friend would eventually ask which poem was my favorite, I broke down, opened the book to a random page and read Oliver’s most loved poem, The Summer Day. My life was changed by that one act of opening myself up to this woman’s understanding of loss, sorrow and hope.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her poetry. But what brought her to winning such prestigious awards was growing up in an abusive house where her only escape was to wander the woods near her home. In nature she found her true home and healing for a broken heart.
What we have in common with Ms. Oliver and each other, is that we live in a remarkable place of nature that others might experience as inhospitable. But what we know is that despite living with the constant danger of getting poked by plant life that doesn’t want to be touched is that we are blessed to live in a desert where we are surrounded by daily wonders – the magic and power of a monsoon storm, the collared lizard doing push-ups on our garden wall, the roadrunner stopping on a dime and changing directions as she spies us coming down the wash, the hummingbird taking on all comers to protect his feeder , the coyote sauntering across the road and then turning to give us a smug look before he bounds away into the brush and javalinas who, if you sing to them, will stop and lay down to listen until you’re done with the song.
Mary Oliver’s poems bring me comfort. But why are they comforting? I believe it’s because she continually reminds me to pay attention to the world around me – from the grasshopper to the stars. And when I bring my attention out from the hamster wheel of dark thoughts in my head to the beauty of our desert, I am brought into awe and wonder and that brings me healing.
Ms. Oliver gave these instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. My wish for you is that you find your Mary Oliver who can speak your pain and bring you words of guidance and comfort.
Let me leave you with words from another poet, Rumi, that I’ve come to love (yes, open your heart to one poet and others will push their way in).
Grief can be the garden of compassion if you keep your heart open through everything. Your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.
When I wrote my last blog entry a few months ago, I was “speechless.” So many of us were reeling from the national election results. We were heartbroken, appalled, angry. We were/are grieving.
I have also known deep, gut-wrenching personal grief in my life with the disruption of a cherished relationship. Much of my speech then was moaning and sobbing. Thank Goodness, that dark period turned out to be a womb and not only a tomb. While I looked over the brink into utter despair and lifelessness, I emerged with a spiritual awakening into the indescribable gift of Life.
The grief may include the death of optimism that missed the depth of fear and pain that always lurks below the surface of what appears to be social progress, that always paints the lives of those suppressed/oppressed, that always tinges the views of those afraid of losing position.
The hope is that we have today—Life has graced us with sun, Earth, breath once again. We get to live, we are indeed from and of Life itself. Regardless of how things turn out, the hope is in this question, “How do I want to express Life today?” —and in how we try to show our answer.
That’s likely not a big deal to you, but for those who know me, I am rarely quiet. It’s an aspect of myself that I sometimes judge, that I sometimes embrace, that I sometimes just observe. There are many rooftop shouters and I happen to be one on a lot of occasions. I’ve come to accept that about myself and let it be.
Yet… I find myself quiet in all the ways I normally echo through the halls of my life. This quiet is because I cannot figure out the first word to the next sentence that would make sense of the loss of life in these endless mass shootings.
I have been reading the words of others and watching us collectively attempt that tried-and-true five-part model of coming to terms with grief as offered by Kubler-Ross. The problem is, once we get past that first stage of denial, entering into anger, we have yet another mass killing that brings us back to that denial. We only get to two-step our way through something that requires so much more to navigate.
“What? Another one? How can this be? I blame [fill in the blank]” and we never get to that elusive next step of bargaining then depression then acceptance.
Denial. Anger. Denial. Anger. Repeat.
My first memory of participating in a collective shared grief was when I was 8 and made to attend an elementary school assembly. We were gathered because the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after liftoff and people died. I didn’t fully understand this gathering we were doing. This silence they wanted us to sit with made very little sense to me.
My fellow elementary school peers and I tried to sit quietly, but we were fidgeting and coughing, because we had no idea why we had to suddenly be quiet together. I remember looking around and wishing we could talk again. I wasn’t bored, just completely confused by the whole deal and wanting to get back to whatever we would be doing if this hadn’t happened. As I looked around I noticed that the teachers were crying. Then, the slow dawning of the devastation settled on me.
The space shuttle had a teacher on it. The teacher was going to space, literally doing something out of this world, and that teacher died. Wait, could my teacher die? I remember looking for Mrs. Likes, my favorite teacher, seeing her crying and thinking “That teacher was like Mrs. Likes! Mrs. Likes could die!”
And this was the most tragic thing my new-to-this-world brain could imagine. I was so sad and I cried so hard as I imagined my Mrs. Likes blowing up in a space shuttle.
When we see ourselves or those we love in the death what follows is such a devastation to the soul. This life that we have been taught to nurture could just go away. Just like that. And in violent, murders, someone makes it go away.
“What? Another one? But how can this be?”
I’m trans. I’m queer. I love so many people who are trans and who are queer. This makes relating to the Pulse massacre in Orlando all the more real to me. I was able to cast myself as a dancer on that dance floor without even knowing I was doing the casting. Images came to me with no provocation, like laying my body over my wife’s body because there would be no way on earth I would let her be exposed to death without trying every defense within me.
I have loved ones who are police officers. I could cast them very easily into the badges and uniforms in Dallas, imagining their last breath. I have loved ones who have darker skin than mine and they run a greater risk to die violently and prematurely every single day just because of the bias, prejudice and fear our society has endorsed since the start of our country.
Once we see ourselves and our loved ones in the rampant hate, victimization, and debilitating disparities we can never “un-see” it. And we will often do anything we can to stop it.
Denial. Anger. Denial. Anger. Repeat.
The versions of me, the versions of you, the versions of all those we love are the ones that have their pulse taken from them in places that often had served as sanctuary.
Our souls cry out in denial: “No! Not again! No!”
Our souls grapple with the anger that is oh so appropriate for this loss, “I will stop them! They will not harm me!”
Our souls begin to well up with tears as the bargaining begins, “Please…”
We only can utter the single word of bargaining as it is interrupted by yet another shooting, another body crumpling to the floor. We return to the desperate denial chorus “No! Not again! No!”
Denial.
Anger.
Denial.
Anger.
Repeat.
Then the slow dawning settles on me with an unshakable truth:
That could have been my pulse that slowed and then stopped.
That could have been your pulse that slowed and then stopped.
That could have been the pulse of every single person that we know, every single person we love, that slowed and then stopped.
I’ve been very quiet, stunned into emotional muteness, a seemingly endless moment of silence as I find a new use for my hands that once fidgeted during that assembly thirty years ago. I use those hands now to check my pulse, to feel that life force pumping through my being, to witness the miracle that keeps me breathing and to acknowledge my pulse continues where so many others have ended.
As we go through the dark brokenness that has become the norm, let us never forget how rich, how powerful, how mighty and how unyielding that stubborn flow of life within is in the face of all that attempts to end it. The true grit of the heart keeps on going.
That pulse within you is ancient. That pulse has been giving a rhythm to life in this world since the dawn of time. That pulse is what unites us. That pulse that lives in you speaks to the one that lives in me. The radical act of intentional living in the face of all the destruction is the very thing that steady pulse within has been calling us to all along. And it changes our options, it changes our paths when we invite in the flow of life.
Denial.
It says Look.
Anger.
It says Be.
Bargaining.
It says Please.
Depression.
It says Love.
Acceptance.
It says Live.
I walked around for months with my head down and my chubby little seven-year-old hands clasped . . . around a 1950’s Eastman Kodak Brownie Camera, a Christmas gift from my parents, intended to distract me from the death of my older brother, Billy, whose four-year battle with childhood leukemia had been lost several days before his tenth birthday. Little did they know how symbolic this new lens on life would become for me.
Our family was numb. Our lives had revolved around Billy’s care, keeping him encouraged, doctored and medicated (at the Cleveland Clinic), and rested. We siblings brought his school work home weekly from the Edwin Markham Elementary School, and sat on his bed to play board games, willingly giving up our friendship time to support his health. Our family had purchased one of the first black-and-white T.V.’s for his bedroom so that we could enjoy “The Lone Ranger” and “Howdy Doody” and hope to cheer him up. We had gone to church every Sunday and prayed and done everything right. Of course Billy couldn’t go because of germs. He had died despite our heroic efforts.
Our minister advised that we kids not attend the funeral. Too sad an event, as if we weren’t already devastated and knew exactly what had happened, as if we might live blissfully onward without a care. Billy’s leukemia had been, after all, four years of all of our lives. We stayed home with our grandmother and cried. Our clergy preached that we should all feel happy that Billy was in Heaven with God, no more pain or suffering. They seemed to have no concept of the kind of support we could have used to help us work through the deep hollowness that the death brings.
After my second grade class let out one day, I walked directly to our church and asked to meet with the Head Minister. I was ushered into the office of the Minister for Christian Education, a woman with a strong intellect and little warmth. I sat dwarfed in her huge brown leather wing-back chair and asked if she could help my family with our sadness. She told me to give my life to Jesus Christ and everything would be O.K. She gave me theology when I needed God’s Love and Sustenance. She gave me precepts when I needed the warmth of a faith community.
Within a year, my mother had Stage IV breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. I can still picture my eight-year-old-self standing in shock by her bedside as she showed me her railroad track scar and explained what the doctors had needed to do. From that point our family life struggled. I listened while my mother cried herself to sleep many nights out of a sense of guilt and for fear of losing another child. We were living with the sudden rise of polio and no one knew the causes. My father traveled increasingly for his work. We kids buried ourselves in our school work and tried to be the best daughters and sons possible in order to alleviate our parents’ suffering.
One day, as I shuffled my little feet home from school, one of my brother’s classmates asked me where Billy was. I hesitantly pointed toward the sky. “No!” he exclaimed. “That can’t be true!”
At that moment I realized that there were probably many people in my life who had no idea that my brother had died. A second “aha” came close on the heels of that one – that there were very likely lots of people in the world walking around with smiles on their faces while hiding deep pain. Because that was exactly what my parents and siblings and I were doing. At age seven, radical empathy was born.
This life-changing experience was the jump-start of my spiritual and moral development. It became a lens through which I filtered every life experience. It heightened my sensitivity to people around me, driving me forward with an untamable desire to ease human suffering, especially through the church and God’s Love. This life lens led me to understand that children, adolescents and young adults within and outside of our churches have deep needs for spiritual and moral support and guidance. They may not show that to us, but it is there and they need us to love them. People of all ages and walks of life are doing the best they can and need us to be God’s Love for them.
My experience of my brother’s leukemia and death is something that I rarely discuss but I am very conscious that it was a pivotal experience that has catapulted me into the ministry and the helping professions. There is no greater pastoral care tool for a clergy person than understanding pain, from the inside.
You, too, have stories of pain and struggle that have immeasurably changed who you became, as a person and a professional. That job that you lost, the parent who left, the wayward child, an addiction, a run-in with the law, you know. Are you embracing your “pain stories” ? At least to yourself? Are you recognizing how they have shaped and strengthened you, even though they were extremely difficult? Even though you’d like to bury many of them in your unconscious mind.
We bring “our whole stories” (OWS) to life and to church. It is through the lenses of the “OWS” that we respond to every situation, secular and sacred. Our assumptions, perceptions, conclusions, fears, and actions are ALL filtered through the lens of the “OWS.” Furthermore, every other person in your faith community is having the same individualized experience. We are all looking for healing and acceptance, understanding and deepening, growth and a sense of spiritual peace and goodness, friendship and Love. We are all looking to become better, more whole people.
Jesus made it very clear that God treasures each of our “whole stories.” Warts and all. The woman at the well. The woman who was hemorrhaging. The dishonest tax collector. The mad man inhabited by demons. Our whole stories develop us into God’s people, if we will let them. Our OWS have Power! Together with God, we can turn them into “POWS” !
Jesus lived authentically and embraced the unbelievably difficult aspects of his life and calling. He could have backed down during the last week of his life, but he did not. His “whole story” is what we carry forward as Christianity. If he had not lived “whole-ly,” there would be no Christianity. Jesus gave us a lens through which to perceive and experience life and a role model to follow. The lens is his whole life story.
How have the lenses of your “whole story” informed your development? How has the lens that Jesus provided helped you? Far better lenses than my 1950’s Brownie Camera !
“Be ye perfect (whole) as your Father in Heaven is perfect (whole).” Mt. 5:48
To respond confidentially to this article, you may reach Beth using the contact information on her contributor page.
