The Nature of Grief
Atlanta, GA
John Adams once asked a septuagenarian Thomas Jefferson if he’d willingly live his life over again. Jefferson assured him that he would, while acknowledging that “even in the happiest life, there are some terrific convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account.”
That brought Jefferson, who had suffered considerably, to the question of grief. “I have often wondered”, he said, “for what good end the sensations of grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object, but what is the use of grief?”
Adams’s gave a thoughtful response that satisfied Jefferson, who assured his older friend that “to the question on the utility of Grief, no answer remains to be given….I see that, with the other evils of life, it is destined to temper the cup we are to drink.”
I have been fortunate. In my life, grief has been fleeting. I’ve lost relatives, but few before their time. My wife is well, my sons are healthy, my parents are active, and my brother and his family are fine.
But this year, I feel like I’ve been informed of more deaths, attended more funerals, written more eulogies, and sent more condolence cards than in most that have come before. Among the living, we’ve learned of serious illnesses affecting members our extended family, and pray they are terminal only to the extent we all are.
At my age, this is all to be expected. My wife’s father died two months ago. My boss, who I also consider a friend, lost his dad a few months before that. Another dear friend lost hers in February. I learned last week that a former work colleague, a year younger than me, died last month. Other co-workers and friends have recently mourned parents, siblings, and spouses.
Obviously, my father-in-law was a significant loss, and leaves a gap that will never close. We continue to grieve for him, and to some extent always will.
But when friends suffer loss, our task is not as clear. It is less to partake of their grief (which can seem contrived and, in any event, may be impossible) than to support them thru it. The result is often formulaic and trite, but the effort is usually appreciated.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know exactly what the afflicted are feeling, or the exact nature of their suffering. But that’s OK. For the most part, they don’t either. And they don’t need (or want) us to tell them.
Besides, the process varies for everyone, and changes over time, and at different rates, for each person. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy people smile in similar fashion, but mournful ones grieve in their own way.
It’s usually enough for our friends to know that, like a lifeguard surveying a stormy sea, we are there…even if (perhaps especially if) we don’t say anything at all. They may need to soak in their grief. We should simply make ourselves available to ensure they don’t drown.
CS Lewis made this point in his poignant account, “A Grief Observed”, of his emotional and philosophical struggles after the death of his wife. He said he felt like an invisible blanket had risen between him and the world. Yet he dreaded his empty house, and wanted others around. He just preferred they talk to one another instead of to him.
I don’t know why I pulled this short book from my shelf this weekend. I hadn’t read it since I bought it a quarter century ago. But when I saw it Saturday night, I started leafing thru it, and finished it before I went to bed.
Lewis, one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century, confessed to fearing not that he’d realize God didn’t really exist, but that he’d learn what God was really like.
His initial impressions, in the wake of his wife’s death, startled and unnerved him. “I turn to God when I really need him and what do a I find? A door slammed in my face. The sound of bolting and double-bolting. After that…silence.”
Had Lewis been worshiping a fair-weather diety? Like a fickle friend, would He be there only for the good times, but vanish when they got rough? Would He join you for drinks at the bar, then slip out the back once a fight broke out? To Lewis, a lifelong bachelor who had finally been granted true love, only to have it suddenly taken away, that’s the way it seemed. He was asking God for help, or at least an explanation, but received no answer.
Lewis, during his grief, asked his brother, “If you were God and you had created man and woman, what would you do? Let them love each other, and then lose each other? Or keep them safe from both the love and the pain?”
“I’d let them choose for themselves.”
Lewis agreed, and expressed no regret on his choice. But then continued, “It doesn’t seem fair does it? If you want the love, you have to have the pain.”
But ultimately, that is inevitably the case. As Madeleine L’Engle put it, “the death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one must accept that one of them will die before the other.”
Lewis described his grief as a feeling of fear, or suspense. It was like waiting around for things, none of which were worth starting. Everything was “permanently provisional”. Emptiness abounded. Nothing mattered.
Several people I have talked to have felt the same way during this trying year. They may not have lost a loved one, but they have lost direction. Plans they’d made are suspended, and they have no idea when, or whether, they’ll be resumed. It’s almost as if they are grieving for themselves.
Their world is becoming unremarkable and bland. A sense of drift and pointlessness is slowly settling upon it, like the first dusts of snow that slowly cover a once colorful garden. What will remain when it melts? Anything?
As Lewis put it, will there come a time when we no longer ask why the world has become what it is, because we come to accept the squalor and turpitude as normal? I confess, this is less a question I hear others raise than one that constantly comes to my mind when I consider our present, and what seems to be our foreseeable, state of affairs.
Among Lewis’s chief laments was that happiness didn’t come to his wife till late in her life. Then, at long last, she had it, and her “palate for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit was fresh and unspoiled”. She was finally in position to savor them. But, just as she began to take a bite, “the food was snatched away”.
Before long, Lewis, a man of faith who had been so instrumental instilling or reinforcing that of others, started to receive reassurance. Like Jefferson, he began to get answers that, while perhaps not entirely satisfying, were at least somewhat comforting.
It occurred to him that to receive more, he had to grab less. That he couldn’t see anything when his eyes were blurred with tears. Like a drowning man who sinks if he clutches too hard, or one who cries so loud he silences the voice he hopes to hear.
He slowly understood that he wouldn’t ever “get over” losing his wife, much as an amputee could never fully recover a lost leg. Sharp pain of the initial separation would eventually dissipate, and the stump would slowly heal.
The amputee could then continue to function, but he’d never be the same. He’d have periodic pangs when he saw, tried, or returned to certain things. He’d get on with life, perhaps with a crutch or a wooden leg. But he’d never again be a biped. And to get where he wanted to go, he’d have to go to God, not thru Him.
We expect grief, like the travesties of the last year, to pass. But the transition probably won’t be striking or sudden, like flipping a calendar or saying a prayer. Rather, as Lewis said, it will be like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. By the time you notice, it will already have been underway for some time.
JD
