There are stages to grief that have to simply be lived through. And often they repeat again. But living through them, through grief, is the only way to move from brokenness to healing.
Five years ago, I threw myself on my bed and a howl came out of me that sounded as if it came from a wounded animal. And then, another howl.I refused to believe what had happened. It wasn't true. It couldn't be true. My beautiful forty year old son couldn't be dead. I'd just kissed and hugged him two days ago. Yes, he had a brain tumor, but he was not supposed to die - NOW. How could I face never seeing him, touching him, hearing his laugh, again? I'd always believed in life after death, but now I was scared in the face of death's finality, not certain any longer. WOULD I ever see him again? In fact, nothing was secure or certain any more. Nothing in life. Life had betrayed me. God had betrayed me by allowing this to happen to our family. My certainty of God's love for me had evaporated. The only reality was this terrible, gut-wrenching howling and sobbing that took over my life and afflicted me daily. How long could this last before I split in two?
Holidays were unbearable, his birthday and death-day were unbearable, those first few years. There were no longer any memories to make with him. "Death is not difficult because it ends a relationship. Death is difficult because it ends the memory-making that is the real substance of life. 'There is no greater grief,' Dante wrote, 'than the misery of recalling happier times.'" (Sr. Joan Chittister) I couldn't bear to even open up a family photo album. Seeing the past good times we'd had brought back my grief a thousand-fold. Yet I know others who grieve by living inside those photo albums and videos, frozen there, unwilling to emerge into the present pain. My only prayers were a constant angry and anguished "Why?" God was silent. There was no possible answer that God could give me that I could understand.
"The second stage of grief is when we believe the loss to be unbearable and so go numb. We refuse to feel what we fear we cannot endure. And in that refusal run the risk of becoming numb to everything. This is the stage that saves us from desolation but dims our vision." (Sr. Joan Chittister)
I was numb most of the time. I couldn't feel anything except grief. Life was a constant grayness. I couldn't experience enthusiasm. I felt as if my heart had died, and caused all interest in living or participating in life to die as well. I was emotionally paralyzed. Lethargic. No energy. Somehow this was more frightening to me than the grief. People came up to me, spoke to me, and everything they said just drifted by me. People expected me to respond, to be interested in what they were saying to me - and I just wasn't. Was I a zombie now? Not even alive any more? I was curled up in a safe shell of withdrawal.
But - I had a very large family. Many friends. People depended on me to be interested in them, to participate in their lives. Slowly, imperceptibly, my prayers began to shift. "Lord," I begged, "don't let me stop loving. Please let me feel love and concern! I don't want to become so wrapped up in this son who is dead that I stop loving my living children and grand-children and friends." Almost without my realizing it, the numbness began to ease up. But it took a long time. Five years later, I can still feel numb from time to time.Part of my heart is dead, and always will be. But - I can laugh again. Feel joy again. Want to live again.
"The third stage of grief is when we begin to believe enough in ourselves to be able finally to let go of one stage of life in order to embrace the rest of it once more. This is the stage that resurrects the heart." (Sr. Joan Chittister)
As time passed, I realized that I wasn't thinking of my dead son every minute of the day. At first, I felt guilty about that. I felt that, if I didn't think of him, that meant that I didn't love him anymore. But that was foolish! Maybe what this meant was that I had finally let go of him so that he could live his new life with God, and I could continue to live my life here. I had also realized that my faith in Heaven, in life after death, was intact. By this time, I had "forgiven" God for allowing my son to die. Life for my family was continuing to unfold. My widowed daughter-in-law remarried, proving that the heart can resurrect and discover new love, new hope. My son had fulfilled his mission with her and their children; God had given them someone good and loving who would continue the journey with them. Two new grandchildren were born. My husband and I were beginning to regain our interest in doing things that we had abandoned doing. In fits and starts, my family was emerging from the labor of dying into a new birth.
My faith had undergone a "sea change." I had finally realized why "our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man." (Fr. Richard Rohr)
The only image of God that carried me, got me through my long years of grief was and is the crucified Christ. Often in my prayer times, in my sobbing in near-total despair, my imagination would bring me the image of those blessed bleeding hands, that opened heart.
God, I knew with certainty, had suffered for me and was suffering with me. Not a distant God, but a God beside me and within me. A God breathing next to me in my darkness. A God screaming with me "Father, why have You abandoned me?" A God Who carried me until I could finally say with renewed trust, with a resurrected heart "Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit, my whole self. Because if I don't trust You, I have no relationship with You."
Fr. Richard Rohr tells us,
"I believe - if I am to believe Jesus - that God is precisely suffering love. If Jesus is the living 'image of the invisible God' (Colossians 1:15), and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God is in some very real way suffering. God is not watching it, but is in it! How else can we understand the revelation of the cross and that our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man? Christians strangely worship a suffering God, largely without realizing it; and Christian mystics even say that there is only one cosmic suffering, and we all share in it, as Paul also seems to intuit (Colossians 1:24).
"Many of the happiest and most peaceful people I know," Rohr continues, "love this 'crucified God' who walks with crucified people, and thus reveals and 'redeems' their plight as God's own. For them, Jesus is not observing human suffering from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with us and for us.
He includes all our suffering in the co-redemption of the world, as 'all creation groans in one great act of giving birth.' (Romans 8:22.) We 'make up in our own bodies all that has still to be undergone for the sake of the Whole Body.'"
We can see that our entire lives are filled with constant deaths and resurrections, pain and sufferings followed by new life, if we consciously live our lives in the pattern of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. If we allow Him, God can use everything in our lives, including pain and grief, to transform us into new, stronger, more resilient people, with hearts softened by grief to become ever more compassionate. With our permission, God can use our offered-up sufferings to heal and save others, because we are connected with the Whole Body of Christ, and what affects us can affect them in mysterious, life-giving ways.
Grief can never leave us; it's the measure of the depth of our love. But we can live through the terrible pain and darkness and numbness of grief and eventually emerge into a mellow sunlight, the Light of Christ. We become butterflies, flying above and beyond the dark storm! The death of someone we love forcibly reminds us that one day we too will die - and we need to treasure every moment of life and prepare for our next life by never losing our God-given ability to love. Love will lead us home to ourselves and to God.
"Death is the final embrace of life - the first embrace of the Living God. We must spend all the rest of time preparing for both." (Sr. Joan Chittister)