Almost everyone is familiar with an old nursery rhyme; now, when I think of it, I realize what a perfect description of life it is:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horse and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Have you ever noticed that life changes without our permission? Nobody asks us, not even God, whether or not we want a particular stress in our lives. Whether or not we want losses: the loss of a job or our health or a loved one's health, or the death of a marriage or the death of a pet or the death of a much-loved person in our lives. Love, grief, stress, suffering, loss, illness, and death are all part of the human condition. And no one, not even God, asks our permission about whether or not these things should happen to us. They just happen, often without warning. They are out of our control. No one prepares us by telling us how to cope with them. So cope with them we must, and at first we usually cope very badly.
We don't know what to do with our grief. Like Humpty Dumpty, we've taken a very hard fall. And we're shattered. Broken into pieces. No one will ever be able to put us back together the way we were.
When we're shattered by grief, we feel as if our whole self is under attack. Because we're shattered, our whole self is changing, and that especially impacts our relationships, how we love. Our relationships with ourselves, with God, with our family and friends are under tremendous stress. I call this the "Humpty Dumpty Effect" on us:
We don't know how to love ourselves. Our hearts are simultaneously broken and dead and raging with anger, grief, guilt, and overwhelming pain. Even our bodies feel pain - like a knife in the chest. We are in such shock that we can't think straight. Our bodies are exhausted and paralyzed and we often fall into addictions because we want anything, anything! that can give us a brief pleasure to numb the unbearable pain. We're living on automatic. We haven't the energy to think past the next minute, hour, or day.
We don't know how to love or trust God anymore. There's a hole in our souls that we think can never be re-filled. Our souls can experience a total upset of our relationship with God. We can feel that God is punishing us or abandoning us. We can be consumed with anger at God or with asking God over and over again "Why is this happening to me or to us?"
Our relationships with family and friends change. We can feel alone, totally isolated. We think that no one can possibly understand what we're suffering. People can make insensitive and unthinking comments. Others seem inaccessible even if they've suffered the same loss because they grieve differently than we do. Men and women especially grieve differently. They feel the same emotions, but they act on them differently. Often our anger spills over into terrible irritability; our emotions are so fragile that they snap - and we snap - with the least bit of stress.
So, how can we love ourselves, God, and others in healthy positive ways when we're grieving?
Maybe at this point you're asking yourselves if what I'm saying is a professional lecture, or a head trip. It's not. I've experienced everything that I've written and will write about. Here's my story:
In the "Before" period of our lives, my husband Paul and I were happy, content. We had five loving children, five loving in-law children, and a growing brood of grand-children. Paul had finally retired from a hectic, stressful career as a city school teacher and then administrator. Those stresses were balanced by his vocation of Catholic Permanent Deacon. Being able to preach, baptize babies, and marry couples had helped to balance his life's stresses. We''d even coped with his diagnosis of Type Two Diabetes; his determined diet changes and exercising had made his body even healthier in some ways.
Ten years ago, when we were both in our sixties, our Pastor and then our Bishop asked us if we would be willing to become Co-Pastoral Administrators of our small city parish. This was a huge honor, but it came with a question mark in our hearts. We agreed, though with some misgivings; it was also a huge responsibility for a retired couple to take on. Our parishioners had never even heard of parish administrators. They were loving and supportive, but they also asked us when they would again have a priest as pastor.
It was during this already stressful period in our lives that all hell literally broke loose. Four terrible things happened to us.
First, our fourth child, thirty-nine year old Peter, married with three small adopted children, developed a glioblastoma, an incurable brain tumor. Our "Sweeter Peter," who did so much good in the world: a teacher at the Gow School for dyslexic boys, an adjunct Professor at Buffalo State College, an actor, singer, song-writer, - was given fourteen months to live at most. He had two surgeries, the second of which severely affected his ability to speak and partially paralyzed the right side of his body. He lived for about thirteen months and died of a seizure the day before our wedding anniversary.
During the same time that Peter was ill, my mother developed severe dementia, with paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and incontinence, and finally lost her ability to walk. My sisters, husband, and I had to work to place Mom in a nursing home, which happened a month before Peter died. She kept begging to come home, which ripped our hearts to pieces because we could no longer care for her at home. (She is still alive, at one hundred and one.)
Six months after our son died, my husband went up the stairs in the rectory, searching for the priest who was supposed to say Mass, and found him dead in his room, a suicide. Along with our grief and shock and the onset of my husband's post traumatic stress syndrome, we had to care for our shocked, grief-stricken parishioners, some of whom thought that their beloved priest would automatically go to hell. We brought in speakers and counselors for our parish family. Of course our beloved priest friend is in heaven, we said. He was severely depressed. He wasn't in his right mind. Our God is a God of mercy who loves His children especially when they are most vulnerable and hurting. My husband and I both started going for counseling.
Less than three years after our son died, our oldest daughter, Mary Beth, developed breast cancer, had a mastectomy, and went through chemotherapy and radiation. She was just recently declared cancer-free. But her life and ours, once again, have irrevocably changed.
So I ask, once again, when we fall off a wall repeatedly, get broken to pieces repeatedly, how can our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies begin to heal? How can we heal our relationships and learn again how to love ourselves, God, and family and friends?
Leonard Cohen, a devout Jew who wrote that beautiful poem/song/anthem
"Alleluia," also wrote the following:
Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
For so many years of our lives, we try to project a perfect image of ourselves TO ourselves and to the world. We're not perfect, never were. But thinking we are prevents our learning that we're small, fallible human beings who need God. Only the great Mysteries of Love and Suffering crack us open enough for the healing Light of God to enter us and guide us as we seek to rebuild our shattered relationships: with ourselves, God, and others.
It's so important to love ourselves. Having a strong love of ourselves and respect for ourselves is the only way that we'll be able to withstand the uncaring or advice-ridden voices of the world around us.
NO ONE CAN TELL US HOW TO GRIEVE! We all grieve differently!
No one can tell us how long our grieving will last (it lasts forever.)
No one can tell us how long we should take before we give away possessions - or decide which ones to keep.
No one can tell us how often we should go to the graveyard.
No one can tell us how much we should be alone, or be with others, when and if we should cry, when we should sleep.
No one can tell us when or if we should date again.
Loving ourselves can be a tall order, especially if we feel that we're out of control. But loving ourselves means being patient with ourselves. Because God is patient with us.
We can and should love ourselves because we've first been loved by God. Not a distant God Who created the world - and us - and then turned away, occupied with more important things. God is our Father who says to us as He said to Jesus "You are My beloved son or daughter in whom I am well-pleased." Jesus, both God and human, said to us that we should love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. That means that we should also love ourselves with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength - and strength can also mean "body." Loving myself meant realistically accepting my current limits, not pushing myself too much lest I fall apart, being sensitive to my real mental, physical, and emotional needs.
If I currently was bewildered by the changes in myself, I had to accept and understand the changes in my relationship with God, a relationship that grief had shattered. I had always had a good, open relationship with God. I'd never been afraid to talk to God about anything. Now I had this new onslaught of emotions and I knew I had to share these with God in order to keep our relationship honest. I'd yell, howl, sob at God, crawl into a fetal position, throw things, tell God how angry I was, scream at God asking "Why? Why is this all happening?" I had to keep fighting to trust God, trust that God was always there with me, and that God understood every human emotion that I had. God understood that I no longer felt safe in this Universe. I now knew that anything could happen.
How do I know God understands? Because God became human in Jesus. Jesus experienced every human emotion that we have. Jesus sobbed and asked God "why?" in the Garden of Gethsemane. He asked if it would be possible for him to not have to suffer and die. He knew he was facing death and he shuddered and cried over the death of his dreams for his ministry - did it have to end now, after only three years?
On the cross, Jesus, physically exhausted and in terrible pain, weakened by a profound loss of blood, cried out "My God! My God! Why have You abandoned me?" He could no longer sense the comforting Presence of His Father, the same way that so often we can feel abandoned by God. Some theologians believe that at that moment, when Jesus felt totally helpless and alone, he saved us.
What radical love for us is this! God suffered helplessly in Jesus. God died in Jesus. God, Who did not fear coming so close to us, Who became human to be WITH us, is closest to us when we suffer. God knew that when we suffer, the only God Who makes sense to us is a crucified Jesus. The only God Who could be the Way for us is this Jesus who in spite of his being near death could still trust his Father enough to say "Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit." The only God Who makes sense to us when we're grieving is a God Who died yet who would be raised from the dead so that we also would be raised from the dead. In the end, there will be eternal life, justice and balm for all the suffering and the oppressed of the world.
Because God loves us, understands us, and accepts us, we have to learn how to love and accept ourselves, especially when we are exhausted, under stress, and/or grieving. If Jesus could fall three times carrying his cross, he's going to understand all our falls. When I failed to hold on to my temper, I learned that FAIL stands for "first attempt in learning." I had to continue to love myself even when I felt the most unlovable. And learn to say "I'm sorry."
And when we fall, how much better we understand Jesus, have a whole new appreciation of what Jesus did for us when he emptied himself of his divinity and took on our humanity. The Risen Jesus still bears his wounds in his flesh, his badges of honor, made glorious. By his wounds, we are healed so that we too can become wounded healers. I survived by holding on to those wounded hands of Christ.
I learned new ways of loving and appreciating others. Those who had also lost adult children, both parishioners and members of the Diaconate community, were life-lines for me. At the wake, I hugged them, saying "You understand." Going to Mass in the parish, I was continually humbled when parishioners came up to me with simple words of love and understanding and promises of prayers. One couple who'd lost an adult daughter said simply "It'll get better." The fact that they could smile, survive, and stay involved in life gave me hope that we could and would too. The parishioner who confessed to me that she was angry at God over the loss of her husband and daughter yet she came to Mass each week was an inspiration to me because of her faithfulness during her grief.
My husband and I had to learn new ways of loving and understanding each other. Men and women have the same feelings of grief, but they act on them differently. And also we grieved differently because our personalities are different. When my body and mind desired rest and quiet, his body and mind craved t.v. and people. He often found balance in going to our workplace because men often have to work through and work off their grief rather than talk about it. If I cried, he would be upset because he couldn't fix my pain. We both felt such guilt because we had been helpless and could not help our son and daughter. We were healthy and well and our son was dead and our daughter was going through agonizing suffering.
We wandered dangerous territory because the death of a child puts the greatest stress on a marriage. Sometimes we yelled at each other. Sometimes we sat in isolating silence.
Paul's grief was also complicated by our priest's suicide. When I was floundering to the other side of grief over Peter, he was just beginning, because his grief for our son had been "held up" by his shock over a suicide.
We learned to love each other at a deeper level. To simply hold each other when there were no words. To be there for each other's tears and groans and whispered words of grief.
We both had to believe that, Humpty Dumpties that we were, the Light of God was entering through our cracks to re-fashion us into new beings. Never the same. But in some ways better, stronger, even more whole. We had to discover that we did want to live. That life is very, very good. This was hard. Because it's said that every parent who loses a child loses the will to live, even is tempted to commit slow suicide through unhealthy behavior.
I had to wake up and realize that my addictive over-eating was a slow suicide, that I was hurting my true self, who lived deep inside me and spoke the truth to me always. I finally woke up and wanted to love, protect, and listen to my true self who wanted the best for me. My true self was telling me that the only way to overcome grief was to accept the pain, live with it, walk through it. To wrestle with the pain and learn from it rather than to try to escape from it or numb it with addictive behavior. So often we think God only loves our souls. But God loves our bodies too, the temples of His Holy Spirit. God -and my true self - both whispered to me to love my whole self, soul and body. I finally began to diet.
We both had to wake up and rediscover and reinvent new lives for ourselves. We had to begin adopting the good healthy behaviors that would help us de-stress, and experience anew the power of being loved by God in all the experiences of our daily lives. Because God lives in every loving and lovely moment: in our laughing, crying, being creative, being with people who love us, making love, praying, yoga, exercise, being with nature.
God wants the very best for each of us, for all of us. God doesn't make bad things happen to us or those whom we love - God loves them as much or more than we do. God doesn't punish us with illness, tragedies, or deaths. These are the inescapable facts of life in an imperfect world. What God does do is give us the strength, the wisdom, the courage, the love to endure and live through grieving, allow it to deepen our spirits, and re-discover that life is good. Life is very, very good.
When tragedies happen, there is a death that happens to us. We can never return to the Before. Dreams for our futures die. We know we will never be the same again. But Jesus died and then was raised by his Father from the dead. We have deaths in our lives, but we also have resurrections, new life. Our true self remains, changed but deepened, matured, purified, enriched, more compassionate, less fearful. We are survivors, after all.
And we can discover wonderful experiences in the After. In the last few years, we've had two beautiful grand-daughters be born, we've watched our other grand-children grow more into their beautiful selves. Our son's widow fell in love again, and brought her fiance to meet us. He asked her to invite us to their wedding in October, and we went.
Now we treasure all our relationships because we know how fragile they are. There isn't time for arguments and pettiness in this life. The simple truth is: Life is good. Never waste it. You are lovable, born to enjoy the gift of life. Believe in yourself and treat yourself for the person you are, a son or daughter of the Living God Who carries us through deaths to new life experiences over and over again until He carries us to our new homes in eternal life where there will be no more tears, no more mourning, only love and joyful reunions.
"Blessed be God, the Father of Mercies, Who comforts us in our afflictions so that we can comfort others with the same consolation that we have received from Him."