A year ago, we considered topics that we thought we would be helpful to hear about from different voices and different points of view. Almost immediately, we all said, “grief.” Grief will visit every one of us. We decided to write about grief in these months that are in between winter and spring; in between epiphany and Easter. Lent is the middle passage that takes us through Jesus’s life, through Jesus’ death, and delivers us again to Life. Join us as we walk through grief together.
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for we once held close.”
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Frances Weller
I walk forward in church watching the people in front of me receive ashes from our priest. With each step I take, I remember my mother. She, who was so vibrant and full of life, died eight years ago from Alzheimer’s. She was unusually young to die from a memory loss disease. As I remember my own death each Ash Wednesday, the memory of her death comes to me, too. Today is no different.
“From dust you came,
And to dust you will return.”
I step up and look my priest in the eye. I listen. He tells me about ashes and dust. His words spark an image of the dusty Texas cemetery where my mother’s grave rests beneath a live oak. The priest rubs ashes in the shape of the cross on my forehead. Our eyes lock for a brief second. I step back and turn.
I think about the funerals that came in rapid succession. For a long time, my grandparents and mother were healthy and full of life. Until suddenly, they weren’t. I lost my grandmothers, my grandfather, and my mother in a short span of years. We even lost a beloved family dog. I remember the shocking dissonance of seeing no life in the bodies I had always known to be full of life.
“Someday,” I think as I walk back to my seat, “that will be my fate.”
As I said goodbye to the people who raised me, I was raising teenagers. Mom died the semester my son left home for college. So much disappeared in the blink of an eye. Gone, the home I grew up in. And gone, people who loved me unconditionally. Meanwhile, the end of our child-rearing years quietly, quickly approached and another bittersweet loss hovered before me.
Personifying grief helps me remember to be hospitable to what I dread. When I picture Grief, I see an older woman. Her gray hair is pinned up, but a bit messy. Her face is soft and wise from her experiences with sorrow. She has kind eyes. I do not fear her. I have learned not to turn away.
I have learned to welcome her company. Like Mary, standing vigil at the foot of her son’s cross, Grief stays with me. With quiet knowing, Grief directs my steps toward painful places I think I don’t want to go. I realize, however, that Grief tells the truth. I need to go where she leads because that is the path that also leads to life. I trust her now.
I feel her presence first. When Grief slips her hand into mine, my heart literally hurts. My head hurts. My throat gets thick. Tears brim in my eyes. I often notice my own exhaustion. Grief holds my hand.
“Together,” Grief says, “we walk together.” I nod. She leads. My job is to pay attention and notice where and when I hurt.
I look for absences and name them—I miss the daily two o’clock phone call with mom, I remember my Tennessee Mimi’s laugh, I recall going to “town” to see the Christmas displays with my Texas grandmother, I remember laughing and playing dominoes with my granddad.
I stare at the empty space on the floor, where my golden retriever loved to sleep in a puddle of sunlight. I touch the empty space beside me where my goldendoodle came to snuggle just months ago. I see the extra leash hanging on the peg, unused now, and feel the absence of my chocolate lab, her tail wagging, beside me. My heart squeezes inside my chest. Tears fall. Grief nods her head and steps closer to me.
Each absence I find is filled with memories so vivid I feel like I am reliving them. In a way, I am. I am savoring those little moments. Each absence is filled with the presence of love.
This is why I welcome her. Grief is witness to love—little loves and big loves.
Nothing is lost in love.
Hello Jennifer, thank you, this is so beautiful and resonates completely with me. You have blessed me. I wrote a poem a few years back about the desolation/hope of one particular loss of mine: “Grief is the friend who will listen to me talk about you…We talk long with pleasure…We are not sad, Grief and I, as we retell the stories…”
Ok, now I’m weeping!
FYI, I’m a friend of Alicia Brummeler.