“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

I don’t want to tie this up neatly because so much of life as we see it is unresolved. We would have to take some really strong painkillers to make any sort of order to this chaotic existence plausible. It is bent and we cannot fix it. We need faith to see a new order emerging, we need hope so we can feel something above the present mire and we need love so eternity makes sense as the final unspooling of things.

 I am slowly coming around to this at the end. The idea that this is not the end. Of course you know it in theory. You read the good book, the characters there seem to be living in some alternate reality but are present and you have this idea of the Christ risen. You might even feel that the drama about His death was unnecessary. Why all this crying and all this fear?

No book is a life though it may contain scenes of real life. In life we will face the real sadness, the crippling loss, the grief and the silence of death. That there is a larger picture will not occur automatically to the grieving heart.

We already ought to let ourselves and others grieve as they can. It is not a slap on the face on any gods and the only God we say matters is not as small minded as we are. He is not small minded at all. He can take the slings of: where are you? What are you doing? He can answer when we ask about the silence.

And answer He will. I have never put a question up there that did not come back down in an answer. It is not always the answer I want. Sometimes it takes a while to hear it. Silence is just the expectation of the voice. 

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

Is there a time to stop grieving? Life presses back on you very hard. The lessons we are supposed to learn: the fleeting nature of everything, the immediacy of love and care, and the things we should do and say as quickly as we can, these lessons are left at the graveside. It is a glitch and not a reboot of the whole system. We may be changed by it in some superficial way but our character is a harder sell. In a few hours we move on to the next thing. Sadness is the only remnant of the experience. The new habit is perhaps to hold on to life more dearly, to be more careful with our health and to avoid the pitfalls of the fallen life.

Yet we are not on earth for any other purpose but to learn to receive love and to give love freely. The rest are ancillary pursuits. 2^nd Corinthians 13 has clarified that point for us. We should not worry, the Christ says, about food or clothes or housing. Material progress for the Christian is related to spiritual progress. I do not know how that all works out in every life. I only know how it has worked out in mine. I do not know how every grieving soul makes their peace with the silence of the missing person. I only know now that I can see more clearly than I did yesterday. Death shows us the silliness of fights, of grudges, of keeping quiet, of regret and of thinking “tomorrow will be the day that I will say what I should say or act as I should act”. The Christ told this to us: today is the only day you should concern your active selves’ in. Tomorrow lies in silence. Tomorrow is in God.

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

There is a lot of advice about grief. It has this fantasy about it: the idea that it makes you wiser for the pain. Is there any wisdom in pain? Probably that you do not want to feel that way again. All the advertised cures are about the end of it. Time will heal, eternity will correct all the crooked lines, and it will all make sense in the end. It is all designed to keep you walking away from pain and into some sort of hope.

Well, that is better than the alternative. Stewing will do no good. The normal face of it, the everyday nuts and bolts of feeling empty and bitter and sad is surely helped by time. You forget that you are grieving sometimes. You make jokes, you dance, and you find levity in moments away from your own consciousness. Then it hits again. There is something at the back of your mind that comes slouching forward. It reminds you that there is real loss here.

There is nothing wrong with feeling this loss. Isn’t the most enigmatic phrase about Jesus this: He wept?  Not just for his friend but at the idea of death and decay and loss and the great ravaging of the human experience by original sin. It is absurd that we die, Camus says, and we come face to face with it through grief. It cannot add up. It does not add up. It should not add up.

I am ranting. Forgive me. Early nights and early days. A little insomnia and the threat of thinking on these things too much. Yet, there is a joy. A peace. The smell of water. If grief is slouching then truth is walking confidently. I can see words again. Things matter again. I can remember him and all that jazz we had once. I can close my eyes and be on that farm again. Siblings beside me, his smile behind me and the future all forward like eternity. Joy is knocking at my door every day. I will learn to answer more. 

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

It has been the strangest two or three weeks of my life. You know all the details. Tragedy has not come as a gentle rain but as a raging storm and I am overwhelmed by it. I cannot say I am normal. There is no method in this particular madness.  There is no way to shut the door on all feelings and when I pick them out one by one there is nothing. I find myself unmoved by life, numb and in serious danger of letting all that is left slip by me. They say that God seems silent in the worst moments. I am silent too.

It is not that I am hiding some received wisdom or I am calmer after the event. I genuinely have nothing to say. All my thoughts are jumbled up together and amount to nothing. All my words seemed forced. I act like a character in a play about grief and I watch my own performance from the safety of indifference and only belt out the most stinging criticisms.

 This cannot be how to deal with things. In my infancy, in my first sparks of grief on earth, I had the same reaction. I cried off other tears, I felt empty off the physical loss itself but I was no closer to being in the reality of what was lost. I had nothing to say and so I made it up.

I would like to say that time makes it better or more real but that has not been my experience with it. It goes into memory and people around me refer to it and I say the prescribed lines but nothing changes. I am stuck in that dead room with no air and so silence.

At least now I can write about it. Now, I can see what is happening. This is the one in which I am involved in the finer details. I must cobble together some sort of response to it. I do not live alone anymore. The grief is expected but the silence simply will not do.