There is something about being in the throes of grief, that makes you want to compare it to something. Our brains work that way, I guess. We need a framework in which to place our experiences. And grief is an experience for which there is no good framework.
So we say it is like an ocean, that moves with the tides, that is vast and huge and daunting.
And we say it is like a mountain range, it seems so overwhelming, and yet there is another side.
And we say it is like the wind, unpredictable, tossing you here and there, leaving you needing something strong to hold onto.
Being in the throes myself this year, I don’t find a lot of our metaphors to be helpful. I can understand them, appreciate them even. I just find them lacking. Maybe everyone in this company of grief feel the same. I don’t know.
For me, grief cannot be compared to something temporary, or something that must be overcome. It’s persistent, and consistent, and I fear the day it’s not.
I’m finding grief to be the body’s expression that something is irrevocably changed, in a way that I would not have chosen, had I been given a choice. It has altered my sleeping and my eating, the way my heart feels inside my chest, the cadence of my breathing.
And there are counselors for the sleeping, and advice for the eating. There is yoga for the breathing, and meditation for the heart. And while health is always the priority, perhaps the body’s grief just needs to be. Perhaps part of this human experience is to love and to lose in a way where all of yourself has to find a new way to be.
If I had to choose a metaphor, it would be something like a giant hole, a chasm that has stretched out inside of me. It hurts beyond measure, and it is showing my places in myself I didn’t know existed. Perhaps to move through the grief without feeling every terrible part of it is to risk this. The grief can’t expand past the limits of your body, so in it’s expansion, perhaps you are expanded too.
I am finding that the only way to grieve is to just grieve. To take the advice and see the counselor. To practice the yoga and meditate in prayer. And then to go about the world bursting into tears at weird times and being angry and happy inappropriately, and just not give a shit.
This is grief. Like the mountains, like the oceans, like whatever thing one finds it helpful to compare to, it cannot be controlled, and should not be pacified. It can only be endured. And that endurance is holy.
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers this:
There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and helps us to preserve - even in pain - the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.
I agree.