Lenten Journey: Emotional Exploration – Grief

After reflecting on Anger last time, I thought I would go light and reflect on Grief.

On the one hand, this would should be easier for me since I have worked in Grief for a good part of my professional life and I’ve lectured on the topic. On the other hand, Grief is a unique experience each time you journey through it even if there are familiar patterns.

I am familiar with Grief in my personal life. When I was three years old, my dad’s oldest brother died in an airplane crash. Several years later, my cousin died just barely after his first birthday as a result of one of the more lethal aspects of Downs Syndrome. We also moved six times when I was a child, all within about 10 miles of each other but people often forget that grief and loss are not just about death. Any change can provoke a feeling of grief. I attended five different schools by the time I was in 6^th grade and then I went to a middle school that was different from the one where the majority of my 6^th grade friends went. So, there was a lot of change.

And, of course, as a pastor and a chaplain, grief and loss have been a regular part of my professional life. In fact, the name of this blog is derived from one of my favorite patients on the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit who is one of the few people I know where I can recall his first words and his last words to me. They were “Hi, I’m (name). I’m a Buddhist Druid” and “Take care of her” referring to his wife.

So, I guess where I will start with this reflection is that my response to grief and loss is to create ritual. Ritual has been a critical part of my journey through grief. When my maternal grandfather died in Florida, I recall that my mother asked me about attending his funeral service in Columbus and there was no doubt about how important it was for me to attend. Years later, at the end of a particular difficult relationship, I realized that I wasn’t moving on and I didn’t until I bought a candle (a pretty large one) and lit it every day until it was burned out. And then I took the wax and placed the pieces in the current of a local river. And every time I mow the front lawn, I mow carefully around the irises we planted after the miscarriages my wife and I experienced before our children were born.

When my wife and I got married, I knew there would be a rough stretch of years in our future since her parents were so much older and my parents had significant health issues. Still, I wasn’t really prepared for three of the four of them to die in the space of ten months preceded by my mother who died only three years earlier.

When my mother died, I wouldn’t say that was an easy experience but I was prepared. In chaplaincy, we refer to something called anticipatory grief where a loved one is dying and people begin the grieving process as their abilities and faculties become more and more diminished. I experienced a lot of anticipatory grief with my mother. Even though I wasn’t ready for her to die, I can look back on the final few years of life and notice that I was already grieving for the ways that our almost daily telephone calls didn’t have the sharpness and the wittiness that they once had. I didn’t know it then but the liver disease she had was having an impact on her brain and it is only in hindsight that I can see it so clearly. Toward the end of her life, as we looked into the possibility that I might provide a liver transplant for her, I knew that the time I was spending with her was running short. The final scenes from the book I’ll Love You Forever were playing out metaphorically in real life as I drove her to the Cleveland Clinic to meet with the transplant team and tucked her in her hospital bed after a difficult conversation with her doctors.

I thought I was ready for my father’s death. He was diagnosed with a cancer in the pleural sac around the lungs shortly after I received my colon cancer diagnosis. So, we traded treatment notes with more and more frequent phone calls. Two years earlier, when I had called him to tell him that my mother had died, he ended that conversation with a request that we end all future conversations with “I love you.” And we kept that promise to the end so that I know definitively what my last words were to my father.

We may be one of the few families with a gratitude story related to this Covid pandemic. Since the kids were going to school remotely and my wife’s job had gone to fully remote as well, Dad and his wife Judy invited my family and my sister Tamara’s family to come to Florida for an extended stay. We rented a house right next door to Dad and Judy’s house and created our own family Covid bubble during a two month stay that included Thanksgiving and an early Christmas on Dad’s birthday. We had a wonderful time together with lots of meals together and no commitments to rush here or there as we would have done as Florida tourists during “normal” times.  

I made another trip to Florida in May just because and I made this trip by myself while Judy went to visit some of her own family in Ohio. Dad and I went to his favorite sushi buffet and a minor league baseball game and I was acutely aware that these were probably “last time” events. Even as Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night played in my head, I knew that Dad would be dying sooner rather than later and that I was probably seeing him for the last time.

So, when the call came that Dad and Judy had made the decision to stop the treatments that were holding the cancer and related infections at bay, it was fitting that my family and Tamara’s family were on our way to vacation with each other at Lakeside Village by Lake Erie. And it was even more fitting that, once we had all arrived, and more significantly for me, once Tamara and I were together, my dad died. We had a small ritual together as a family where we shared memories of Dad.

There are many reasons why I feel like I’m having a more difficult time with Dad’s death. One is that the anticipatory grief was different. While I wasn’t in total denial of his condition, I was more aware of how much vitality he still had even when I visited him in May. The other reason is that the small ritual we created that night is the only ritual we have done. Partly due to Covid and partly due to the fact that Dad lived a thousand miles from where he grew up and spent the first 40 years of his life, there just wasn’t the same momentum to create a ritual that there had been when my mom died.

So, I haven’t fully ritualized his death and my loss. Parallel to that, we also haven’t had a memorial service for either my father-in-law or my mother-in-law. While my relationship with them wasn’t the same as the relationship with my own parents, I am aware that I am still experiencing a significant loss that hasn’t been ritualized yet. For my in-laws, we are holding a service at their home in Oregon at the end of June but I’m not sure when I will do something significant for my dad. He wants his ashes spread in the Gulf of Mexico so we will make plans to do that but I will definitely need to create my own ritual in the meantime, even if it is a solitary one.

When my maternal grandfather died, I was about 23 years old. When my mom called me, I took the news in stride. I was living in an unusual situation without much privacy so I recall wondering when or IF I was going to cry. I had become more stoic in my early 20s and this became a great concern of mine. Will I feel anything about this death? My grandfather was very close to me growing up so this was not a distant experience of loss. This question was also a question about who I was becoming. So, when I cried at his funeral, this came as both a great release and a great relief to me, to realize that I would be able to make contact with my emotions even if it took a while.

I am generally comfortable with grief. It is familiar territory to me. And yet, this past year and some reflecting I have done in the past week have reminded me that grief is not predictable. Grief shows up in many different ways even for a familiar traveler. I know that I still have some journeying to do with my grief of the past few years… and some rituals to create.

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You are welcome to take this journey in solitude in your own personal journal or share your reflections. If anything that you do makes you think you might want to continue a journey using Spiritual Direction, now or in the future, you can make an appointment with me through my website: 

www.RedRocksSDC.com