Grief is Knocking

What’s fresh on my mind as the holiday cheer comes racing toward me like an unstoppable

train?

Grief.

Grief is on my mind.

Grief is knocking on my door and looking through the windows.

Grief is saying let’s keep this relationship between you and me going.

I don’t want the focus of this entry to be the specific experiences causing my grief. So that we can move on, I will just include here that in a short span of time I lost several friends and family members, moved to a new state, faced extreme challenges at my workplace, and navigated issues with my children’s health and well-being. For a span of three years, every space I was in felt fractured and unwieldy. Grief knocked and knocked and knocked, again.

I think I am ready to write about it, but I will not know until it is too late. I am preparing myself to click the upload button on this blog and immediately regret it.

I asked myself over and over, to whom am I writing this entry?

Am I writing to myself-to find further healing?

Am I writing to fellow grievers- to offer some additional ways to negotiate this difficult terrain?

Am I writing to friends of grievers-the courageous few who stay long after the meal train of casseroles ends?

Well self, my answer is, “Yes.” I am writing to all of us. We all have friends, family, and neighbors who are hurting, and, in all honesty, grief is either knocking at our door or strolling the neighborhood with our address in hand.

The world is hemorrhaging from loss right now. Life feels like a gigantic jar of marbles that has fallen from our grasp and shattered on the unforgiving floor of 2020. The multicolored elements of our lives are running, spinning, and rolling frantically across the floor colliding with visible and invisible shards of the container of our past. We are individually and collectively breaking into a million little pieces.

So, as we scramble together, I want to share a few of my little pieces with you.

I have accepted that my perception of loss is my real, lived reality. I work to not compare my grief with others’ grief. True healthy grief (yup, I just put “healthy” and “grief” side-by-side) is not in comparison but in acceptance. I don’t get to grieve more or less based on the level of trauma I have faced compared to my friend or neighbor. I get to deal honestly with my grief and whatever state it is that day or that hour or that minute. Because grief weaves itself inside of a person’s time, turning minutes into hours and hours into days and days into lost memories, I have to work with my grief and what it is doing in my life. Grief changes the rules without warning. Grief levels the playing field as it invites us both further in to and out of ourselves, if we allow it.

I provide here a few metaphors of grief to help readers with that simultaneous drowning and falling upward feeling that often happens when the floor falls out from beneath you and reality changes forever (past, present, and future) in an instant.

My hope is that in sketching these metaphors, you might find places to breath or lean in or find a foothold. Grief has the potential to make you feel all alone and completely exposed, thin and heavy, real and fake. Because of these feelings, we retreat.

May I invite you, dear reader, to not retreat, but in these rough draft versions of incomplete metaphors find a place where we can, together, find space to breath and a place to throw some anchors into the sky.

What Grief Does

Grief invades your life without an invitation and pushes you over a cliff into the abyss of the unknown. Grief rips back the curtain to reveal your greatest strengths and weaknesses privately and publicly in the same instant. Grief makes you lose all sense of who you thought you were and who you were planning on becoming. Grief scrambles your brains, Iights a fire to your feelings, and smothers the breath in your lungs. Grief comes in like water and builds and builds at its own measure: sprinkling from unassuming clouds, flooding from a lazy river, crashing from the ocean’s tide.

Grief comes in a vast array of ways, and almost always overstays its welcome. Just when you think it can’t do any more damage, it leaves. It puts down the whisk, lowers the flame, and releases its grip.

I want grief to be a well-mannered and polite guest. It is neither. I want it to be seen and not heard; curtsy at my entrance into the room; and say “Please,” “Thank you,” and “Excuse me.” But, I have learned otherwise. Grief does what it wants in its own way and time, and it is best to listen and respond immediately because I have also learned that grief only grows louder and more like an angsty teenager if ignored.

What I Want Grief to Be

I want grief to be a passing carnival, a wild collection of movement and fantastical experiences that shock and awe for just a moment. I am endlessly amazed at the length grief goes to get my attention, stir my emotions, and shock me into a new reality. I want to see the final show end with a bow, hear the crowds applaud, and then vacate the stands as the trailers are packed. I want to look at my friend and say, “What a great show, eh?” I want my pockets to be emptied of tickets that can only be redeemed by playing games rigged for losing. The balancing act is tricky as I attempt to own my grief and not let it own me.

I want grief to make its way out of my town, out of my life. But it stays. The show keeps changing, and I can’t get it to pack up and move on.

What I understand, right now, is grief will never leave my little town and my new normal is learning how to be an active audience member, not a self-obsessed performer on the stage (a very real and very odd feeling that often comes the first few weeks after trauma) or a denying cynic in the parking lot (a very real and very odd feeling that often comes the first few month after the trauma). I want grief to be concise and manageable, it is neither.

What Grief Is Teaching Me

For me, there are not enough rocks in this world to fill the Grand Canyon size cavern grief has plowed through my life. The goal of my daily living is not to fill the hole. My day cannot be spent searching for little pebbles to throw into the chasm. I have children to love and people to care for and work to do. I cannot make my life’s purpose about managing that which has passed. I must make my life about that which is and is still yet to be.

The goal of my life is to believe the truth of the promises of God in scripture. The truth that God is making me complete in the midst of incompleteness because He is perfect completion. The truth that grief is not my last visitor. Grief is not the director of my life.

The truth is that God is making me whole while there remains a gigantic hole in my life. I am learning how to love a Healer whose life, death, and resurrection reach deeper and wider than my grief’s plow.

I thought about ending this post with a lovely crafted paragraph. But grief won’t let me. Grief demands that I end the post as grief has left me innumerable times. With an ellipsis. Because grief is a teacher who does…