"Losing. Grieving. Mourning. Loving. Living."
My journey with grief, a recent lesson: Sometimes it’s a grief for a different season, a future season that we carry. A grief of “when that happens in the future, then I will grieve this more deeply.”
Sometimes it’s a grief that we carry in this moment. A grief that abides. Deeply. Now. Ever-present. A grief that sticks and clings, like honey on your fingers after you close the pouring lid.
And that kind of grief is okay too.
Featured Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.
I feel sometimes you have to be with your process.
For me, that may mean getting a cotton facecloth, sitting down on my bed with my bedroom door closed and letting my emotions connect with my heart and grieve the desires in this heart that continue to live unmet, unfulfilled.
To cry and to lament what I want is not what I have.
And to express my sadness in that.
And the reality that right now, what God has given is what I have.
The tension of where hope and here co-exist together. The reality of the good and the tough tracks of life that we all live on at the same time, no matter the season. The inevitability of what it means to live actively in your waiting. And that this spiritual growth producer that waiting and longsuffering become in you continues with you, in every decade.
Why does it vex my humanity so?
I want things now but I’m guided to live in light of the yet-to-come.
My heart doesn’t always understand. My mind tries to make things logical, practical, strategic. My tears just know the wait has been long and ‘holding pattern’ feels like the answer that I keep getting.
Lord, I’m listening. Help me to hear the way you are speaking to me.
Modern poet Joekenneth Museau says, “People aren’t taking time to deal with their own issues because there’s always a distraction or something to take you away from what’s going on inside.”
I can feel things that need to be expressed in me before the words come. The tears are my indicators. I give them their propers. And respectfully move my logic and thinking to the backseat of myself and allow my emotions to drive me for as long as the good cry is needed, as long as it takes to truly out get it out.
I cry. I pause. I breathe. I cry again. Repeating this cycle, blowing my nose into that facecloth, embracing what the tears are helping me to do: deal with my life and what I’m feeling and what those feelings want to tell me.
Sadness isn’t bad. It’s a feeling just as joy is. I want to make space for my sadness. And to give my tears room to breathe.
The new year has begun. And while many of us are jumping with joy into our new goals, resolutions, and even relationships, others are navigating unexpected pathways into grief and mourning, due to the deaths of loved ones.
In one of my community of friends, I have several brothers and sisters who are mourning the recent death of a dear sister and friend in ministry named E. She battled cancer for quite some time and this past weekend she entered into eternal healing and the loving arms of God.
I met E one time, about three years ago.
She encouraged me with her heart for God’s kingdom and to see oneness truly happen in the Body of Christ so that the love we have could touch those beyond church walls. She is a woman who leaves an incredibly deep legacy of love, intentional living, and fruit that has borne witness to the power of the gospel of Jesus and God’s indescribable love for people.
She also leaves a husband and three young children, along with family members and a huge community of friends. People who are missing her deeply as the first few days of acute grief settle upon on their shoulders and the pain of the loss becomes a new part of normal.
I know that acute grief and that pain very well.
And from my own journeys of grief, I wrote these words and posted them on E’s CaringBridge site, as a comment to the post her husband wrote sharing that she’d passed away. My prayer for him and those mourning E is that they would be present with their grief. The grief has purpose and it is needed in this journey:
“A dear friend told me 10 years ago, ‘We grieve deeply because we’ve loved deeply.’ S, you and your children and so many others loved and will continue to love E deeply. Your grief is a unique and tangible reflection of that. It says with raised hands, ‘I loved someone, and it mattered, and there will always be something beautiful, significant and special about this.’ Grief shows us where the trees of love in our life have been planted. You planted deeply with E. That love will continue to grow in you and comfort you in the journey ahead. Sending my prayers from Orlando. I am so very sorry for the loss of your beautiful bride. Praying God’s comfort and supernatural peace in this time.”
For those who grieve please know this: you are not alone and as much as you want to let others into your journey with you, please do.
For those who know people who are grieving: choose to be present with them and encourage them. Love them and check in on them regularly. The lessons you see them learn in their grief could help you in future seasons where you too will enter the house of mourning as well.
Life is a gift and it is also finite. The days we have here on Earth will pass by faster than we can imagine. Living and loss are entwined together. We can learn much from both.
I think of her and my breath still gets taken away. What if 21 years ago I was walking somewhere with people I love and a random stranger, a white male recently released on parole, ran up to me unprovoked and stabbed me in the neck and stabbed my loved one and then ran away? 21 years of my life as a black young woman would have ceased to exist. Because everything after that heinous moment would not have been. Every laugh that tickled up my vocal chords into the ears of those who love me, every new birthday, every moment growing more into this brown skin, every tear shed through struggles that made these melanin muscles stronger, every breath given from God that gave me more footing to see this world and love and discover Him deeply. Everything would have stopped at 18. It’s not fair that everything has stopped at 18 for her. It’s not fair, it’s not right, and I’m numb at times understanding and living out what it means to be a black woman in America…and the intersectionality that comes with it.
Nia, I remember you, little sister. I remember you. I want this to be made right. I want this to be better. #NiaWilson #sayhername
Amazing how years after a loss, the grief can still be so debilitating & quite unexpected.
Reflecting and grateful for the pain.
It means I have loved.
“Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.” ― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior: A Memoir