Another powerful one from our friend Connor Gwin.
Last year I wrote a piece for Mockingbird about grief and Sufjan Stevens. I wrote about the cathartic experience I had at a Sufjan Stevens concert featuring his newest album (Carrie & Lowell) which centered on the death of his mother.
It has now been two years since my father died and I am still grieving. Do you know how frustrating that is for me? I believed the cultural maxim that eventually things would return to “normal” and I would “move on”. I believed that if I allowed myself to feel my feelings in the moment, surely they would disappear after a year. I believed that I could follow the five easy steps and be back to my usual self in no time.
Here is the problem: grieving never stops. The human condition is to grieve. We grieve our childhood, our family of origin, our hometown, our dreams for our lives, our significant other that got away, our former (thinner) self. We grieve our plans for the day as a child wakes up with a fever. We grieve our shattered expectations for our lives. To be human is to grieve. We are all grieving all the time, but we work to convince ourselves that everything is fine. We put in more hours at the office, we reorganize the closet again, we start training for the full marathon this time. We keep busy so that we don’t have to sit still long enough to realize that we are awash with grief.
In the two years since my father died I have kept very busy. I finished seminary, was married and ordained, began my work as an Episcopal priest, got a dog, bought a house, mowed the grass, hired a personal trainer, began making green smoothies, and read that one book about tidying up and tried to find joy in each pair of shorts I own. I did the steps and followed the plan. And yet, when I sit still long enough or when the stress from my work reaches just the right point of overwhelm, a flood of tears washes over me.
Each time I work through the emotions I discover that it all comes back to this: I miss my father and I miss my mother. My father died two years ago and my mother died almost eighteen years ago, but when I am quiet enough I can still hear eight-year-old Connor crying and wanting to be held. In the depths of my soul, I long for what I once had.
The Rev. Alexander MacPhail, a wise Episcopal priest, recently said that we live under the notion that eventually we can figure this whole thing out. Eventually we will solve our problems and, we secretly hope, we won’t need anyone to help us. We hope that eventually, he said, we won’t need the cross.
I am not a psychologist, nor am I a grief counselor, but I can tell you that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is full of shit. In my experience, there are not five stages of grief and after a few years the word “acceptance” has not entered my mind. In my experience the sting of my parent’s deaths still stings, even after all these years.
What is the root of this sting? Paul says that the sting of death is sin and root of sin is Adam, the one who took matters into his own hands in the garden. Just like Adam, I want control. I want to be like God. This is why I hate traffic and group projects, because I want to be in charge. This is why death stings, in part because it is the ultimate reminder that I have absolutely no control. No matter how hard I work or how many hours I put in, I will never be in control. So I keep drinking green sludge packed with vitamins and tidying the closet in the guest bedroom packed with junk. Like the Meyerist cult in Hulu’s dark new show, The Path, I am continually looking for “the ladder” that I can climb to enlightenment.
The human condition is to grieve our lack of control. The Good News is not that God is in control. That greeting card response to death and tragedy falls flat when confronted with the European refugee crisis or school shootings or cancer or hurricanes or Donald Trump. Instead, the Good News is that God’s grace has the first and last words, the Alpha and Omega. The Good News is that God has done for me what I could not do for myself. The Good News is that death is not the end. There is no magic ladder out of grief and we will not magically ascend above our suffering. Instead, God descends into our pain and redeems it through the cross of Christ.
We are all grieving all the time. We are all going to die. We have no control. God is with us. That is the Good News. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?
COMMENTS
9 responses to “The Ubiquity of Grief (and How I Tried to Climb the Ladder)”
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Thank you for this. My father died three years ago, and my mother, eleven. I’ve given up the notion that my grief will ever go away, so maybe I’ve reached “acceptance” after all.
Thank you for sharing this – it helps to know that I’m not alone in my seemingly endless grief. I think what happens is that grief just changes its form. Once the initial shock wears off, and we try to ‘return to normal’ (as if life could ever be normal again), we are visited by grief in unexpected ways, and reminded that we are not in control. A good meditation. Peace to you.
Thank you for this post. This week, my sister’s 30-plus year old horse died. And I’m very sad for my sister in her grief–and I am ANGRY at death, for causing that grief. I said to myself, ‘Death Sucks!!!!!!’ countless times on Monday. And I’m STILL angry.
Beautiful reflection. Thanks for sharing. I’ve thought a lot on this myself. On one hand, I’m very interested in mindfulness and being in the present and meditating. On the other, I read Luther. I realize intellectually that a theology of the cross is one that is in the present moment. But it’s so hard! And I just want to mindfully become mindless again. Grief steals that mindlessness away, I think.
Hi Connor! Thanks for your post, it’s super helpful and a good word to all of us grieving.
I wanted to suggest a brief defense of Kubler-Ross, because it’s a great example of how the human insistence on ladder climbing and progress corrupts something potentially good or helpful. KR herself regretted building a framework with steps/progress, and later in life tweaked the model as framework to help process the extra-rational emotions that come with grief. As in, “here are the emotions you can expect to feel and color your inter-human activities as a result of your grief” or “being always angry at your wife or dog can totally be linked to getting shafted at your job or losing a loved one.” Grief causes us to kick around between these negative emotions which we may not initially have linked to part of grief’s wake.
It’s almost like a pinball machine- you are the ball and grief is the plunger that launches you. Anger, depression/numbness, bargaining, and denial are all the bumpers and flippers and ramps and obstacles. The ball has no control, sadly, and is at the whim of gravity and the playing field. Acceptance is when the ball loses its momentum and eventually drops down below the flippers out of play, which is not to say that the plunger won’t eventually shoot it back up again! The great contribution of K-R to the world of grief is more the exploration that grief knocks us out of a place of control, even on an emotional level.
Please don’t change your tone or language toward K-R as a model though! Pop-psychology ladder climbing *has* turned it to crap. But as someone who’s going through some of his own grieving and found a more thoughtful K-R model to be helpful, I thought I’d share. Thanks again for your thoughts and your contributions!
I agree with this comment. K-R intentioned readers of her seminal work are the dying, not the grieving. That also helps me to put her words into perspective. Pop-psych hijacked them for the bereaved.
Undoubtedly, she has good things to teach us.
Excellent comment by Bryan J!! KR model was for patients dying and we use it for all family members. It gives us insights to help us deal with death and grief. We just lost our 39 year old son after a 4 year fight with colon cancer. Every part of it has been unique and every hard. We love the TED talk Beyond Closure!!! Also, read Rare Bird, it gives a very thorough account of how grief touches you in every micro aspect of your life. It is wonderful the compassion we experience, the knowledge and help that is available and the Grace and Gratitude of God that becomes so real in our lives after such a devastating loss.
Thanks for sharing. I found the article (and comments) very meaningful for some of the things I’ve been dealing with. Much love.
Thank you for pointing out the countless griefs of all our lives, and all the ways we devise to avoid them – it is part of a point I’ve been trying to make, for years. The story of human life is loss, and learning to deal with this fact is the essence of maturity. It isn’t just our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and so on, it’s our life we lose a little more, each day. There are seemingly compensatory gains, of one sort or another, but nothing can replace that moment when all was well in our world, somewhere back along the way… As you say, hiding from it stunts our growth, our ability and our willingness to accept our utter lack of control, which in turn prevents our surrender – the only true defense available.