This week I am grieving. This morning I officiated at the funeral of a family friend. I spent the afternoon discussing grief as part of our clergy study group’s reading of See No Stranger. And my heart is full with the images and news out of Gaza & Israel. I’m grieving the breakdowns that have led to Portland teachers overwhelmingly voting to strike. And I’m still grieving the change in our family with Paige going off to college.
As we celebrate All Saints this Sunday it seems the perfect time to reflect on grief. Naomi Shihab Nye writes in her poem kindness:
“you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.”
How do you understand grief?
How do you sit with your grief?
How do you enter into the grief of others?
Valerie Kaur writes, “When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them…..We come to know people when we grieve with them through stories and rituals. It is how we can build real solidarity, the kind that points us to the world we want to live in-.”
I love this view of how grief can lead us to change, can bring us closer together, and yet we so often run from grief. We turn the channel or ignore the weeping mothers. We try to talk ourselves into being okay. I am happy with my life and so enjoying more time with Jeff. That reality doesn’t change the fact that I miss our daughter Paige and that our life is different than it was. It is not either or. I can love my life now AND grieve what was. My happiness doesn’t mean that I can’t also grieve. It doesn’t mean that I don’t need to grieve. Yet when I share with folks they don’t want to hear it. They tell me she is happy and enjoying school or remind me that I will adjust. This is true and so is my grief. Why is it so hard for us to just be in the dissolving space?
So this week I invite you to sit with your grief. To allow yourself to feel what you are feeling without trying to talk yourself into other feelings. I invite you to bear witness to the grief of another. To allow yourself to sit with their pain without trying to mitigate it. This is love. A powerful love that might just change the world.
-Eilidh
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