eavesdropping

Grief is such a strange thing, and so personal. All Kubler-Ross wisdom aside, how each of us manages our way through a loss will never be duplicated, even by ourselves at another time. I have found this to be true in my own life, though the other truth is that - so far - I have not yet navigated a loss which snatched the whole world away from me.

There is grief in infertility, of course. Grieving what has not yet been, or fearing what may never be, is a real thing. Different than grieving a miscarriage or stillbirth, yes. But a thing which has not yet been can still be nearly as real, nearly, as things which are. A yearning to be something (a mother) and to love someone (a child) comes with its own grief, as unique as any other.

I have walked with others through the loss of a born child. Not an infant, not yet, and if I am the luckiest girl in the world, perhaps not ever. My first pastoral experience with this came when a mother called the church on a Sunday morning before worship to tell me her son had been found in the woods, with a shotgun next to his body and a six-pack of beer, empty, in the truck bed. It's a long story. It always is. But they changed, those parents, in that day. In one way, their son's death freed them from twenty years of holding secret his mental illness; "I keep telling myself, 'the truth will set you free,'" said his mother on the phone that day. But in many other ways, his death diminished her, and her husband, and their daughters, forever. Permanently.

Of all the interviews I have seen in the past few days with Paul Newman, the best by far is the moment Barbara Walters asked him how he felt about the death of his son, some ten years later. "It gets different," he said to her. "Not better, but different." I have not known that pain myself. But I have no doubt he is right.

Loss, of course, is not something you can create - not loss-by-death, anyway. If I have not experienced it personally very much, I can't do much about that, except be grateful. And yet I wonder at times how that might diminish my understanding as pastor. I know how I felt when my grandfather died of Alzheimer's, but I was fourteen at the time, so it's been awhile. And I know how I felt when my grandmother died during my first year of ministry, but again, the fact is that your grandparents are supposed to die before you are, so even when you mourn them with all your being, it's not precisely out of the norm to do so.

Grief is so intensely personal and private that it's rare to hear an honest accounting of it. A few weeks ago, I checked with RevGals to read that one of our bloggers had lost her son, and that is how I found her blog, Search the Sea. (Isn't that a stupid phrase, by the way? "Lost" her son? Good God, it's not like he was wandering around in the frozen food aisle and she accidentally walked out the door. It almost puts the onus of the loss onto the one left behind: well, you lost him. Didn't you hold on tight enough? I may have to stop using that phrase altogether.)

So I have been reading her words now, since her son's death. This has been both enormously gratifying, and yet feels almost wrong, as if I were driving through a neighborhood at night peering through windows, and saw something meant to be entirely private because someone forgot to close their windows. I know that the writer realizes her blog is public. If she didn't want to write these things down, if it didn't feel like it might, maybe help someday, she probably wouldn't do it. But still, the loss is so great that her words feel like glass, like they could shatter at any moment. Like if I read them too often, they'll fall apart in front of me. Fragile. And precious. And sharp.

I have not posted on her blog, other than one initial word of consolation, because I do not know her. I will not link this post to her, because perhaps her own writing is exposure enough. But still, I want to thank her. For letting us in. For telling her own story. For being honest. For getting up in the morning.

She wrote early on that the phrase, "I can't imagine what you're going through," is not helpful. It may be true, but it just doesn't help. But here's the thing: I can't imagine it. I don't know that grief. I hope with every fiber of my being that I never do. She is in my prayers and I don't even know what to pray for, really, except to say her name and hope that God knows what to do from here. (I pray more and more like this, now. A two word prayer: your turn.)

I've thought about writing this post for awhile, and I didn't because mentioning it felt like I was pointing out a particularly interesting zoo exhibit. ("Look, kids! A grieving mother! Let's see what we can learn, shall we?") That's not it, of course. But what her writing does for me is give a glimpse, a tiny peek, into her own story of grief. I am grateful for that, as someone who peeks into grief on a regular basis, because somehow each story enriches the whole body. Makes our individual responses less crazy, less lonely, more real.

Thank you, Gannet Girl.