Someone's Grieving, Lord

DON'T TELL THE LAZARUS STORY THIS MORNING

"It would not help the boy
who, listing wishes with a red 
   crayon,
has only one, and writes,
'I wish she could come back to
    life.'"
        --Mary Kratt


I'm beginning a Grief Group next week and I've been thinking a lot about the folk who have lost someone they love.

They'll come from all over. Some will be retired Professors, Contractors, widows, a woman who lost her father and husband within four weeks. The couple who carried their baby to full term and now don't know what to do with the shower presents. Some were hard livers and some had never finished high school. But it did not matter. For Grief leaps over all the socio-economic barriers and takes them all in. And as they share and weep and show pictures of the loved one they lost--they find a new family out there who understands, who will call them after the group ends and who will know they are not alone as they walk through the lonesome valley.

Christopher Reid said of his loved one: "Dying--tougher work than playing an oboe..."

And somewhere I read where William Meredith wrote: "Everything gets watered sooner or later with tears..."

In 1947 these words appeared in a Charleston, SC newspaper."Not until trouble and heartache and sorrow came into my own life could I fully comprehend the words of Iran McLaren: "Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle." 

Mary Oliver may say it best. "Someone I loved once gave me as box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was as gift."


And maybe this is why, week after week , I sit it that circle of grievers. I keep hanging on to that marvelous Scripture: "Weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning." Dear God--I hope so. For them and for me.