A Note For Those Who Grieve

photo by Emma Craig / flickr

A wise person remarked, “Losing someone does not come  with instructions.” And they are right. When we lose a loved one we just don’t know what to say or where to turn. Friends try to help. But after the casseroles are gone and family and friends have gone back to their lives—the griever is left alone rattling around the house. 

I have been leading Grief Support groups the last few years. And sitting around that table the stories and the tears just keep coming. Some grief is so fresh they can hardly put their feelings into words. Some old griefs comes surging back when they least expect them. But in that circle people look around at others that walk the same sad road they walk. And they begin to know the powerful truth—life really does come back. 

I try to give instructions but most of the time my words seem hollow. I wrote a note to a friend who had lost his nine-year old daughter. He wrote me back: “Thank you for what you did not say.” Often in our desperate need to help we say too much. Sometimes we say the wrong thing. Some of us just stay away because the threat of this death has comes too close. 

What we should never say is: “God took him.” “She’s better off.” “You’ll get over it.” “What you need is closure.” “Get a dog.” “Reckon you have been punished for something you did?” “God needed her in his flower garden.” “Just think— he or she) is with all those family members that they lost along the way.”

These well-meaning words fall flat on our hearts. What we need is a hug, a visit. Someone not to say so much as just being there. Folks tell me the hardest times are the weeks and months following the funeral. This is when we need to reach out.

One of my favorite grief books is by William Armstrong. After his wife of twelve years died suddenly he wrote a beautiful book, Through Troubled Waters. Mr. Armstrong’s wife had a fever and found it hard to breathe. The doctor suggested she check into the hospital. But the husband got a phone call an hour later: “Your wife is gone.” And this husband was left in the house with three little children. And the book tells his story about his trying to make do after the hardest thing he had ever faced. He writes it was like Noah’s flood. The water came up and he felt it swept away everything. No wife. No Mama. No friend. No neighbor. Just an empty house with three heart-broken children.

Nothing seemed to help. He tried his best to help his kids understand what can never really be understood. Mama is gone and she is not coming back. What can you tell little children—five, seven and a little older that their mother had died? 

So he writes in the book how he sloshed through his grief and how he finally got to the far side of his brokenness. His healing began, he said, when little Mary age five came to her Daddy one day and this is he puts it. “And after the flood she (Mary) will be the dove, bringing the olive branch, showing that the waters are going down and that the earth remains.”

We have to look closely, we grievers. Beyond the loss and the tears often in the smallest of ways something or someone will be your dove. Coming with that tiny green leaf that Noah found and Armstrong discovered. The water really does go down. And we can walk once again on land we thought would never be dry again.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com