I have been processing deep grief for quite a while. Some of what I thought was healed seems to keep gushing up to the surface, even through small triggers. Will I ever be healed?
In a footnote to another book I was reading, I learned that there was a man who lost 3 generations of his family instantly in one car accident. I immediately wrote that book title on my reading list. In an email from a divorced friend, she mentioned that same book. I had to get that book.
Jerry Sittser in “A Grace Disguised” has become a fellow traveler with me on my journey of grief. He knows what he is talking about: subtitled “how the soul grows through loss.”
I am SO encouraged by this theme he draws out: “This book is not intended to help anyone get over or even through the experience of catastrophic loss, for I believe that ‘recovery’ from such loss is an unrealistic and even harmful expectation, if by recovery we mean resuming the way we lived and felt prior to the loss. Instead, the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it” (Loc 154).
What a relief! On many “stages” of my journey, I felt like, “I’m healed! I have come so far!” and I felt some resemblance of the former me, the me “before.” But then, something would happen to trigger depths untold, and I felt like I was regressing and not progressing! How frustrating!!
Now I am reminded that maybe I never will ‘recover’. Maybe there never will be a ‘normal’, and maybe I will never return to the me that once was. But maybe there will be some way to “live in and be enlarged by loss” especially as it is ongoing and continuing.
I can get disappointed with myself and I get angry at my weakness. I struggle with comparison to others: “Why does she get over her grief so quickly?” or “why doesn’t she struggle with that anymore?” or “how did she move on and get so strong?” Ahh!! What a snare of compare I can find myself in.
Again, this author encouraged me greatly: “I question whether experiences of such severe loss can be quantified and compared. Loss is loss, whatever the circumstances. All losses are bad, only bad in different ways. No two losses are ever the same...” (Loc 307).
I am reminded, there is no value in comparing. This is my own story, and it is unique.
I am reminded also of Peter and John, when Jesus says to Peter: “I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted, but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18).
I relate so much from Peter in this passage, because when I was younger I got to go wherever I wanted to go. I traipsed through South America, Europe and Asia, flying on hundreds of planes and exploring foreign cultures. I was strong and fast and used my energy to pour into tons of other people, even in other languages. But now, how old I feel, how constrained and confined, how foreign it feels not to be that version of me anymore. Now I have been given an assignment I would not have chosen.
But Jesus’ words strike me: “Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’” (John 21:19).
Here Peter reminds me again of myself, because he turns and looks at John and says: “Lord, what about him?”
Yeah, Peter, I’m with you! Why do I have to suffer? What about John? Doesn’t he have to suffer too?
Jesus snuffs out comparison: “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me” (John 21:22).
I hear Jesus saying the same thing to me: “You must follow me.” If he wants other people to have different kinds of loss or different degrees of strength or different kinds of experiences, what is that to me? Maybe God has some mysterious way that He has planned to receive glory through my suffering. I must live by faith.
Isn’t it interesting that in one verse we see people living by faith, but such contrasting things happen?
“[By faith] Women received back their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured...” (Hebrews 11.35)
Some people get resurrection. Other people get torture! “You, follow me!” Jesus says.
I think of some other women who followed Jesus all the way from Galilee, who followed him to the cross, and watched him breathe his last.
I think of the grief and shock they must have experienced, for only a few days prior, their same Lord was riding on a donkey in a procession of people joyfully praising God: “Hosanna!”
What was it like for them to watch him get falsely accused, beaten and crucified? What was it like for them to hear him cry out: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”? (Luke 23.46).
He breathed his last, and did their hopes die?
“When all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away” (Luke 23.48).
Anguish! Grief! Shock! What a loss! The man who healed the lame and opened the eyes of the blind! Dead! The friend who raised Lazarus from the dead, now lifeless! On one day, the hopes of Israel were crushed. With one cry, Jesus breathed his last.
I never before experienced Holy Week through the lens of grief as I do now, having studied more on the human experience of initial shock and waves of subsequent grief and darkness.
I think of the shock that Jerry Sittser went through as he waited an hour for emergency vehicles to arrive. Such a sudden instant of life-changing loss, and the shock took days to wear off.
What was it like for those who saw Jesus die?
“But all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.” Luke 23.49.
What thoughts went through their minds in that moment as they watched these things? Did it even seem real? “Is this really happening? Is he really dead? What will life be like without him?”
“The women...followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it” (Luke 23.55).
The same women kept following him to the tomb. I can’t imagine burying someone so soon after he died! It is a big deal to bury someone. It is a marking point of the reality of the loss. “My loved one is not coming back. He really is dead.”
Before the sun set on Good Friday, Jesus’ body was wrapped in linen and laid in a tomb. And the tomb was secured and sealed (Matthew 27.66).
Saturday. The Sabbath. Sitting. Resting. Crying. Processing. Stunned shock. “What has happened?!” They must have sat around talking about all these things, remembering all that Jesus had said and done.
I cannot imagine the confusion, shock, stunned experience it must have been to find the tomb empty on Easter Sunday!!
How can humans go through so many emotions in such a short time?! Hosanna one day, burial soon after. From the perspective of grief, the resurrection must have felt like a dream. One gospel even said the reports of the resurrection “seemed to them like nonsense” (Luke 24.11).
Never before in the history of the world has a man been crucified and clearly dead before the eyes of plenty of witnesses, buried in a sealed and secured tomb, and then found fully alive and resurrected!
The shock of their lives was not the crucifixion, but the resurrection.
This gives me great hope. The shock and grief and suffering and loss of my life is not the defining reality of my story. It is yet to come.
“Listen, I tell you a mystery:...
in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet....
the dead will be raised, and we will be changed”
(1 Corinthians 15.51-52).
