One Year: Grieving with Hope
The table was set for six. Personal tissue packets accompanied each setting—permission and encouragement that tears were expected and welcomed.
Between the six women around the table, we had lost four men in one year: two men to cancer, and two men to murder.
The deaths we were grieving and processing involve trauma and violence. The deaths happened to men too young to be gone, with too much life left to live.
The deaths give us thoughts that won’t leave us alone. They force us to ask God “why” over and over, though we know we won’t have answers and if we did, we probably wouldn’t like them.
The deaths make us often feel alone. Isolated. Misunderstood. Ostracized.
When was the last time someone said our loved one’s name, unprompted? Shared a good memory? Prayed for us? Offered to pray with us?
Sometimes our community thinks it is enough that they remember us in their private prayers; we don’t need to know.
What they don’t know is—loss is collective. A community lost my dad. A community lost my friend’s uncle. A community lost my friend’s brother and nephew.
Because loss is collective, grief should be too. Communities should collectively mourn, and not just on the day we bury the deceased.
Before we shared a meal, the six of us, we read aloud a liturgy from Every Moment Holy: “Liturgy for Embracing Both Joy and Sorrow.” Rituals and order, structure and expectation are helpful for those of us in pain. Our host made these things happen, so that my mom and I especially did not have to wonder or worry when we would talk about my dad. Removing cause for anxiety, and removing the burden of initiating conversation about our loved one, is also extremely important for those who are grieving.
After dinner, we moved to the living room for dessert and stories. We’d been asked to bring photos to share. Since it was my dad’s day, the first anniversary of his death, my mom, my aunt, and I shared the most. We told so many funny stories, ones I hadn’t thought of in a while. Everyone in the room knew my dad, had known him for years. They remember his antics, his humor.
But after the laughter and the gratitude, our thoughts and memories turned darker. We couldn’t help but talk about the rapidity with which my father’s cancer took over his body. We talked about the strangeness and horror of the final days. We shared about the memories and images that haunt us at night.
We openly cried in front of each other.
And we knew each other, had known each other for years. As my aunt said, this felt completely different and one hundred percent better than the anonymous format of Griefshare. If communities did this sort of thing for each other, we wouldn’t even need Griefshare. Grieshare is a symptom of a problem: a society that does not know how to face death and grieve well.
If you had told me a year ago that these were the women I would be sharing with one year after my father died, I would have been surprised. They aren’t the women I expected to be with me, supporting me. But we each experienced fresh and nearly unbearable loss in 2020, and so we understand each other. We are bonded together in a way that I don’t experience with others. I struggle to relate to those who have had years pass since their loss, who are somewhat removed and who have received many gifts, of marriage, children, life milestones, in the time since.
I recently listened to a conversation about people in the Bible who suffered and what we can learn from them. While discussing his book on suffering, philosopher and biblical scholar Mark Talbot pointed out that Naomi and Job both believe their lives will not be good again after their losses. But that did not mean they stopped believing in God’s goodness; they just couldn’t imagine it for themselves. Talbot says, “What I try to point out with both Naomi and Job is that their despair at ever knowing good again in this life proved to be false.” He went on to say,”It seems to me we should say to Christians, You know, in most cases, probably, you’re going to get through this and you’re going to see the good that God has tendered you through the suffering you’ve had. But it may not be true in every case and, if it doesn’t happen, that’s not a reason for giving up your hope in God.”
Despite his assurances, Talbot never once says we shouldn’t feel like we might not taste goodness again. He never once shames Naomi or Job for their despair. It’s part of the human condition and experience. We must be honest about this feeling with each other. It’s good to be with others who understand. We are still in the thick of it.
But being together, laughing and crying, was, for me, a taste of goodness. If I can grieve in community, then I have more hope that I can and will go on. If I have people in my life willing to sit and watch me cry, even cry with me, and hear my darkest thoughts and questions, if I’m given space and grace for that, I know I’m not alone.
And not being alone in the darkness is the best comfort available to those who grieve.
While we know that our Lord Jesus is with us, and grieves with us, the physical presence of our brothers and sisters in Christ is an assurance of our Lord’s presence. Our presence is the Lord’s gift to the broken-hearted. We are his ambassadors embodied as the Holy Spirit resides in us.
Once, when I shared what it’s like to miss my dad, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 was quoted at me.
“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (ESV, emphasis mine).
I’m sure it was meant to be encouraging. Instead, it diminished my pain. It made what I had written invalid, that my pain was misplaced or too strong. That I shouldn’t vocalize how much I miss my dad because I will see him one day with Jesus. Again, I’m certain that’s not how it was intended. But that’s how it was received.
When I left our friend’s house, the one who so graciously offered to host and feed us on the first anniversary of my father’s death, I felt a lightness of heart and body that I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
I said to myself, “This. This is what it means to grieve with hope.”