Faith Works 3-12-22

Faith Works 3-12-22
Jeff Gill

Grief isn't waiting
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"How long does mourning take?"

I've heard that question more times than I can count over the years as a pastor, and I have an answer that's been my first response for most of them:

"As long as it takes."

There's no set timetable for recovering from a personal loss. Some people may take a few weeks or months, others take years. And the same person can find one death from among those they love to be a fairly straightforward process, not that it's ever easy, but then have another loss set them back for much longer.

Those are, in some ways, the hardest pastoral conversations. "I should be over this by now!" Who says, I reply. Not God. Not me. Yes, anniversaries can both help in the healing and re-open old wounds, there's just no set schedule for affairs of the heart.

And if you are involved in hospice work, there's an inverse proposition involved. How long does a particular person's passing take? There are patterns and templates and a general history of how this sort of illness and that sort of condition will play out, but anyone who's been around death and dying knows that it's foolish and dangerous ground to walk onto when raising up a sign saying "they have exactly this long." You don't know.

What I can tell you is that there's a strange sort of mourning in advance that happens when you are caring for a seriously ill person. It's not the anticipation let alone expectation, but the reality of coming to terms, day by day, with the loss of a loved one, and then there's the uncertainty of asking when you will need to make use of that pre-sadness, preparatory sorrow, advance pain.
My wife recently said "Grief doesn't wait." I told her "I'm stealing that." Because it's something more of us need to think through, to hear at first and accept in the final assessment. Grief isn't waiting, not for us to be ready, not for our lives to get to a convenient place to pause, not for death, even. Grief is here, a part of our thoughts even before what we are grieving has happened.

Grief is an emotional and I would argue a spiritual reality for each of us, just as pain is a reality for any of us as embodied persons. If you have a physical form, you have pain. It's a part of our warning and monitoring system — hand hurts, remove from fire — that's actually quite useful. Foot hurts, don't put your weight on it, until more healing takes place. Leprosy is most dangerous, I'm told, because you no longer have the sensation of pain, so bad things can happen to fingers and toes and you don't do anything. Pain gets our attention, and ideally points us toward healing.

Grief is like that. It reminds us that healing isn't done. How long does healing take? Don't ask me, ask a nurse practitioner (but we'll tell you the same thing: as long as it takes). Some people can heal up from a broken bone in four weeks, others for their own material reasons physically will take ten or twelve. The orthopedic surgeon says "six to eight weeks," but even they will offer a cautious caveat.

Today is two years since the call came that my dad died earlier that March 12. I'm better than I was those first few weeks, and more in balance with my own thoughts and reactions than I was perhaps a year ago this day. Will I be "over it"? Others who've lost parents say "never," some say "it's always there in certain ways." Some move on, close doors behind them, say they're fine.

For me, the "I need to tell Dad about that" moments come less often. The healing isn't so much that increased interval as it is how when the shock of "but I can't do that" hits, my world doesn't wobble quite as much, or as long. Grief for me has been an imbalance, a disorientation, a loss of equilibrium in my movement forward. The earth shook, and there have been aftershocks, but now I can at least find my footing and move more easily on the way.

How long does it take? I wouldn't say two years. Might be a bit longer. It depends. Just remember that grief isn't waiting on our timetables, before or after a loss, but it's also quite possibly a friend. It can help us heal.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking about love and life and loss for a while. Tell him how you find your balance when knocked off of your path at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.