Grieving to the Tune of Taylor Swift

On Sunday, I went to the funeral visitation for a forty year old woman.

She is the cousin of one of my parishioners. They lifted her as a prayer concern in worship the previous Sunday.

A week later I was standing in front of her casket with her widower, doing my best to comfort him though he may as well have been a stranger to me.

She had gone in for a routine scan with hopes of figuring out why she was continuously falling down.

The results showed that an aggressive cancer in its advanced stages had overtaken her body, and she had just days to live.

Unfortunately, this would not be an instance where the doctors misread the timeline. She passed within days of receiving the news.

Grief is a funny thing.

Not "funny, haha" obviously.

It's just so strange.

Everything from its existence, to its movement, to our experience of it...

The way that it matters not to grief how long it has been since we experienced loss because it will always find its way back to us--in the most random of times and most unlikely of places.

The way our grief pours over us when we sit with others in the midst of their own.

The way the grief of others seeps into places that we thought we had long ago sealed off from feeling. 

It's fascinating to me.

But I suppose those things are the price we pay for being connected to one another. They are the consequences of honoring the connectedness between us as human beings. 

--

As I drove home from a meeting later that evening, Taylor Swift's new(er) hit "Reputation" came on the radio. And, for whatever reason, that's when grief struck me.

Grief struck me so hard that tears poured out of my eyes and down my cheeks, staining them with blackness. I could feel the streaks being made by the perpetual mascara-clad tears hurrying down my face in every direction.

The forty year old woman's death had brought my grief bubbling--hot and fast-- to the surface.

I grieved the mortality of my parents and the realization that they will not be here forever.

I grieved that my son is growing older.

I grieved all that my body went through in pregnancy, delivery, and recovery after his birth.

I grieved the way my relationship with my husband is different now that we have a child.

I grieved that I feel as though I have lost the sense of who I am as an individual being.

I grieved losses of relationship our family has suffered in the past year.

I grieved the magnitude of exhaustion I felt deep in my bones.

I grieved the time that I feel is slipping too quickly from my grasp and that I might not be making the most of what I have left.

I had no idea how hardened and cut off my heart had been, nor that I had reverted back to an old way of being. Without my knowledge, and much like Queen Elsa, I had embodied the "Conceal, don't feel. Don't let them know." mentality on all things relating to my own pain, anguish, loss.

But, as the song goes, "Well, now they know."

Now you know.

Grief is a funny thing.

But it is also a thing meant to be experienced in full--whenever and wherever and however it meets us. It is a thing that is okay to admit. It is a thing that it is okay to talk about with people whom you feel safe sharing such sacred space.

The more we harden our hearts and close ourselves off to what we feel, the more we dishonor the divine connectedness between us and God as well as the divine connectedness between us and others.

Because, surely, if we cannot allow ourselves to feel our own hurt...there will be no hope for us empathizing with the suffering of others.

God created us in such a way that we belong to one another for so many brilliant reasons. 

One of the most significant of all those reasons is so that no one must sit alone in her suffering, her pain, her doubts, her fears, her grief.

Dear mamas (and whoever else is reading this), remember that you are worthy of grieving the things you need to grieve and that you were never intended to do it alone.

Know that you are loved.

Thanks for reading.

Deep Peace,
MK