Charting the existential loneliness of grief in loss

Grief is the felt intrapsychic experience from the thing called loss.  And there are so many varieties of loss, but we typically ground the experience in the loss of death.  But we all endure many losses throughout the living of our daily lives.  Yet many of these losses don’t break through the threshold of pain into what I’d call existential loneliness.

When you’ve been there—in a state of prolonged deathly loneliness—you know exactly what I mean.

In this state, for basically an entire extended season of months and even years, we feel completely disconnected from everything that ever meant anything to us.

It’s a parallel universe where nobody and nothing feels close, where there are moments of tremendous insight interspersed with yawning chasms of vacuous nothingness.

It’s in the nothingness, where we cannot escape the pain, that we learn to search for a way out of the living hell called grief.

Charting the existential loneliness of grief in loss is utterly unique to each and every person called by their circumstances to that journey.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Holding the tensions of two opposite ideas that are both true, it’s both good and bad that nobody is qualified to give us advice.  It’s both good and bad that nobody has any idea what we’re facing.

It’s good because the right people enter our lives, but it’s bad for the people we thought would be helpful but aren’t.

Those people who end up being good for us—who understand that they don’t know—come from some surprising quarters, and just like everything else, our world is turned upside down.

Nothing we came to expect to be as it is ends up being that way.  This is both a good and a bad thing. There are huge disappointments that exacerbate the grief, whilst there are also unexpected, pleasant surprises.

Journeying each day is, of course, treacherous, and we quickly realise that living in such mental, emotional, and spiritual uncertainty makes us distrust the present whilst it also makes us nimble and agile—again, some good in the myriad bad.

But life in loss is still a vacuum, and our whole being—our whole existence—is subsumed in being forever stuck in the in-between.

In the starkest times, when we truly question if our existence is worth the pain, we descend to depths that one day—when we’ve recovered—we’ll paradoxically want to return to.  Again, good with bad.  Somehow, we’re touched in such a visceral way in these experiences, afterward we see them as that rare time we truly felt connected with ourselves.

Isn’t it amazing that in an experience that is as close to a living death—at that point of sheer brokenness and overwhelm—that we come to a place we’ve always sought to arrive at?  It’s in many ways the finding of who we are.

Grief will take us to where we would never go of our own volition.  The bad.

Grief will take us to where we’ve always wanted to go but never knew that this was the way there.  The good.

Grief is a revenant experience.  So aligned with the gospel—the good news of Jesus—we never truly live until we’ve died first, that is, dying to oneself.  Then, all of life opens up!

There’s a depth that comes in enduring the long season of grief that teaches us something nothing else in life ever could.  It’s bad, but it’s also good.

But we must adjust to saying goodbye to the old life and that can seem impossible.

Finally, without trust in grief we do despair.  Grief takes us to the precipice and simply asks, “Will you walk by faith this journey that will test your trust every step of the way?”

In grief, there is one way or the other—never both.  Grief forces us to choose between holding onto what was, OR embracing what IS in faith for what is coming—believing it to be good.

We chart the journey well when we take the losses of grief on the chin yet refuse to give up.