If I were my 47 year old self, I’d have given myself some advice, weeks after losing my son to full term stillbirth —
LEAVE PASTORAL MINISTRY FOR TWO YEARS
But I didn’t. I white-knuckled it. And it failed.
It failed in some small part to my insistence that I was okay, when clearly I wasn’t really okay. I felt okay in helping people, but I was vulnerable to anything negative in my life, particularly feedback.
I was particularly sensitive due to the traumas of that previous season of complicated grief from an extended period of ambiguous loss.
And I didn’t cut myself any slack — because I was morbidly fearful of losing my ‘pastoral identity’. As it happened, I only put that process off 18 months and thereby slapped a six-year delay on healing properly the traumas that could have been dealt with in two or three.
But I could not and would not be told.
Today I am more honest about this. Not a regret, a learning.
Walking ahead through grief is one of the hardest things to do, because when your heart’s been crushed by loss, the trauma is undeniable — it bleeds out of us.
Heart break is a life-ending experience. Normally we could trust our mind, but in grief our mind is so thrown by the trauma of it, it takes us down the most insidious rabbit warrens.
Hope, for instance, whilst it’s fundamentally a good thing, leads us to bargain upon impossible dreams that the old-normal is recapturable. It isn’t. That old-normal is long gone. It can only be accepted.
But that brings us to a terrible reality; it means facing our pain!
Here is a bone-jarring irony: not the more we wish upon a star, not the more we revisit our pain, but the more we rationalise our idealisation, the better the chance we have of thinking straight in that moment.
This is the only way to heal the mind so we can walk ahead — and function! We can only heal the mind one thought at a time, training or re-training our mind to think logically, including challenging our thinking with balance and truth.
Healing the mind one thought at a time is going gently with ourselves, recognising, as we walk forward one step at a time, that life won’t always be so etched in the acuteness of the pain of this actualised grief.
One thought and one step at a time are both abundantly doable.
Another paradox: we experience more comfort in the discipline of facing reality—because there is hope for a future there—than we do in emotional appeasement, which feels comfortable but takes us nowhere.
We’re tempted to sojourn with sympathy, when just a little compassion is merely the instigating motivator toward something more empowering.
Thoughts of reality must be nurtured and retained, whilst idealistic or caustic thoughts need to be identified, validated, and then jettisoned. Because the mind is a rudder and idealistic and caustic thoughts will direct us toward spiritual and emotional compromise and hopelessness.
Living while dying (grieving) can feel impossible, just functioning, with a limp in the gait.
But life doesn’t ordinarily surface without death preceding. Take the cross and the resurrection of Jesus as the archetype, but don’t forget the nature of crisis preceding resolution in every great story, movie and momentous event in all of history.
Becoming a student of grief is becoming a student of death; death to the hopes of returning to what was; death to dreams long held dear; death in many ways to our desires.
Death as an antecedent to acceptance and life.
Death in life is not altogether a bad thing, and indeed it can be a good thing.
Such a state of grief in its interminability is lesson after lesson in the impossibility of control. Could this not be life’s most polarising lesson: accepting much of life is beyond our control. Indeed, I’d argue it’s one half of the wisdom of handling our living circumstances.
Living and walking ahead while grieving (dying inside before learning how new life comes) can seem impossible, and it is certainly helped when we’re planted in a healing environment.
If only we walk forward being able to grieve gently and live and learn and find a portion of compassion where we need it.
But it is nevertheless one of the hardest things to do—to walk forward with vibrance whilst dying inside.
