Reconciling the Never-Ending Pain of Loss in Grief

Speaking with a widow of an over-60-year marriage recently opened my eyes afresh to the gnawing, unending, tremulous pain of loss in the grief.  

There is no going back in a situation
when there is also no going forward.  

No going forward to the way life was, those long-yearned-for hugs are gone, with not a one available — not even one!  The soft comfort of a smooth word uttered in symbiotic understanding all gone.  The sight of, the presence of, the hand-holding with that loved one — intransigently gone!  

I cherish a ministry where there are no words that appease a soul bereft of the ability to bargain.  A soul seemingly tortured by a pain that cannot be touched.  

Reconciling such a pain can seem impossible unless
we agree there MUST be a purpose in this pain.  

Think of it this way… 

Loss is the opposite side of the coin of love, and we were made to love, so in the grief of loss there MUST equally be a purpose.  

Loss forces us into a search to resolve the pain of grief — it forces us into the surrender of seeking help, and this necessitates connection with others who can provide such help.  Growth is thereby enabled.  

It doesn’t feel like growth but simply to survive grief is growth!  

Go there to grief outbound of loss and there you are, struggling just to survive, so much so that survival is victory, and such a victory is growth in the depth of the individual concerned; depths of empathy, compassion, open-heartedness, kindness, depths of humanity.  

To connect with our own suffering is to connect with another’s suffering, where suffering opens the eyes of our heart regarding suffering in our world.  Our powers to connect are not only deepened, they’re enhanced.  

Nothing whatsoever can appease the grief of the loss of a life partner or child or parent or significant other.  To appease such pain would betray the power of love we had for them who we miss terribly [insert better word than “terribly,” here].  

Reconciling what on earth has no answer can seem on earth to be an impossibility.  But just as we have lost our loved one to eternity — that is where we must look to reconcile it in our mind.  They are not gone, just elsewhere, in a place we Christians call eternity.  

We can only find a purpose for being beyond simply surviving if we imagine the best really is to come — when we, too, go over the cusp, giving up the mortal body for something indescribably better.  

Being a Student of Grief

Ever since I first grieved, I’ve called myself a ‘student of grief’.  

This is because grief schools us in things we cannot ever fully know.  

We grieve because we love, and with both grief and love we do not see either fully in this life.  With both there is an eternal hope that we’ll see all.  

Only with God, as far as I know, do we grieve with hope.  

That has been my experience.  To know, perhaps without always experiencing it, that a future hope will materialise sometime in the future.  

The essence of faith is belief that a reality that has not yet come true will ultimately come to pass.  That a good will come of it.  

Hebrews 11:1-2 puts it this way: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  This is what the ancients were commended for.”  

One way to keep the faith in grief is to take the posture of a student — becoming teachable, humble, accepting of the thing we cannot change, the thing we have no control over.  An approach that commands humility.  

Taking such a posture as a student is the exercise of faith.  

Suffering ought to captivate us in reverence for what we do not yet know rather than cast us into the futility of bitterness and resentment.  

Understandable as they are, bitterness and resentment are a dead end that lead to the death of a thousand cuts.  Alcoholism or other addiction for one.  A lifetime of depression is another.  A hard heart is still another.  

Being a student of grief is about being laid open, broken open; open to a healing that can only come spiritually.  

Being a student of grief is about going the opposite way to how the world expects us to go.  It’s the narrow road that few take, and it can be lonely.  

We take such a road by faith with a faithful God.  

Being a student of grief is casting our own common sense away for a wisdom that there is a better way — yet unattained, but believed for.  

Read Hebrews 11:1 again —

Faith is confidence in what we hope for
and assurance about what we do not [yet] see.  

The spiritual way is the way to be a student of grief.  The spiritual way defies what seems true but ultimately isn’t.  The spiritual way cuts crossgrain against the world’s ‘wisdom’.  

It seems to believe in a dream,
but so many times I’ve seen God
reward faith in a hope not yet seen.  

Being a student of grief requires weakness or it makes us weak; a weakness God makes strong — “For when I am weak, then I am strong” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 12:10.  

Being a student of grief will make you weak, but you won’t be hardened by it.  

Living and grieving (dying) at the same time

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.  

After I’m Gone

The kookaburras will cackle…
After I’m gone…

The trees will remain…
After I’m gone…

Streets that were before me… endure…
Sometimes reshaped, but the land remains…
After I’m gone…

Those much younger than me will remain…
After I’m gone…  

After I’m gone…
All that was there before me…
Will still be there…

Is there a better opportunity to motivate our living purpose than ponder a time we’re no longer here?  

The funeral I attended last week, and the one I conducted the week before, are both funerals closer to my own.  Funerals are sobering.  Many of us will attend dozens before it’s our turn in the coffin.  

Humbling, it’s only a matter of time.  Giving each moment beforehand its significance, death promises an outcome none can bargain around.  

Death itself urges us to have a philosophy, a theology, that explains — or makes meaning of — life, its purpose, the reason for our being.  

Giving reflective thought space to death feels morbid for so many of us, yet is there anything like death that would motivate us to truly live our life.  

What is it to truly live this life we’ve been given?  

If life is to come from death, how are we to redeem life from the deaths of our dearly beloved ones?  It’s a good question.  They, like us when it’s our turn, go to a place beyond the pains of this life.  A place of reckoning, believe some, including me.  A place of truth and peace, in Jesus, is what I believe.  A hope that brings us peace.  That peace brings joy beyond anxiety, to know all is well even when, on this earth, at this time, it isn’t.  

… if our hope is (and theirs was) an eternal one, a good one.  

Funerals are gloriously humbling, where we will find the essence and purposes of life.  If we see, there, what is the purpose of our lives — redemption in the realities of our relationships — we will live motivated.  

… to make amends… to set straight what presently isn’t.  

After I’m gone — after you’re gone — what will they say about me and you?  Did we live for others and for love or did we live for ourselves?  

Were we kind when we could be?  Did we endeavour upon the insight to imagine, “What is the private battle of this person before me that I know nothing about — except empathise and give compassion toward?”  

We all make mistakes.  We all miss the mark.  Have we forgiven ourselves?  Have we forgiven others?  Have we sought forgiveness for our wrongs?  

After I’m gone, will I be known as someone who sought to correct the errors of my life?  Does anything else matter this side of eternity?  

What purpose is there in healing?

There are times in the healing process when we truly doubt the purpose of it.  This is usually because we’re struggling to believe it’s working; we lack faith that we’re healing at all.  

Having lost sight of hope, little wonder we’ve lost sight of the purpose in healing.  Sick and tired of being sick and tired, fatigued and possibly burning out, confused or overwhelmed, having perhaps lost bearing for the heading or the progress we’ve made.  

Bizarrely, when we’re weakest in the fight for healing, we stand on the precipice of possibility, there’s no false pretense in our attitude, as we face our reality in all its bleak starkness.  

Depression is strength in that it can no longer
look away from the peril that life has become,
and in that is a hope beyond sight of emerging light.  

But none of this is hope to us when all vision for hope seems to have failed.  Maybe it’s only a moment — or moments — we feel this way, but there can be entire seasons where we cannot see the purpose in healing.  Hope vanquished, sight for light has dematerialised.

When we cannot see the purpose in healing, our motivation to continue on healing’s path is in grave danger of peril.  We could easily backslide into a season of going the opposite way; many people do not make it back.  

If only we could see how we could borrow some hope from a mentor or friend, but that takes faith — to believe upon another person’s belief that a thing is possible.  

Here is an incredible paradox — how would we describe a person who has lost sight of the purpose in their healing but they continue along the healthy and right path of healing, anyway?  That person is a standing, walking, abiding miracle of faith.  

Recall Thomas encountering Jesus — believing He was “My Lord and my God” when Thomas had put his hand in Jesus’ side.  Jesus decrees that, “... blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29)  

Maybe that’s you right now, at the end of your tether.  Needing to keep moving forward despite the apparent folly of it, moving forward anyway in the faintest hope that all could work out after all.  

Much as it’s the same for anyone who cannot hope because they see no hope, and yet they cannot let go of the hope they borrow from elsewhere.  Many times we cannot let go of hope because of those who depend on us.  Even a hope borne on the wings of the Spirit who intercedes with groans (Romans 8:26).  

It’s never good news to lose heart, but it’s only when we do that verses like, “Do not lose heart,” make the most sense to us, because we NEED that encouragement to hang on right then and there!  

We may insist on believing the truth
t h a t   d o e s   n o t   f e e l   r e a l
because that’s all we can hope for.  

The purpose in healing is to reclaim our purpose — to trust that we will indeed, one day, see everything we cannot yet see, and that takes faith; a faith that does not feel strong, but that is tested in the fire.  

Strongest faith believes in the storm
that stillness will soon be found.  

Strong faith does not need to feel strong.  It only needs to keep doing what faith does — to keep stepping forward into the tyranny of fear despite feeling scared.  

Losing heart eventually necessitates a search to reclaim what’s lost, so suddenly wise sayings have their purpose in the lingering there.  

With imagination captivated, with attention fixed on a prize that feels so inconceivably far away, faith is piqued, and the purpose to heal is born.  

Purpose to heal is born where healing feels impossible.  

A Reluctant Counsellor

I dare say that anyone who has been a counsellor any length of time has not only done perhaps a power of good they have also done some harm.  

Yet, as displayed right in front of me every time I sit in my study, the Greek sentence, ektelo me blape (do no harm) reminds me of any good helper’s mandate.  

But having been a counsellor to over 50 couples, about 30 pre-marrieds, and lots of individuals, there have been a few times I learned later that I did harm.  I will face God on it one day.  None of these harms have been done with intent.  I think those I inadvertently harmed I’ve had the opportunity to reconcile with and to practice where appropriate the making of amends — committed as I am to the Twelve Steps.  

These days I’m a reluctant counsellor who goes out of my way to avoid counselling unless it’s in a church situation where as a pastor I’m asked to journey with someone to give pastoral counselling.  

It weighs on me that burden that I have placed on some others.  It would be very easy for me to say to God, “I disqualify myself.”  I’m aware that there are many times when I’ve been a blessing to people, but that’s how it’s meant to be; to do harm, for a person to feel harmed, is in my view reprehensible.  

I’ve been on the receiving end of poor therapy practice on at least one occasion.  Two issues that cropped up in that, the lack of skill of the person helping and a conflict of interest in the room.  On the whole I’ve used this experience to endeavour never to do that to anyone… but that is only one set of errors, I’ve made others.  

I’m fortunate these days to practice chaplaincy which is both therapeutic and by and large safe.  It involves my counselling skill set, but because it’s more slanted to a ministry of presence — I actually intentionally say much less — it’s safer and if anything I believe it has more efficacy.  I cannot commit to ongoing intensive pastoral care.  Thankfully most chaplaincy is not both ongoing and intensive.  

I’ll never regret the experiences I’ve had as a counsellor — many of which were both challenging and enlightening personally — and I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m thankful that I consider myself more a pastor and chaplain these days.  

The Heart of True Change

Only those serious about sustained change will prosper in reading this article.  It has nothing for anyone else.  Trouble is, we all reckon we’re serious about change — until the action starts.  

The heart of true change always comes from the heart, the right insight and motivation.  And true change is only possible when we admit we’re going wrong.  

Admitting we’re going wrong in any detail of our lives demonstrates an attitude of humility, but attitudes are useless — mere and genuine frustrations — without true commitment to action.  Motivation that fuels change occurs when we’re finally sick and tired about being sick and tired (living in a lie).  

Recently, I noticed a better chance of success for myself in an area I’d struggled with for many years.  I think my rates of success with change are about one-in-twenty.  Once in twenty times I get it right because the rest of the time I only have an attitude of humility about where I’m going wrong — my heart isn’t humble.  The problem is true motivation — which is always about the true heart behind change.  

When we don’t truly believe we are going wrong, we aren’t truly motivated to change.  We may think we believe we’re going wrong but we don’t truly believe it because the heart of change always links belief with action.  

Belief grounded in action is faith.  

Motivation underpins faith to act right based on true hope.  

The reason I think most if not all of us struggle with change is converting that attitude to action — being true of heart.  Another way of thinking about it is this: 

Action requires a heart committed
for behaving differently
over a sustained period of time.  

Christians have a definite advantage when it comes to increased chances that true change will stick.  They are at least in theory more prepared to admit the true issue is a matter of the right (or wrong) heart.  

The heart of true change is about
change toward a true heart.  

If a person wants to be a better person, they cannot get better unless they face what is wrong with their heart.  If we are ambitious, selfish, greedy, unkind, lazy, lustful, etc, it always starts with the heart.  

There’s nothing wrong with admitting wrongness of heart.  Perhaps it’s the only right thing we can do.  The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah (17:9) stated this truth powerfully if only we’d accept it, and change:  

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?”   The next verse answers the question… only God can understand it.  Verse 10 says, “I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”  

Our conduct, sustained over a greater portion of time, which reflects our true heart, is what God judges, and this is evident in the way life works, more or less.  Our true heart is judged.  Not what we pretend to think, say, or do — as if we could fool God.  

If our heart covets nothing but doing the right thing, all ways, we will be rewarded — if not in this life, in the next.  That is always the test of a true heart.  

A true heart never seeks reward. 
Ironically, that’s the only heart God can reward.  

“Can I accept that I may not get my reward until I see God in eternity?”  

If only we can reconcile this, our motivation will always be right, because revelation has convicted us at the level of our insight.  

We must truly be prepared, as Jim Eliot said, to lose everything we cannot keep to gain what we cannot lose — and that right there is the abundant spiritual life Jesus promised to every believer.  But we must be prepared to lose our life to gain it.  

It all starts in the heart.  If we had hearts that always saw right and were always committed to doing right, we would always do right with the same attitude.  But we don’t.  This is a liberating truth two ways.  First, there’s no need to feel ashamed or annoyed; we all struggle with the same thing — if we can admit it.  Second, the key to change stands right there before us.  

We can repent of the corruptness of heart,
and move in a life-giving direction of change.  

Evidence that we have moved is blessing not so much in our own lives, but more through us into others’ lives.  Being genuinely other-oriented is evidence of the right heart.  We can seek such a heart but only God can change hearts.  True change, therefore, is a matter of prayer with the right heart.