Good Grief?

My mother died recently. 

The death was neither unexpected nor, to be honest, entirely unwelcome, for she had been seriously ill with dementia for the best part of two years.  Dementia is a cruel disease that takes our loved one from us a piece at a time, and I started grieving for her several months ago as I sat by her bedside in the Nursing Home, listening to her unbearable screams, cries of distress and incoherent ramblings, and seeing in her eyes only pain and fear and, often, no vestige of recognition.  

When I received the inevitable phone call telling me that Mum had died, my sadness was more than equalled by a sense of relief that her suffering was ended and she was at last at peace.

"I've been grieving for my mother for the last year or so," I would say, "because the woman who was my Mum is long gone". But if I imagined that this 'pre-grieving' would somehow diminish the pain of bereavement, I was mistaken.  

Grief, as we all know, is a strange and unpredictable thing. It can hide away in the recesses of our psyche  tricking us into thinking that the worst is over and life can now go on,  but then will suddenly ambush us at the most unsuspecting moment, hitting us with the force and brutality of a sledge-hammer.

Whilst grief is certainly nothing new to me - I have lost several loved ones and friends over the years - I am finding this most recent loss particularly debilitating. This is doubtless partly due to the closeness of my relationship with Mum, but I think there is also more to it. 

My father, with whom I also had a good and loving relationship, died in 2011. I certainly mourned his passing then, but there is undoubtedly a sense in which the loss of both parents has created for me an existential crisis with which I know many can empathise. Suddenly I feel 'rootless'. Although I've had a slightly 'nomadic' life and have always felt that home was indeed 'wherever I laid my hat', the parental home was always there as - if you pardon the mixed metaphors - a kind of anchor, whether I was conscious of it or not. I guess it's therefore inevitable  that with the death of both parents and the subsequent sale of the family home, I feel rather adrift. (Interestingly, places where I have previously laid my hat and found significant happiness and fulfilment are now emerging as substitute family homes - places where I might again drop anchor, not least as I begin to contemplate retirement.) 

This 'Orphan Syndrome' must at least partly account for the fact that in grieving for Mum, I'm experiencing a renewed grief for Dad - and indeed for others. It seems that as we journey through life, our various griefs build up - layer upon layer - so with each new loss the burden becomes noticeably greater; so, too, does the sense of our own mortality and our awareness of just how fragile and precious this life is. 

Grief hurts, there's no denying that. As I say at every funeral service that I conduct, "Grief is the ultimate expression of the reality and depth of our love". The only way to insure ourselves against the pain of grief, is to deny ourselves the joy of loving, and I doubt that many of us would make that choice. 

But it's bloody hard. 

Of course, as a priest you'll be expecting me to say something here about where my faith fits into all of this. I hesitate to do so, mainly because for a priest as much as anyone else, a close bereavement can present a seismic challenge to one's faith, but also because it's too easy to fall back onto familiar platitudes which can sound alarmingly like an unhelpful  'pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die' escapism.  

It's certainly true that the hope of resurrection (whatever that means and whatever it looks like) brings a degree of comfort, but it certainly doesn't negate the grieving process, and nor should it. Grief and hope are by no means mutually exclusive. They are, I suspect, two sides of the same coin. I'm always reminded of this when I read one of my favourite Psalms - Psalm 139 - which includes these words:

If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me  

and the light around me turn to night,’

  Even darkness is no darkness with you;

    the night is as clear as the day;  

darkness and light to you are both alike. (Ps 139:10,11)

 As I recently re-read those words I was struck by something to which familiarity had perhaps previously blinded me. The psalmist says, "Darkness and light to you (God) are both alike" - implying that this is not the case for us. We see darkness and we see light. We perceive the two as being opposites - mutually exclusive. When we dare to hope, we often speak of seeing light on the distant horizon and we long for the darkness to give way to that light. 

Perhaps we hope even better when we simply accept the darkness and embrace it,  knowing that God is in there with us, and trusting that with him the night is actually as clear as the day if we could but see it. I wonder.....could this perhaps be the key to 'good grief'?