What Do We Do with Our Grief?

What Do We Do with Our Grief?         May 26, 2019      Dr. Roger Ray   

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No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

William Shakespeare

In a fit of uncontrollable grief, I had one of those experiences you have heard so many people talk about. Armond had not told me that he was near death and so, when the news reached me, I fell to pieces, and in the midst of that pain, I had a vision of Armond speaking to me from heaven, saying sternly, “That’s enough now, get ahold of yourself.” Which I dutifully did. 

Years later, another dear church member died of a sudden heart attack and I was away and could not get back to preside over or attend the funeral. As barbaric as many of our funeral rituals seems to be, I can testify that when you don’t get to see the deceased, your mind can have some real difficulty in accepting their death as a fact. For years, in crowded situations, I would swear that I saw Don in the crowd, for just a moment, before he disappeared. 

Even as a very young pastor, I never believed that Armond spoke to me from heaven nor that Don was playing hide and seek with me at the mall. It was obvious to me that these visions, these waking dreams, were the product of my grief and my unwillingness to accept the finality of our shared mortality.

It has always been a curiosity to me, that if you have ever lived with a dog, you know that they will have dreams. You see their paws moving, the breathing gets, heavy: in their dream they may be in the hot pursuit of a backyard rabbit but when the dog wakes up, he looks around and does not seem to believe that there is a rabbit loose in the house. Dogs understand the difference between a dream and reality.

People, however, who have an experience such as those that I described, will often insist that they have proof of heaven or evidence for life after death. 

I just wish that we could get religious people to take a lesson from their dogs. Just because you wish it were so, doesn’t make it so. Just because you are struggling with your grief doesn’t mean that an alternative reality exists in order to comfort you or to help you to deny reality. 

Am I going too far to say that healthy religion helps us to deal with reality and unhealthy religion encourages us to deny reality?

A few years ago, when our friend, Mary McKenzie, lost her husband, Dan. The family decided to hold the funeral in his home church, a rural Baptist church north of town, but she asked me and Sean to come and conduct the service. It was a very honorable and respectful service, but I don’t make certain religious promises that no one can know and probably shouldn’t be mentioned.

After the service, the host pastor was visibly a bit shaken. He said to Mary, “I sure would have handled that differently.” And Mary replied, “I know, that’s why I asked Roger to do it.”

I am not unsympathetic. No one who has ever bought a lottery ticket doesn’t understand what it feels like to wish for an outcome that is so immensely unlikely that you don’t want anyone to see you making the purchase. Most of us do not readily give up our own lives and all of us have had to say “goodbye” to someone we loved very much long before we were ready.

In the overall evolution of religions, I am not certain whether we invented hell or heaven first. The desire to go on living in some idyllic state, contrasted with how much we might want others who have done us wrong to get what they so richly deserve, could be a pretty tight theological race. But even though most world religions have made unblinking assertions about either reward or punishment in eternity, it seems that no one was ever entirely convinced.

I took a Shakespearian sonnet as our wisdom lesson today in which the Bard encourages a friend not languish too long in grief when he has died but to accept death as an inevitable fact and to try to move on with your own life as long as it lasts. It is sobering more than it is comforting, but a helpful piece of reality orientation.

Most of us are more familiar with Hamlet’s graveyard soliloquy in which he speculates about death in a mixed bag of considerations of grief, murder, and suicide.

To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

In times when infant mortality has been very high or at the end of wars when huge portions of a society has been prematurely wiped out, people turn to one another, seeking to assure one another that the reality that are experiencing is not the last word. And yet, as Hamlet muses, who knows? 

In fact, we get so resistant to the idea of our own mortality that we will even project immortality onto our beloved pets. The movie that is currently in the theaters, “A Dog’s Purpose,” promises that though dog’s lives are comparatively short, that they are lovingly reincarnated, over and over again, as long as we need them. I hate this movie for two reasons. One is, because it is theologically stupid, and secondly because, even though I have not and will not see the movie, I have seen the trailer several times and I cry every time. Stupid manipulative dog.

I have a good friend who is one of the people who keeps the Renaissance Book Store in business. She claims to really believe in psychics, tarot cards, and in her own magical gifts of spiritual cleansing and various forms of the blessings and 

curses of witchcraft. I sometimes gently prod her to spend more energy on reality and she predictably replies, “Whose reality,” as if there were many and varied realities from which once could choose, like flavors at a Baskin Robins. And you may think, “so what, people can believe whatever they want,” which is typically true enough.

But I was sharing with a group of friends who were, shall we say, “over 50,” that even if you had received the vaccine against shingles before, that there is a new vaccine that is much more effective and that I had gotten it and everyone else should as well. My friend replied, “I don’t believe in vaccines.” Which, once you believe in tarot cards and horoscopes, you can already pretty well give up on every getting into an Ivy League school but when you categorically dismiss medical science, or climate science, or economics, or any other science, even though you might become president one day, you have a much greater chance of getting shingles. 

I’m not the kind of doctor that you should turn to for this advice, but I am plenty smart enough to tell you . . . get your kids vaccinated . . . it won’t cause autism and it will give them one less reason to talk to a therapist about you when they are grown. And all of us who travel and who have lived past a few decades need to keep our tetanus, Hepatitis, and shingles vaccines up to date.

But speaking as a theologian, while there can be some palliative benefit to believing in things that cannot be known and for which there is no credible evidence, what I really wish for us all on this Memorial Day weekend is that we might remember those we love who have died. The grief is real and deserved. Mark recently buried his father. Sean and I were up in Pilot Knob on Thursday to help Paul Thomlinson with the memorial for his brother. At this point in my life, I have lost my grandparents, my parents, all of my aunts and uncles, and my only sister. Many of my high school classmates have preceded me in death and Paul’s brother, whose memorial we participated in on Thursday, was two years younger than I am. But I don’t have to look any further than my bathroom mirror to be reminded that mortality is real and closer than I might want to believe. 

But, if you can follow me, that reality does not beg for denial. It doesn’t ask me to engage in fantasies about what cannot be known. Rather it demands that I cherish the life that I do know, the days I do have. It allows me to grieve the loss of those whom I have loved, and encourages me to love those around me while I can. 

I was called upon to speak at the funeral of a good friend’s grandmother a few years ago. When it was over, I sat with Kim as she wept quietly and finally she said, “I wasn’t done with grandma yet.” I have really felt with my friend Paul this week because I know that he is heartbroken and that he just wasn’t done with his brother, Mark, yet. When I think back over the last few years of our shared lives here, I can tell you that I wasn’t done with Rev. Parnell, or Jim Price, or Nancy Pate. I wasn’t through with either Chuck or Ruth Snowden, Dan McKenzie, Terry Bacon, or Bob Green.

Time passes. Memory fades. Grief does not always go away entirely, it just becomes a dull ache, like a bad knee, that just goes with you wherever you go. But we are enfolded in the history of love. We have been taught, inspired, provided for, and healed by those who brought us to this point in history and today we remember them, we feel them, and we strive to deserve the confidence that they had in us.

I will close today with the honest and defiant sentiments penned nearly a century ago by Edna St. Vincent Millay, what I read at Paul’s brother’s funeral a few days ago:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.