Comforting Those Who Grieve: Part VI: Scars of Remembrance

(The Weight of Grief, Celeste Roberge)

What does it mean to move on, when it comes to grief?   Does that mean “getting over” the one who has died?  Does that mean not feeling pain or sadness anymore?

Many years ago I knew a man who worked in addiction counseling.  He said one of the biggest problems we have in our culture is that we have defined pain, rather than being a part of life, as somehow “wrong.”  And so, as soon as we feel pain, we “take something” in order not to feel the pain any longer.

As a culture, one of the pains we are uncomfortable with is grief.  We want others to “get over it” quickly, and, when we are the ones grieving, we think we should strive for that also.  One of the words we use so often when it comes to grief is “closure.”  Somehow we think that we can just “close the door” on grief and the pain from it will never bother us again.

However, as I stated in Part V of this series, grief is our response to loss, and loss results from no longer having what we love.  If total closure was actually possible, we would lose touch with what we have loved, and to lose touch with what we have and continue to love is to lose an essential part of who we are.

Moving on in grief is not about forgetting, closing a door, or no longer feeling pain.  Moving on occurs as we are able to face the pain, allow a measure of healing to take place, and then move into the future, not because we have forgotten, but because we have learned how to live with the pain.  Living with this pain will, over time, lessen it, although it will never go away totally, because we do not want it to.

In my journaling following the deaths of my parents and first wife, Pauline, I wrote about having a hole in my heart for each of them.  Those holes were there because of my deep love for each of them, and I never wanted to forget that love.  I just wanted the gaping wound to begin to scar over, so it didn’t hurt quite so much.  But I never wanted the scars to go away completely.

Several months ago, the wife of one of my best friends died.  I was working on a sermon and searching for a quote from the profound German theologian, Dietrich Bonheoffer, who was killed in a concentration camp in Germany.  In my search I came across the following words from him, which describe profoundly the experience of grief and how it affects us as we move into the future. Having lost both family and friends in war, and being imprisoned the last two years of his life,  prior to being executed a month before the end of the war, he certainly had experienced the depths of grief and loss:

“There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so.  One must simply hold out and endure it.  At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it.  

It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness.  God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship.  Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation.  But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy.  One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.” [Letters and Papers from Prison]