First Parish Unitarian UniversalistTending to Our Grief
Rev. Cricket Potter
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton
November 1, 2009
Reading
Our reading is a recent poem by Mary Oliver called “Heavy.” It is part of a larger collection of poems from her book entitled Thirst that Mary Oliver wrote after the death of her beloved partner of over forty years. Here is her poem:
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
Sermon
Loss is an unavoidable part of our lives.
It comes in so many forms from loss of a job to loss of health, loss of a friendship or a relationship, loss of a home or a way of life, and of course, as we remember today, loss of a loved one.
My daughter Haley faced her first significant loss at the age of seven when Megan, our beloved little dog, died at the age of 17.
I made an altar for Megan with flowers, pictures, and her little dog tag so that Haley and I would see those pictures every day and be nudged to really face into our loss.
Every day Haley would see that altar and she would start to cry even as she tried to fight back her tears.
I would hug her, get teary-eyed myself and say, “Don’t hold back the tears. Your tears and your sadness are part of your love for Megan. We both miss her and we both need to let the sadness come.”
As the days passed and we talked about how we hurt, the tears lessened and the stories of joy and remembrance came –
stories of the silly things Megan did,
of how loudly she snored and how much she loved her food,
and of how much we loved her.
That little altar to Megan is still there for us to see every day and mostly we just look at her pictures now and smile with the memories.
And once in a while Haley will still get sad and shed a few tears and say how much she loves and misses Megan.
I hug her and simply say, “Me too.”
I share this story because it hasn’t always been this way for me.
I learned about the importance of facing into grief by absolutely avoiding it at first and then suffering the consequences.
My father died in a car accident when I was 19 years old.
It was so sudden – as all accidents are.
The days following his death were, and still are, a blur for me.
Visits from my father’s Episcopal priest, funeral preparations, visits and phone calls from friends and extended family, the funeral and burial on a gray January morning, meeting with the lawyer to sort through legal things, starting to plan with my sisters for the tasks that lay ahead.
After everything was over, I retreated into a state of what I can only call numb denial.
I was living and studying several thousand miles away at the time, so it wasn’t so hard to go back to my place and immerse myself in the familiar comfort and busyness of my routine.
For about six months I kept up this façade - busy, focused, clutching the door to my heart shut as best I could.
But then I finished the program I was in and moved back home.
Once home, I came face to face with all the ways I missed my father, all the ways big and small that he was no longer there to talk to, weed the garden with, get silly cards from, swap favorite cartoons from The New Yorker with, or commiserate with about the demise yet again of the Red Sox.
As much as I tried to keep that door to my heart barred and locked, I couldn’t.
My grief, shut away for so long, overwhelmed me.
I felt lost and dazed.
Thankfully, my mother had the wisdom to steer me towards help.
So, I went for counseling and thankfully found someone who could companion and encourage me as I finally learned to face into my grief.
I can find no other word to describe that time than to call it life-changing and life-giving.
What I discovered is the process of grieving we all must go through when we face a loss.
We must be with the pain, name it, be patient with it, and ultimately trust in the path we each need to walk with that pain before it can soften and begin to ebb.
Only then can we see toward a place of joyful remembrance when we have lost a loved one, a place where we can embrace open-heartedly all that that person gave us in their lives.
“That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I went closer,”
Mary Oliver writes, “and I did not die.”
I don’t know about you, but I so identify with that fear of getting any closer to grief.
Sometimes, we just don’t think we have the strength to be with our sorrow any more.
Perhaps we feel like we’re going to break or be consumed.
We just want to get past it all and feel okay again.
After all, we are taught by our fast-paced culture to give our grieving only so much time and space before we should move on.
We are told to get back to work, get back to the routine, as if the few days of leave we give ourselves is enough to heal a broken heart.
Yet, the process of grieving and healing doesn’t have a time sheet.
It is the deep work of the heart, work that we can only do by tending to it gently, courageously, patiently.
The words of Mary Oliver’s friend Daniel come back to me:
It’s not the weight you carry
But how you carry it –
Books, bricks, grief –
It’s all in the way
You embrace it, balance it, carry it
In the case of my father’s death, I clung to my own misconception that I just needed to keep going, that the pain would eventually go away if I ignored it enough.
In other words, I carried the weight of my sorrow poorly such that it became impossible to bear.
It was only in facing into my loss – embracing it, if you will - and staying open to the part of the journey that grief needed to walk with me that I began to see a path toward healing.
And, this journey toward healing will look different for each one of us.
It is neither linear nor predictable nor logical at times.
And from my own experience as well as listening to many others, it is not about filling the void left by our losses.
How could we ever fill up a space left by someone or something dear to us?
Rather, it is about folding those losses into our hearts and into our very essence.
It is about moving from a heavy sense of loss to a tender-hearted sense of gratitude for all that was shared and experienced.
If we will allow them to, our losses can shape us and inform us and open our hearts even more.
I once heard a parishioner describe it this way:
“In a way we become transparent,” she said. “We become people whom the light shines through as we soften and our defenses our peeled away and we see how closely connected we all are.”
This from a widow who had lost her beloved husband of fifty years.
Now, I also need to add that this was a woman who was deeply informed by her faith as a Unitarian Universalist.
She had faith in the mystery of life in all its beauty and pain.
In her darkest moments, she could find great comfort in her sense of connection with others.
So, she could accept her pain and her unknowing because she trusted in the larger movement of life.
She also had her community of faith that helped her feel connected and helped her heal through rituals such as we have shared earlier as we named those we have loved and lost.
I wish I could say that there is one clear and simple way to do all this work of the heart.
But there isn’t.
Just as we are each so unique, so will each experience of loss be unique.
What we do have is one another – we are a community.
While grieving is a journey, no one needs to be on that journey alone.
Part of our healing is in the connection we experience with one another.
In that spirit, I invite folks after the service to come and join me at this table of remembrance.
Look at the photos and mementos and share your memories of what you hold dear.
We are also community of faith.
We journey together in the questions, mystery, and hope.
In all this there is much strength and comfort to be found.
May we all hold our losses tenderly in our hearts.
May we all find the courage to touch the center of our sorrow and be with it for the time it needs us to.
May we all have faith that healing will come.
And in the words of Kahlil Gibran, may we reach a place of openness in our sorrow where we can look again in our hearts and “see that in truth (we) are weeping for that which has been (our) delight.”
May it be so.
Amen.