Opening and closing the door on grief

A little girl always asked her mother to leave the hall light on and bedroom door open when she was put to bed at night. Her mother asked her one evening, “Is it to let the light in?”

The little girl thought about it for a moment and then replied, “No, Mummy. I think it is to let the darkness out.”

Grief is a bundle of quite complex negative emotions. It is a bit like darkness inside. It needs to be let out—it needs to be expressed in whatever way is appropriate to our own personality and temperament when the time comes. When grief comes upon us, as surely it will (and probably it will come a number of times) in the course of our lifetime, we need to open the door, and keep the door open for long enough for the grief (the darkness) to get out. Sometimes we may need someone to open the door for us and to hold it open. For various reasons, it is sometimes difficult to open the door, and sometimes the door keeps trying to close itself.

There are a number of things we can do for ourselves to help us through our times of grief in a healthy, constructive and godly way. And there are a number of ways others can help us in our times of grief. We may well need their help. Of course, the converse of that is true: there are a number of things that we can actually do, if we are aware, to help other people with their grieving. Surely that is a good and godly thing to do. We should try to learn how to do it.

In this brief article, I explore the nature of grief, how grief heals and what can hinder that healing, and ways of ministering to others who are grieving.

What grief is

What is grief? Grief is the single word we use to cover a whole cluster of emotions we experience when we lose someone or something that has an important place in the emotional fabric of our lives. Grief is made up of a number of components such as sorrow, loneliness, fear, despair, anger, confusion and guilt. These components rise and fall from time to time in the experience of grief. Sometimes one particular emotion is much more prominent than the others: the emotions rise and fall and the shape of grief constantly changes. The experience of grief is obviously felt more strongly the more our lives are involved with that someone or something and the closer our attachment.

Sometimes the very foundations of our lives are shaken, and we experience a deep and profound sorrow—an overwhelming sorrow and a confusion almost bordering on despair and hopelessness. That probably would be a good description of my grief experience back in July 1991. After a two-year struggle, my wife Betty died of cancer, and this grieving experience was further complicated by the fact that two of my daughters (Jenny, 25 and Narelle, 32) were killed in a head-on car accident eight days before Betty died. I had pastored and taught courses in pastoral care before 1991, but this massive grieving experience has certainly shaped my own reflection on the topic.

Grief is not limited to traumatic events like those I experienced, or even necessarily to the death of some person we love. We experience grief in childhood: the loss of a child-time pet is often a grief experience in a child. We experience grief as adults when we move house or job, and leave behind familiar people and places. We even experience grief when we lose some object that has emotional or sentimental value. We experience grief with lost expectations—for example, being made redundant, failing an exam, missing out on a promotion, not achieving a cherished goal, retiring and leaving behind the familiar workplace and friends. People also experience grief with their advancing years and the loss of faculties. It should be clear that we meet grieving people quite often—not just when a death occurs. We may grieve a death, but we also grieve an illness, an absence, a change, a significant loss of any kind. We need to be aware of that and seek to recognize the needs of people who are suffering grief. “No man is an island”, wrote John Donne, the 17th-century English poet and preacher. We really can't live a full life without some network of human relationships. This very network of human relationships inevitably involves the experience of grief. Indeed, to avoid grief we would have to live in total isolation from relationships with other people, cut off like islands: “a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries”, as Simon and Garfunkel sang. But most of us don't want to live that sort of life, and so we are inevitably exposed to the possibility of grief. Our most significant grief experiences revolve around people.

There are at least three components to grief. There is an emotional component—intense feelings of sadness, loss, loneliness and despair—which will vary in intensity and impact from person to person. There is a psychological component, where the grief affects our mental processes: it may be difficult to make decisions; a person may ‘break down’, as we say. And there is a practical component: we lose people and things that have structured our lives, and we have to learn new ways of living.

Christians and grieving

Christians grieve too. It is important to remember that although, as Christians, Christ is at the centre of our lives as Saviour and Lord, that doesn't negate the importance of other things and other people in our lives. In fact, our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ should make us more sensitive people all round—more human and not less. I emphasize this because of triumphalist Christianity that says that if we are genuine Christians, our lives will be above being affected by changing circumstances, and that trials and troubles, sorrows and losses will be water off a duck's back. I think that is directly contrary to the teaching and certainly the example of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our example in all things. He was literally one of us and, in fact, far more human than we are. Our humanness is marred and diminished by sin; we are broken people, and we live as part of a broken world.

If the Lord Jesus Christ is our model—if he is the kind of humanity that he is moving us back towards being as he recreates by the presence of his Spirit within—then we should expect to find ourselves becoming people who are more affected by life's events, not less.

How grief heals

How do we deal with grief in a healthy, constructive and godly way? In a book called Beyond Grief, the author John Holm says that grief is the illness that heals itself. I'm not sure that I like the word ‘illness’; I prefer to use the word ‘hurt’. Grief is the hurt that heals itself. In another book, Good Grief, Granger Westburg describes ten stages through which a person might move towards the feeling of their grief. This book is well worth reading. The ten stages are:

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1. Shock
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2. Painful emotions
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3. Depression and loneliness
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4. Physical symptoms
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5. Anxiety or panic
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6. Sense of guilt
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7. Hostility and resentment
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8. Inability to return to usual activities
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9. Hope
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10. Adjusting to new realities
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It is important to remember that not everybody experiences all of these stages, nor are they necessarily experienced in this order. The fact is that there is no standard experience of grief. There are a number of common factors. There are relatively common stages that grieving people move through. The process is usually slow, but in the end, a balanced, meaningful and happy life should emerge out of the ashes of grief. Life can be good again. I am so grateful to someone who kept telling me that.

After I was through the initial stages of grief, from six weeks onward for the next six months, this person constantly told me that life can be good again. When the appropriate time comes, we need to keep feeding people hope. Hope needs to grow again. Life on the other side of grief will never be the same again, but like a plant that has been pruned, it will grow to a new shape and flower again.

Grief usually ‘heals itself’, but there are two dangers. The first is that we suppress our grief rather than living through it. This very often leads to illness—physical, psychological, emotional or mental illness. In the midst of grief, when those deep feelings of sorrow and hurt rise up inside, it is easy to rationalize a need to do this or that. It is easy to suddenly push them away by this process of rationalizing the need to do other things. When my mother died in 1977, I was on the faculty of the Bible College of Victoria. I immediately threw myself back into college life. I became aggressive, and my arthritis flared up. I asked myself the question, “What am I doing wrong?” I had a look at my notes on grief. Believe it or not, I was actually tutoring the stuff at the Bible college. It is surprising how theoretical we can become at times! I decided that what had happened was that I had suppressed my grief. So a year later, I had to go back to Woronora Cemetery and visit my mother's grave, and begin to do the grieving that I should have done a year before.

The second danger concerning grief is that we surrender to it. Surrendering to grief is the opposite of suppressing our grief. This happens when we indulge in self-pity and deliberately withdraw from life because of our pain. We might withdraw from people and different activities and responsibilities, and close the door on life.

The comfort of God

Grief works its way to the surface over a long period of time. I still sometimes have experiences of grief. When I see a red Toyota Corolla driving down the road, I remember that that was the car that Jenny, Todd and Narelle were in when the fatal accident occurred, and I find myself catching my breath and feeling the grief again. Passing North Shore Hospital in Sydney brings the same sort of feeling, for it was there that Betty went through most of her cancer treatment, and near here is where she died.

In our experience of grief, I believe there is a process that God wants us to go through. Our loss leads to grief, which leads to crying out to God, which leads to receiving help, which leads to growth, which leads to ministry. I think that this is a pattern by which God deals with us as we make our way through life:

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Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted from God (2 Cor 1:3-4).

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What can we do to open the door for those who have experienced loss? What can we do to help the grieving?

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• Practical support at the initial shock stage. Just be there and give practical help in the background. When my two girls died and Betty was in and out of hospital for eight days, people came and answered the door and phone, took messages, cooked meals and brought food to share with visitors. Practical help at this stage is of immense value.
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• Expressing sympathy. Initially this can be done by a word at the door, a phone call or a sympathy card. But I would encourage you to do more than that. A week after a person has suffered loss, write them a letter. Think about what you write carefully; say all the things that you can't say when you are face-to-face with the person, stuck for words and don't know what to say. Tell them how much the person who has died meant to you and how you feel for them in their sorrow. One of the most precious things about the time I spent at Shoalhaven Heads was reading the letters. The cards were valuable, but it was the letters that really ministered to me.
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• Encourage expressions of loss. Don't chatter, don't attempt to distract, just be there. Encourage and accept genuine expressions of sorrow; don't be embarrassed by tears. Talk about the person who has died. Hold the door open.
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• Encourage the person to take time to grieve and not to rush back into the busy schedule of life too soon. Often people expect to be back at work or into their ordinary routine after only a few days after their loss.
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• Encourage persistence in Bible reading, prayer and church. My wife, Margaret, found it very hard to go back to church after the loss of her first husband; meeting with close friends almost inevitably involved an outburst of tears, which she found embarrassing. Margaret had two very good friends who called her constantly, encouraged her to attend church and Bible study, and keep up her Bible reading and prayer. People experiencing grief need to be encouraged to keep at the basics of the Christian life, trusting that God will see them through.
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• Help preserve good memories. Keep in contact with the person on a regular basis and, each time you see them, try to say something about the person who has died. Keep those good memories alive. Sometimes we hesitate to talk about the person who has died because we are afraid we might upset them. However, the reverse is almost always true: often the person experiencing the loss is delighted that someone remembers their loved one, because no-one talks about them any more.
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• Be a practical, ongoing helper. People do need practical help in their ongoing experience of grief. Cooking meals, doing the ironing, mowing lawns and other ways of helping out practically mean a great deal to the grieving person.
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• Recall James's words about the importance of caring for the grieving: “religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jas 1:27). Responding to grief really is at the core of living for Jesus in this broken world.
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