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 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 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 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:
_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.
_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:
___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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