The thing about loss...

The thing about loss is this:  It is not a learned skill.  To me, it seems the world tends to treat it that way.  It is not.

A while ago, I wrote about my driver's ed training and the lessons therein that have remained with me: get the big picture and leave yourself an out.  Another set of lessons that have remained despite the failings of my mind are things I learned during a semester studying death and dying and then training for hospice work afterward.  In my opinion, every single person on the planet could benefit from studying the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

One of the first things she noticed, when she started her work, was that the doors of the patients who were dying were left closed and those patients had less visits from hospital staff than those who were going to survive.  People did not want to face death, even medical personnel trained to deal with it.  When it comes to loss and its companion grief, we are still shutting doors, still avoiding those facing it.

Another lesson I remember was how she taught that loss was loss, and that we navigate the stages of grief with "small" losses as we do those which are "larger."

Think of a time when you lost your keys and you were running late for work or to pick up your child from school.  You cycle through the grief of that loss:

• There is no way I have lost my keys again!
• I cannot believe I am so stupid to have lost my keys again!
• If I find them, I promise I will _________. [The silent prayer to whomever.]
• My entire day is ruined.
• Well, I've lost my keys. I have to make other plans.

I am not trying to be simplistic about this ...  and yet I am.  We grieve.  Day in and day out.  We have loss all around us.  Things that derail our schedules, our routines.  Things that threaten our well-being.  Things that destroy our families.  Small losses.  Large ones.  We classify them that way.  Only loss is loss is loss.  We have to face each one.  We grieve each one.

Sometimes, I wonder why I have read no articles about the mass grief being experienced in America for the past few years.  Job loss is a loss whose grief can eat away at a person's psyche, particularly confidence and certainty.  It is a burden that grows day by day.  Its mark oft remains even when a job is found again and, Lord willing, financial stability regained.  The question looms in your mind of when it might happen again, rather than if.

It isn't just because there is a truth that if you have lost a job it is likely you might lose one again.  After all, down-sizing often begins with the last hired.  It is the fact that it happened.  Possibility became reality.

When a parent loses a child, he/she/they often become exceedingly protective of the other children in their/her/his life.  If it happened once, it can happen again.  That is the real cruelty of loss.  It makes the uncertain certain. It makes realities of the things we would rather never face in our lives.

I have written before about grief, about how it is a companions of sorts, with whom we learn to live. But, again, I would say that grief is not a learned skill.  It is not something to be conquered.  In a way, grief is like the old Adam within us.  We will never be free of him until we die.  Yet, by the grace and mercy of our triune God, we can live more through our baptism than we do by our grief.  The joy of our salvation truly is the best companion to help us in our grief.

Not only does God promise that in Him there is no darkness, or as I prefer to think of it, no darkness that the Light cannot overcome, but He also tells us again and again and again that He knows of our tears, of our weeping, of our grief and that He will, one day, turn our mourning into joy.  The prophets, the psalmists, the Lord Jesus Christ.  This is their refrain.

wounds bound
captives freed
sight to the blind
ruined cities rebuilt
shame removed
plowmen over take the reapers
mountains drip sweet wine
life like a watered garden
mourning turned dancing, to joy

The Creator of the universe, His Son, our Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, our Sanctifier, a trinitarian force the world will never understand, and yet a God who captures our tears in a bottle, who hides us in the shelter of His wings, and sings with joy over us ... over those whose nature fights Him and flees from Him at every turn.

Why?

In order to retain the Gospel among people, He openly sets the confession of saints against the kingdom of the devil, and, in our weakness, declares His power. ~BOC, AP, V (III), 68

There are some bits of our Confessions that I cannot hear enough.  That astound me so much the comfort of them is ineffable.  This is one of them.  Primarily because it is not about our strengths, about our worship, about our works.  It is about our weakness.

But back to the thing about loss.  It is not a learned skill.  And to treat it that way deepens its wound.

There are some things I remember well, few things.  One of those is the moment I learned how common miscarriages can be, twenty-four years ago.  I was sitting with a bunch of women missionaries, all telling their birth stories.  As the only single woman there, I was fascinated by my crash course on pregnancy and child birth.  None of what I was hearing resembled the Hollywood births I had seen.  Then someone told about her miscarriage.  She was talking, really, about the unexpected twins she had afterwards.  Until the day of their birth, no one knew she had two children in her womb.  The way she told it, her second child was a gift from God for the one who died before.

No matter what I think about her philosophy, right after she spoke, another woman told the story of her miscarriage and then another and then another.  They had all had them. I was stunned.  I had no idea.

So often the "comfort" given to those who experience loss goes something along the lines of: "You have gotten through this before; you can do it again."

Set aside the focus on the reliance on human strength (or the lack of clarity about just how it is that the person "got through it"), and what you left with is the idea that repetition makes things easier.

If my best friend lost her daughter, and then later lost her son, I am certain no one would comfort her with the fact that she survived the first death.  But we do this with miscarriage.  We do this with small losses.  We do this with great ones.

But loss is not a skill to be acquired.  Grief is not a companion who ever completely leaves, not a journey ever completed, until that day we go to our true home.  When Jesus wipes away the last of our tears.

For the third time in a calendar year, I have suffered the same loss.  I am, at the moment, rather felled.  I am numb and I am drowning in a raging sea of loss and fear and doubt and weariness and, yes, hopelessness.  Since last Thursday, I have heard, several times, "You have gotten through this before; you can do it again."  Those words hurt.

I have also heard, "I can see how that would be difficult for you." Those words hurt, too.  Oh, I know that they were spoken in sincerity.  But I do not want the other's understanding.  I want God's.  I want the Psalter. I want to hear every verse of doubt and despair, of weeping and fear, and of confidence.  I want to hear the faith I cannot feel, I cannot see, I cannot taste, and I cannot remember.  And I want to know that God understands where I am in the moment.

There is another lesson from Kübler-Ross that I have never forgotten.  It is about stories.

I believe I have written about this before.  But I cannot remember.  So, I will start with the end, rather than the beginning.  While studying for my Ph.D., I read The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination.  It is the first part of the book that I remember most.  Robert Coles is a psychiatrist.  One day he was talking to a mentor, essentially despairing about the efficacy of his work, the lack of his patients' progress.  His mentor's response astounded him: That is because you are not listening them.

I could hear the frustration in Cole's retort, probably sputtering with indignation, that listening was all he did all day long, day in and day out.  His mentor, nevertheless, told him to start listening.  So Coles set about trying to listen, even though he was certain he was already listening.  In doing so, he stopped listening to what he expected his patients to say or what he anticipated them saying, but to what they were actually saying.  And he began to think about what he heard.  Essentially, this was the beginning of Cole's work on the role stories play in our lives, how we navigate our lives by the telling of stories.

For me, it was a wild moment.  One that harkened back to the study of Kübler-Ross' work, but also one that opened my eyes to just how much storying was going on around me.  It was the beginning of my journey of listening to those stories, of trying to hear what needed to be said.  [I just ignored my own.]

Kübler-Ross talked about death stories, about the stories that we all tell about the death of our loved ones, our neighbors, our countrymen, our fellow humans.  We all have a story to tell about the deaths that impact our lives.  But not everyone's story is the same.

Take a couple who've lost their child.  Each has his own story.  Each has her own beginning.  Sometimes the story begins years before, months before, the day of, the funeral, weeks after ... do you see?  Do you understand?  When, how, why ... a skilled counselor will guide the parent through his loss; that is the vocation of counselor/psychologist/psychiatrist.  But we, as family and neighbors, we can listen to the story.  No matter how many times it is told.

Telling the story is difficult.
Listening to the story is difficult.
Waiting for it to be finished is difficult.

Grief is hard, brutal, ugly, painful.  It is an agony of body, mind, and spirit we would rather be kept behind closed doors.  But Kübler-Ross warned that each has a certain number of tellings necessary to finish speaking that which needs to be said.  If, for example, a mother needs to speak of the death of her  son 17 times and we only listen 16, all that listening is negated when we turn the grieving away.

"You don't have to go through that all again."
"It's time to move on."
"You have to let it go."

Not to be flippant about the Living Word, but if we are told to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven, surely we can listen as many times.  The beauty of the body of Christ is that not any one of us needs to do all the listening.  Not any one of us is required to face all that pain, all that grief by ourselves.  Even counselors do not.  Yes, they might be the only one in the room with the patient, but all counselors have supervisors, mentors, back-ups.  They share the burden even if not the actual story.

The telling is a way of working out what is in our heads, in our hearts, in our spirits.  The telling is the path to the balance we need within.  The telling is not an acquired skill.  It simply is what it is.  The story of our loss, of our grief.

Just because a person has survived one loss or ten does not mean that person is ready or able to face another.  Loss fells us.  Loss fills us.  Loss skews our perspective.  Loss distorts our hearing.  Loss blurs our vision.

In a way, the need to speak of the losses in our lives--losses of security, family, health, balance, serenity, faith--is evident in both the specific words of the Psalter and in the quantity of psalms given to us to pray.

I know there is all this scholarship on biblical numbers and their meaning.  I confess sometimes I turn a bit skeptic when such is spoken.  Yes, there are clearly repetition in numbers.  But I have heard three as being the completeness in number; I have heard seven as being the completeness in number; I have heard twelve as being the completeness in number.  So which is it?  Frankly, to me, if you wish to talk completeness, speak to me of the number one hundred and fifty.

Were I some great computer nerd blessed with the added skill of graphic art design, I would find a way to overlay all 150 psalms, visually, so that we could see the repetition within them.  Repetition of thought and feeling, repetition of structure, and repetition of near words and phrases and exact words and phrases.  A multi-layered, color-coded, diminutional representation of the petitions found in the Psalter.

How long!?!

Why are you in despair, O my soul?

My enemies ___

Shield

Refuge

Wonders

Might

Righteousness

Anger

Fear

Water

Food

Creation

Works of Thy hands

Save me!!

In many and myriad ways, the words of our hearts and mind and souls are presented, again and again and again in this collection of prayers that is the Living Word.  Written this way.  Repeated that way.  Quick prayers.  Focused prayers.  Sweeping sagas. Whirlwinds of emotion.  Shouts of praise. Whispers of fervent hope.

Many and myriad because we are known.

The thing about loss is that it is not a learned skill.  

The thing about grief is that it is not a learned skill.

The thing about living in a fallen world is that it is not a learned skill.

"For although the whole world should work together, it could not add an hour to our life or give us a single grain from the earth." ~BOC, LC, I, 166

But the one who Created us can!  He knows us.  He provides for us.  And, in many and myriad ways throughout the Living Word, He comforts us with letting us know that He knows we will struggle with loss, small loss, great loss, loss of health, loss of safety, loss of life, loss of hope, loss of our grasp of the certitude of His saving faith.

The Psalter is, to me, God's rather loud and long shout: "It's okay that you struggle.  I love you anyway.  Your weakness is why I sent my Son to die.  And the confession of such is how I retain the Gospel in this world."

I wonder why it is, then, that God can tell us that it is okay to struggle and doubt and fear and weep and yet we either shut the door on such in others or try to tell them something different.  God doesn't tell us to practice, practice, practice until we hone living in this world into a perfect witness for Him.  He tells us we will know trouble.  He tells us what we might think and feel in that trouble.  And He then gives us the hope and joy and confidence of faith that we need in such times.

In my opinion, those struggling with the wounds and grief of loss would be better off if we took a page from His book instead of trying to flip through ours.


I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!