The following words were offered, over 20 years ago, to someone who had just suffered the loss of a loved one.
I would just offer a few words of reflection that I hope may be helpful. Places of darkness, such as you are now in, can be so overwhelming as to feel like an endless tunnel from which there is no escape. Yet the very oppressiveness that they impose and its painful burden are an echo of our longing and struggle and hope to move through and beyond them. While it may seem faint, like the distant voice of a small child, this yearning is as real as the pain that blows against it like a strong wind. A basic assurance that I would try to give you, in light of my own experience, is that the heartache and sadness do lessen in time, that it is possible to experience joy again on the other side of sorrow, that the feelings that hold us prisoner do eventually become resources and sources of strength. In the meantime, it seems essential just to place one foot after another as we walk through that tunnel, while holding fast to the conviction–even if we cannot feel it–that we will walk into the light.
One thought that may help is the realization that the experience of pain and loss are themselves the other side of the intensity and depth of love both received and given. Where the bond has been exceptionally close, where the love has had an unconditional quality, and where the death is all too sudden, the sense of loss and incompleteness and irreplaceability become all the more acute. When my younger brother died, I just wanted to be able to talk to him. It seemed that our conversation was interrupted in the middle of a sentence we could not finish. Still, it is the love that is most real, most basic and most enduring, and it gradually absorbs the pain. While it probably seems totally unrealistic now, the experience of this kind of love carries with it an undercurrent of gratitude, a gratefulness that something so good has been and endures, though the sudden ending of its present form makes it seem so brief and incomplete. I guess what I am trying to say is that the essential goodness remains and gradually makes itself felt more strongly as the elements of pain slowly recede. Perhaps what is most important is to cling to and not let go of the hope–even though you cannot feel it–that you will move beyond where we are now.
I once read an article on joy that impressed me by its honesty and insight, and by the way the author spoke of finding joy on the other side of sorrow. I later found out that her sorrow was chiefly caused by the self-inflicted death of one of her children, the pain of which seems unimaginable. There is often a feeling of guilt that accompanies the death of someone close, especially when it is sudden. We can worry that we may have failed to do something or left the relationship jarringly incomplete. The “if onlys” that are part of every bond can be felt as guilty regret in these instances. We cannot argue the guilt away, even if we recognize that it usually has no real foundation. Sometimes it is best just to let it be, as part of our yearning for a completeness that is always beyond our grasp but always within our longing. This incompleteness is part of every human bond, but is felt so keenly when someone dear to us dies. And it can be an incompleteness that is felt both in terms of the love we give them and the love we receive from them.
I have noticed that there are a whole array of feelings that arise when someone so dear to us dies. They can be surprising and overwhelming in their intensity, in their erupting within us at unexpected times and places, and in the very kind of feelings that arise. We can even feel angry at someone who died because it feels as if that person has left us and we feel abandoned. At first, it seems inappropriate to feel that way, but at second glance it is really quite understandable. I remember as a child thinking at first that every feeling is forever, that I would always feel the way I did at that moment, especially when the feelings were unpleasant–that I would never be friends with that other 6-year-old again, that I would stay lost forever, that maybe after getting hit by the truck I would never walk again. But these feelings, as well as the really pleasant ones, seemed to weave themselves in and out of the fabric of my life. Then as an adult, when I first experience the death of someone I love, … I realize it is different and more difficult that I had ever imagined, and I am again like the child who thinks it will last forever. Yet this experience, too, over time seemed to be forged into something precious that is more than the pain.
These are some thoughts that come to mind, that are perhaps not expressed too clearly. In terms of practicalities, beyond maintaining the daily routine, and trying to eat sufficiently to keep up basic physical health, I think it is really important to regard and treat yourself with a gentle kindness, the way you would respond to someone else in a similar situation. …. Part of the healing process, I think, is telling our story, and retelling it from within, especially the parts that are now so vividly felt, until the need to do so gradually lessens–until this part of our whole life story becomes a part of our story, and not our whole story or our whole identity.
I think it is also really important to keep contact with genuine friends, …, and to allow them to love us. Just as the loss of love wounds us, perhaps it is the receiving (and giving) of love that heals us. No one can replace the unique and precious love that is lost through death. But I think a genuine caring is always healing. It does not take away our wounds but holds them in caring hands. It does not take away the hurt, but does help us to bear it. I really appreciate the comment of Henri Nouwen who says that the real friend is not the person with the answers, but the person who sticks it out with us even when there are no answers, and that very staying with or being with is part of the answer. It is probably good, too, to engage in other activities with friends, such as movies, concerts, even hockey games. In this vein, it can sometimes be helpful to have certain times when we will explicitly think and feel and talk about our heartache with friends–and always do so when we really need to–but sometimes decide that for a time we will talk about or do something else.
It can also be helpful sometimes to write down our feelings, even to visualize our hurting self as a small child with whom we engage in a conversation, first listening and then responding. This too can be done with writing. Writing a condensed summary of our relationship in a kind of poem or story can be useful. Sometimes a ritual can be helpful, one in which we express something of the process that we expect to go through over a long period of time, such as drawing on a piece of paper an image of the love and an image of the hurt, and them making a gesture of separating the two and letting go of the hurt. It’s really a matter of expressing a pattern into which we can gradually grow. Reading enriching novels, seeing good plays or concerts, can also be helpful, even if at first it almost seems as if we have to force ourselves to get involved in them.
Well, I will close for now. I offer these thoughts to you in an invitational way, to try them on, so to speak, to see if they are at all helpful. The thought that came to me as I was preparing for a talk, was that, while we hurt, we are more than our hurt. May I wish sincerely that this “more” emerges more and more fully in your own heart….
Norman King, February 20, 2003
