the last burnt sienna crayon

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. . .”

C. S. Lewis begins his notebook on grief this way. He wrote these journals on the subject, not as a detatched academic exercise, but as a way of helping him to cope after his wife’s death from cancer. I read this small book for the first time the year I was diagnosed with MS. It wasn’t a person who had died in my life, but my own life and future as I had always imagined it, as I had always planned and hoped for it. So I grieved, I reordered my expectations, I found new hope for a different kind of future, whatever that might be, and I came to some kind of acceptance. I was ready to face a different kind of future. “Your will be done”. I trusted that back then. I trusted that His will, was a good one. I hadn’t made enough mistakes to have been discouraged yet.

I didn’t relise that grief, once accepted, does not always stay accepted. What I mean is not that the original grief becomes ‘unaccepted’ once again, but that the original grief will always change a bit every so often, a day, a month, a year, or whatever, so that the new grief must go through the same process as the first one did in order to come to the same acceptance of it. That’s pretty exhausting.

For example, when my father died, I grieved, I went through the stages, I came to acceptance. But that grief changed. My loss of my father was a different loss when I was 21, newly married and an immigrant in a new country than it is today when I’m more than a decade older and I know he will never sit in the living room of my house playing with his grand-daughter. I didn’t have those things yet, so I did not experience the loss of him not being a part of them. But now I do have them, and his absence is made real in a way that it could not have been the first time I grieved for him. Does that mean that I must go through the whole grief process again each time something new comes into my life for him to not be a part of?

And what about MS? I might have been able to appropriately grieve for my future as I had imagined it when I was 20, but now must I go through the list of more concrete things to wrestle with? So today I may grieve for the mountains I will never climb (both physical and symbolic), but when I come to accept that and my body changes, deteriorates, further yet again, must I then grieve tomorrow for the roads I will never walk the length of, and then the day after that for the things I will never see at all? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get it all over and done with and grieved for in one go, complete and totally accepted? Perhaps those of stronger faith have been able to do that. Perhaps that is how I was able to accept things so much faster in the past? I was younger, more trusting?

But I’ve been collecting my losses over the years, and have never been quite sure what to do with them. They haven’t spaced themselves out so neatly and tidily as to allow me to confront them one by one, and I’m tired and a bit short tempered with it all.

And what about faith in the midst of it all? Yes, I know it is there, but right now (and much of the time) I am more likely to relate to what Lewis says near the beginning of his book “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

I doubt Lewis had any intention as he wrote of ever having his thoughts published (I still haven’t decided about this post). How could he be so brutally honest if he had ever considered sharing his thoughts with the rest of the world? How could anyone not remain academically detached in order to speak publicly of such things (I am being candid now, because I doubt that I will hit the ‘publish’ button)? Honesty with the rest of the world is difficult. Honesty reminds us that God is there and knows our shame, our shame at being human, anyway. We know that he knows us completely, but it (our grief, our deeds, our shame, our failings, our humanity) still somehow remains private and even a fiction until we share it. Perhaps that’s why we write these confounded blogs. Somehow, though we must believe He is not, God always seems to remain stuck there in our heads. Somehow, though we are aware that we only need confession to Him and Him alone, it never really becomes real until our darkest wrestlings are made public. Until we are made public, and forgiven and loved. (Yes, I am aware this doesn’t stand up theologically, but on a different level, perhaps it does emotionally?) Perhaps that is why He didn’t stop at Adam and made all of these other people as well, even though, on the whole it made things so much more complicated and messy. Perhaps in order to grieve, to accept and to return to joy, one must find and recognise and trust where God’s Spirit walks on earth now. One must remove him from the cofines of our own heads?

I don’t know. I’m only writing a notebook. Just like C. S. Lewis. And tomorrow perhaps I won’t be lost in my head anymore because perhaps I will have indeed hit ‘publish’ and told you. and perhaps I won’t because I will realise that one way or the other, ‘this too shall pass’ and it probably doesn’t matter anyway because something else will happen to take the place of these thinkings.

Tags: God, grief, hope, life

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 3:33 pm and is filed under musings and meditations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.