A Good Grief, Part 2

When I wrote this piece in early summer, I didn’t plan on a part 2. When my dad died in July, we didn’t yet know the seriousness of Jim’s cancer. We didn’t even know for sure he had cancer. He had so many symptoms that could be related or could not be related, that could be one thing or another. We thought we’d solved two of the biggest symptoms and he was feeling better than he had in a while. Three months later, a week ago today, pancreatic cancer took Jim’s physical life from us. I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m scared. I’m hopeful. I’m glad he isn’t sick any more. I know I’m not alone and that I’m loved and supported by many. And I still have laundry to do, meals to fix and eat, dogs to tend to, a home to manage, bills to pay, stuff to learn, people to love.

Grief, good grief, doesn’t mean life stops even as we set some things aside for a while. Good grief doesn’t mean we pretend all is well when it isn’t. Good grief is allowing ourselves to be sad/angry/scared and to be hopeful and grateful and to love and be loved.

I don’t know why God created us to have limited life spans on this earth. I don’t know why, when humans decided to choose for themselves how to define good and evil rather than accept God’s way, that human action somehow enabled disease and corrupted cells that grow in ways that cause our physical bodies to die not of old age. I don’t need to know these things to appreciate this life God has given me. What I do know, in the very depths of my soul, is that the Loving and Life-giving God I know and love and who loves me and every single human being ever, did not ‘take’ Jim’s life, or cause him to be sick and suffer and die for some “reason I don’t understand”. I don’t hear this as often in the Episcopal Church as I did/do in the denomination of my childhood but I had some folks say it about my dad and I’m sure at some point someone will say it about Jim. The idea that God somehow needed Jim more than I and his kids and grandkids need him here is, my friends, simply bad theology.

Yes, we have the opportunity to learn in our suffering in this life, but the God who loves and values our humanness enough to become like us, born of a woman, fully human/fully God, to live as we live, isn’t some chess master style god who cruelly makes one of his beloved children sick to somehow ‘teach us something.’ What I can learn from the struggles and deaths I’ve experienced these past months is how to live and love better, not because God thought I needed to learn a hard lesson but because God always calls us to continuously learn to be more and more like Jesus in every moment of our lives.

Jesus showed us in flesh and blood what it is to live as God created us to live – in loving relationship with our Creator and with each other and this amazing planet we live on. All created things – humans, animals, plants – die a physical death. This isn’t something to be avoided because we don’t understand it or are afraid of it. Death is a part of the life God gave us. And we know that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we have life after this physical one. Jim and I speculated a lot about what this might be like. And, the best we came up with is that we don’t know the details but we do know that it is a life without cancer, and without suffering, and pain, and sorrow.

All of the emotions we experience when someone dies are part of being who God created us to be. The emotional pain is challenging and we want to feel better. Perhaps this is why some have come up with the idea that God ‘takes’ people for reasons beyond our understanding. Is it easier to say we can’t understand than it is to face the pain? Suppressing pain or denying it doesn’t make us better. Bringing our most difficult emotions into God’s presence and letting God’s love hold us does. Talking with others we can trust to let us express our pain without platitudes or toxic positivity or attempts to ‘fix it’ helps the pain heal and in healing we become better.

I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m scared. I’m hopeful. I’m not alone and I’m loved by many and I have many people to love. I’m a beloved child of God and so are you. The best we can be is to let suffering, ours and others, teach us to love more and more like Jesus. God’s peace be with you, my friends.