Campus Ministries: Catholic Ministries

GRIEVING - THE PAIN OF LETTING GO

We associate grieving with the death of someone dear to us. This is certainly the major form of grieving that most of us will do. But there are other losses that also need to be mourned. A person may grieve the loss of a limb after an accident, or of a boyfriend when a relationship ends. People grieve for familiar persons and places after they move. Some are surprised to find themselves grieving as graduation approaches and they feel their school days, and childhood, coming to an end.

Grieving is letting ourselves feel the pain of letting go. Precisely because it is so painful, grieving is not something we are eager to do. That is why our initial reactions to a loss may be denial or anger. But eventually, if we are emotionally healthy, we allow ourselves to feel the pain, we grieve.

WHEN GRIEF HITS

I was in the Dominican Republic when I received my sister's phone call announcing my father's sudden death. She way crying, but I remained composed. My Dominican friends, warm and caring people that they are, were very consoling. But I remained perfectly composed, almost matter-of-fact. And that's the way I remained as I journeyed home, even as I embraced my sister, and presided over my father's wake. My sister cried repeatedly; but I was "strong." Emotionally I was still in shock and denial.

It was the next day, at Dad's funeral Mass, that the dam broke. In a sense, it couldn't have come at a worse time. I was right in the middle of my homily, trying to give people a sense of what my Dad had suffered and achieved in his life. Suddenly I was overcome with grief and uncontrollable sobbing. It became almost impossible for me to go on, to continue speaking between my sobs. My sister came up and stood beside me, holding me. Now who was being the strong one?

I would have preferred that my personal grieving had come at a more private time, rather than while I was publicly standing in front of so many family and friends. I was dragging everyone into tears with me. But I didn't care. We cannot rationally plan when to do our grieving. All we can do is go with it, let it happen when and where it hits us.

WAVES OF GRIEF

My Dad's death also taught me that we cannot do all of our grieving at one time. It is just too overwhelming. The grieving comes in waves.

After my sobfest at Dad's funeral, I went through a period of depression. Life had lost its luster. There was a gaping, jagged, raw hole in my heart, when my Dad had been. I remember wondering and dreading whether I would have to go through similar suffering as, one by one, I lost everyone near and dear to me. It was dreadful.

Finally, however, the cloud lifted. I was integrating the fact of Dad's death with the reality that I and so many others I loved were still alive. I wanted to make the most of, cherish, each day and each person in my life. I still missed Dad, but life had become sunny again.

I don't remember precisely what brought it on, but before long I once again found myself swallowed up in grief for my Dad. It was frightening. I had though I was all over the heavy grieving I had to do. But I was wrong. It was happening all over again.

Eventually I was able to get over this second bout of mourning. It was very painful, but, gratefully, not as deep nor as long lasting as my initial grieving. Since then I have found myself hit, periodically, by other waves of grieving. They might be triggered by a photo, or a date, or the death of someone else. Mercifully these subsequent waves have gradually become smaller and less frequent.

Our inner psyche has its own wisdom and its own timing. It knows that we cannot possibly handle all at once all the pain that is involved in losing a loved one. And so it breaks our grieving up into pieces and spaces it out over time.

Just as we cannot shove a whole sandwich into our mouth and properly chew and swallow it, so too with grief. Our grieving is broken up into bite sizes. We are fed it mouthful by mouthful, so that little by little we can ingest it, make it part of ourselves, incorporate it into the rest of our lives.

FACING DEATH

Letting go is a painful but integral part of life. It's only by letting go of today that I am ready for tomorrow. It's only by letting go of my childhood that I am prepared for adulthood. Each letting go conditions us for the next. The tremendous grief involved in letting go of a loved one is a preparation for the supreme letting go which we must face at our own death, when we must leave everyone and everything behind. All letting go's, but especially the major ones, offer us the opportunity to slowly digest the reality that we have not here a lasting city, that we are mortal, our days numbered.

It's a lesson we need to absorb. For we are tempted to deceive ourselves into thinking that death only happens to other people. After all, it hasn't happened to me yet! I've woken up every single morning! We pretend that life is certain and death uncertain, when, in fact, it's the reverse that's true. Our culture isolates us from our dead, and masks death's finality. Undertakers are paid handsomely to wash and dress up our dead, and to let them sleep comfortably in funeral parlors.

Our grieving can help teach us how to live, and how to die, gracefully. We don't want to be morbidly obsessed with death, but neither do we want to live in denial. May our painful experiences of grief drive us deeper within our hearts, to find there a Source of strength and hope that can sustain us through our losses is life, and, someday, through our dying and death.

Ronald Stanley, O.P.

For additional articles relating to the topic see:

ASHAMED OF YOUR FEELINGS?

GOD IS DEAD

WHY DOES GOD LET PEOPLE SUFFER?

QUESTIONING YOUR FAITH

I NEED TO PRAY

WHO NEEDS GOD?

THEN CAME THE STORM

PERSEVERANCE