Loss and Saints and Meaning

My posture toward “seeing the good” used to be grounded in only seeing the good as good and the bad as bad. I could never make the connection of seeing goodness by looking through that lens of loss. Until life in many ways became dark. When life became only about loss.

I believe part of the reason loss is so particularly hard is because we spend much of our lives straining to look through the lens of gains. Whether it be a job status or title, the amount of kids or cars, the number of degrees on our wall. And look, all of those things are not inherently bad. But, what happens when our being, our foundation is grounded upon everything we achieve and acquire gain? I wonder if that is why our world is struggling so much right now. Is it because we have lost the art of learning how to live in loss?

This morning, I pondered what it would be like to live in a time where we still wore black when grieving; to wear black until we felt a time of moving forward in our grief? Part of me absolutely abhors the idea. I mean, how bleak and dull to wear black for days on end; how completely opposite of seeing the good. Yet, part of me wishes I could tell the world that right now, there still isn’t a day where I don’t mourn losing Dad and that grief is still real and fresh.

A day or two after Dad died, I remember walking into Target with the sole purpose of finding “funeral black” for the girls. Of all the dresses in closets, not one child had black to wear. Such a strange dichotomy to be standing among the brightly colored clothes, the radio blaring music and people cheerfully perusing Target (in an upbeat, mask-less, pre-pandemic sort of way). I couldn’t think and I so badly wanted to tell everyone to be quiet and just let me pick out some outfits and get the heck out of there. I remember walking up to the self-checkout thinking “I shouldn’t be here right now doing this” and I started crying, but it was the kind of cry where I bowed my head and shifted my eyes from side to side to make sure no one else was around. I was trying to hide my grief because I wasn’t comfortable with it and I didn’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable with it.

I think of all the losses out there right now, big and small. Be it loss of a routine and rhythm or the loss of a loved one. In some ways I feel we became afraid of naming and marking these things, maybe we'd forgotten how. We bow our heads, plaster on a smile, we say we’re okay when we’re not. Then, you throw in social distancing and the the inability to gather with family to mourn and mark a milestone of loss.  And look, I have come to understand the importance of “moving on” in the sense that life does just keep going and it can be grounding and helpful when everything else is shifting sand. Nevertheless, I’m learning the importance of naming and marking and living in loss.

This weekend we acknowledge All Saint’s Day. I am grateful for this one opportunity in our church year to acknowledge these saints. But, this year I hate the idea of it and in the same breath I wonder why we don’t do more to honor the saints. On one hand, I’m reluctant to acknowledge my Dad is a saint in heaven, because well, that just means having to say once again my Dad is not here and that’s still hard on my heart. On the other hand, I must acknowledge this saint who now resides in heaven. I must acknowledge the legacy of love he left behind and remember this perfectly imperfect saint who was my Dad.

I still struggle so much with trying to find the meaning in all of this. First, Dad’s illness and death and then the world going caddywhompus. This is a hard season all the way around. There isn’t one person who hasn’t lost or is losing something and collectively we’re trying to find the meaning in all the loss. Yesterday afternoon I was listening to a conversation between Brene Brown and David Kessler on her Unlocking Us podcast. David has done extensive work on grief, in particular finding meaning in grief. He said,

“There’s no way around the pain. If you don’t feel it, you can’t heal it. You’ve got to feel that pain. Meaning will be the cushion, but you’ve got to feel pain. And another place that people get stuck, is they’ll think there’s meaning in the death. People will go, “My loved one was murdered, there’s no meaning there.” Or, “My loved one died of cancer or Alzheimer’s, there’s no meaning.” And I’ll go, “The meaning is not in the death. The meaning is what we do after. The meaning is in us.” That’s where the meaning lies. That’s what we can create.”

I am convinced the only way for us to keep going is to first acknowledge loss and feel it and live in it. We must also allow each other to live in it. I don’t know that we, as a culture, do that well. Who could blame us? Grief is messy and hard and life-draining. But, I think if we do that messy work we can trust the meaning will come to us not in what is lost but in what will come after.  We will carry on the light of the saints who have gone before us.