As I was perusing my 2005 journal for anything unrelated, I was drawn to the following entry from August 24:
“The grieving process has just begun and I will anticipate its steps now. I had an anger event yesterday. You know, with all that I have (the girls) I still wish I wasn’t living my life right now. I feel like a fool … let me say it again, I feel like a fool. “
I read those words and I feel how sad they are. My three daughters were the only reason I did not make an attempt on my life almost two years earlier, when another season of the deepest pain had begun. I found at that time, and even now, the folly and confusion of having three beautiful daughters, and yet their presence did not seem enough. How the heck could that be? Who and what would have been without them? (Of course, my daughters were enough, but this loss was for something I didn’t have and couldn’t have right now.) But that is grief, a normal response to insurmountable loss, and grief, understandably, involves a lot of irrationality. as we struggle through a quagmire of confusion, guilt, and fear on our way back to some sense of mental, emotional, and spiritual normality.
There is an insurmountable and discouraging nature in the beginning of grief. And it is worse when we have delayed the process years only to recognize that we have not made any progress because important details were not addressed. In fact, we can feel very foolish for having wasted those days or years!
We have all heard that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but the ache of pain marks a beginning like defeat before we have even begun. Everything is so overwhelming, and there are levels of overwhelming that compound the enormity of the long road ahead. And the most overwhelming thing is the current tsunami of wanting this reality to end.
However, even so, we must begin. We must turn away from the past in such a way that we recognize it as the launching pad for the painful present and the anticipated future. We must believe for a future that is dominated by hope. We must begin the honest journey of suffering our feelings and all the maladaptive responses that we will experience. We must know how messy it will feel and how ugly we will feel.
And we must have the wisdom to live life one day at a time, and know that this too will pass.
Finally, we must gather a support cavalry, a guide meeting, a cohort of fellow travelers who will help us endure all the way through such a harrowing journey.
There is something good in the beginning of a grieving journey. We put the stake in the ground. Like the times in my life when I wondered what was wrong and why I was depressed; what a relief it was to say, ‘I have depression!’ because it meant that he was starting a journey to get out of it.
At the beginning, we finally have a view for the journey, and where there is a beginning, we believe for an end.
When you feel like you’re at your worst, you realize that the pain is just beginning. The first time it feels like a hole we can’t get out of. But God has given it to us so that we can learn, as others have, how to do it, through the slow but steady passage of time.
Beginning the journey of grief is a crucial means to an inevitable end: we arrive, more healed than when we began.