I've come to understand something, something that might possibly apply to others as well as myself. Against the chance these things might be of value for someone else I'll share them here.
What I am speaking of is a thing akin to a form of momentum, emotional momentum. For five months now I've been in mourning, various stages of the work. But for the last say six weeks it has been of an ever stranger nature, seemingly the same mechanisms in play and yet the peripheral environment diverged from what had been. It's dawned on me that I'm not mourning the same event. For a while this worried me, and I suppose it still does, but for different reasons than at first. Any powerful emotional mechanism can take on a life of its' own, run on beyond where it should, a danger I've understood for a long time. Searching about for the why of these last weeks has brought me to understand it is not time to worry, not just yet.
The act of mourning is to set to peace the losses of life, and I've discovered that in my life were many losses that were never fully mourned. I've looked back, and looked within, and I think there have been losses, huge losses, that were never really set to peace, I look out and around and it seems there may be many who suffer to that same burden and for the same reasons.
I lost my father young, and what needed doing was in fact curtailed, limited and incomplete by reason of the relatives, and their religion. I lost my mother in my mature years, the majority of the years between estranged from her by reason of that same religion. Neither event was ever set to peace in my life. They've hung for years in the limbo of the unresolved like salt hanging in a suspension of unshed tears until now.
I've come to think of these last weeks as a final gift from my wife, that those old and unresolved losses she knew were there, knew needed addressing, I've come believe it is her gift that they be addressed now that I might be free of them as well. She loved me, for all the complexity of our relationship, for all the troubles and trials she did love me in spite of all, and in all fact what these last weeks have been are a gift of love she could only enable to me as a final act.
She was a wise woman, it is her wisdom I share with you, not really my own. When you must face a loss, when it is yours to support another who must face a loss? Do not begrudge the process, don't. Understand that all lives know loss, all lives will know grief and mourning, and that when those linger on the salt of those unshed tears will be the things that can render a heart barren, that only by allowing the stream to run until it runs clear can the remainder of life be full safeguarded. Do not accept, do not try and offer, comfort in ways that will curtail that needed work of restoration no matter how great the pain of the moment might seem. Don't, don't do it.
Understand that truncating the work of restoration to the motive of easing pain, your own or someone else's, is in fact a cruelty that will linger on till the sum of the lingering will far exceed the endurance needed to finish the work at hand. Let God speak for himself, do not muffle His voice in the ears of the bereaved with religion. God will know better than any when the work is completed, when it is time to put away the mourning and embrace the new day.
Thank you Barbara.
First: My condolences on your losses, especially the early loss of your father. My own father died when I was 4, and I'm still dealing with the aftereffects.
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree fully with you that it is no true kindness to "spare" others the details. My own family decided that I should not go to my father's funeral, and in fact I didn't. (I have no memories of life after his death for about a year, despite having some vivid memories from before it.) The end was that I had to work long and hard, as an adult, to bring about my own sense of closure--to accept his death and let him go, and to begin to take healing about it.
But many sacred texts and great teachers remind us not to be too attached to *anything* in this world--not even our families. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26) Of course, other Bible verses remind us how important it is to love and care for our families, so it is obvious that Jesus means not a literal "hate," but that we love Him and the things of Heaven so much that our attachment to things and people on Earth is by contrast no better than hate. If one insisted on a foolish literalism in reading the Bible, one might believe we are to love our enemies better than our friends and family! *lol* But not even our families should bind us so much we cannot let them go when the time comes.
May you find closure and healing so that your search for wisdom will be pure.
Jochanaan, thanks for the kind thought.
ReplyDeleteI'd put a bit of a different interpretation to that scripture, based on the double negative within the full verse: hate not... "cannot be..." Since I do not believe the literal and oft translated text of the Bible to be immune to the actions of men acting to evil influence I can easily see this passage as having been deliberately distorted at some point to throw confusion into mankind. It is entirely to opposite all of the other teachings for me to believe it survived the years unmodified. I'd read that to mean if a man comes to God carrying a hatred for any of those things he will be unable to follow the path of Jesus, because a hatred for those things is a hatred of the gifts of life. Hatred is a thing that consumes the hater far more than the focus of the hatred, a thought Jesus spoke to often.