Why Grief Can’t Be Rushed
May this grief slow my anxious pace,
and still my scheduled existence.
May I allow my heart to ache as longs as it needs to,
resisting the rush of those who'd hurry its completion.
May I receive surprising graces,
laughter, wonder, remembrance, hope.
May I be present to my companions in grief,
holding theirs as I hold my own.
May I make a home in my own heart,
to welcome the one I lost to dwell within.
May I listen to her voice reminding me
not to rush back to the urgent, but to go gently.
In a culture addicted to speed, efficiency, and hurry, we need to resist the rush to grieve quickly.
I have a dear friend whose Mom died three years ago. She still regularly tells stories, writes remembrances, and posts pictures. She honors her mother's memory, but she also honors her own precious body with her slow grief. She's been my teacher from afar, and I'm learning even now just three weeks after my Mom's passing.
When we got the call that Friday, everything slowed down and everything sped up at the same time. With the last weeks of summer ticking away, I'd been plotting my Saturday garage-reorganizing project on the afternoon my brother-in-law called to tell me that Mom had just minutes to live. My body was growing more anxious with a new semester drawing near, and I'd carved out time during the week ahead to get my ducks-in-a-row. But everything slowed to a halt. Time stopped. Things that couldn't be cancelled were immediately cancelled. That evening, I sat on the floor of our home entry way with my youngest daughter, both of us in tears. My oldest daughter came a short while later and joined in the lament. We'd shifted into Grief-Time.
I loved the tenderness of these moments together. There was nothing else to do but grieve. My wife Sara was away with her sister, and there was something immensely comforting sitting with my now adult daughters, each of them navigating their own questions, each with their own deep ache. Hours into the evening, I gathered myself to make the necessary travel arrangements, and I'd already forgotten what day it was. In Grief-Time, we're not locked to a clock. What was urgent is quickly surrendered.
But amidst the slowing, even stopping, what I didn't expect was that a new kind of urgency would arrive. I'd booked a flight to Florida, but an overnight alert notified me of its cancellation. At 4:00am, adrenaline was surging as I re-arranged flights and an Uber. By Saturday late morning, I'd flown into one airport and picked up my sister at another. By mid-afternoon, we were in Mom's home, viewing it as it was left in the moments she pressed her life alert button. I'd expected Grief-Time to afford us hours of unhurried processing at this point.
But then came the knocks at the door, a constant stream of dear friends of my mother arriving with their own grief and confusion. As these visits eventually trailed off, my sister and I found ourselves sorting through papers and passwords and pondering funeral arrangements, not 24 hours after we'd received the call. My Mom had planned fairly well, but she'd also left us with puzzles to solve, not least her iPhone passcode. And then there was a home to sort through with the persistent question of what to discard, what to keep, and how to get whatever we'd keep from Florida to my sister's home on Long Island or mine in Michigan.
I wrote a chapter called "Kleenex Theology" in my first book Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places reflecting on our collective tendency to quickly hand someone a tissue to wipe away the tears. In so doing, we're effectively saying, "Clean yourself up." At least in American culture, our rituals of grief are often private and quick. We don't wail audibly. We don't sit shiva. We don't give ourselves the gift of a week (or a month!) of mourning and storytelling. Too often, we're quickly rushed to gather documents, close accounts, make arrangements, pack boxes, and make hasty decisions we're in no condition to make.
But what I've discovered is that despite the urgencies which curtail grief, grief will find us. Two weeks to the day after getting the news about my Mom, I decided to do the very thing I was about to do on that difficult day - go to a late afternoon movie. I exited my car and began walking toward the theater at the very same time my brother-in-law called two weeks before. And then, quite unexpectedly, the tears began to come. My body felt the weight of the moment, and remembered. I walked into the theater tissue-less, my eyes wet and puffy, grateful that Grief-Time had arrived at just the right time, offering me yet another moment to honor the memory of my Mom.