Tag Archives: sorrow

Feb 21 2014
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art and photography, grief and trauma, learning to live, Quotes

more than our sorrow

we-are-more-than-our-sorrow
He sat down at the table with me briefly while I ate and he waited on food to go from the cafe. Since he knew of the chaos raging, not much had to be said. I looked up and tried to squint in the way we try to squint when working to hold back tears that we are tired of.

The same way we squint that usually fails when someone knows of the raging chaos.

As tears began to crack and run down the edge of my runny nose, he said, “It’s like a bomb got dropped in the backyard.”

More tears. Nods. Then conversation about weather, salads, and other things neither of us cared about.

I’ve noticed a sense of being caught between surveying the damage and trying to move. The quote housed about my desk that refrains often in my own mind and heart when things seems unbelievably devastating felt a little out of reach at this point. To quote it, even to myself, felt like cheating the grief and confusion and fury and loss that was gripping everything inside of me:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders. 

– Anonymous Vietnamese poem

I could not imagine myself filling the craters yet, much less singing and sowing because I could not yet fathom or feel the extent of the damage, I could not sense the size of the crater left by the bomb in our backyards. I could only survey the damage. And with every glance, its complexity became deeper and harder to wrap my hands around. I would find myself staring into the crater and disappearing in my thoughts. I was beginning even to have trouble remembering what used to be in it’s place. All I could sense and see was a crater. Impossible to fill.

But somewhere, a sense that we, in community, always fill the craters, kept me from jumping in completely to the loss. Phone calls to friends and mentors. Visits to kitchen counters and living room floors. Weeping and asking and not answering.

And then, somewhere, even while still surveying the damage left by the bombs, something somewhere insists that we are our sorrow, but we are also more than our sorrow. We are also our hopes and dreams and work and errands and children and families and lives and friends and promises of the future. “We are more than our sorrow” Thich Nhat Hanh says, and so we enter into the reality that is the only thing stranger than the reality of the chaos. We enter into the reality that we are all of these things at once, in our humanity, and we must be all of them at once to find a way to move.

And so we move.
Because we are more than our sorrow, even as real as the sorrow may be.

djordan
Michigan Ave, Chicago

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Oct 22 2012
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learning to live, poems, what they are teaching me

in our honest hours

in our honest hours
of anxiety
of unsureness
of exhaustion
of insecurity
of restlessness
of loneliness
of misunderstanding
of arrogance
of boredom
of transition
of self-righteousness
of worry
of confusion
of isolation
in our honest hours
where we are altogether not our best

we come face to face
even when through a dim mirror
with the promise of how things will be
and we feel our souls
lift
weightless
weightlessly
to the sky
with the promise of how all things will be
when all things are as they should be

and then, we live more musically
in our honest hours

djordan
Pine Tree

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Mar 13 2012
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Quotes, what they are teaching me

when the story is stolen | grief in public

In light of many comments, public and private, about my previous post “Loss as loss, not as lesson”, I thought perhaps now is the time to  share a little bit about what I’ve been learning concerning trauma, and specifically sudden, violent death.

After a few weeks of cofacilitating a support group for people who have lost loved ones to homicide, suicide, or accidental death, I began to learn how very, incredibly different the grief process is for this kind of violent death than for other types of loss.

All loss is loss, no doubt; violent loss is different.

I can think of people by name who have
lost a mother in gunfight.
lost a cousin in a robbery gone wrong.
lost a son in a hit a run.
lost a baby to violence.

Three days from today will be one year since my grandfather died. I will never forget the day he passed away, kissing his forehead, and telling him thank you for everything. I had watched as the sinfulness of Parkinsons ate away at his body for several years. Meals had become special. Kisses on the cheek had become monumental. Laughs shared and jokes made had become cause to gather everyone’s attention in the room. Our family was making meaning together, in the privacy of our home, of the life of our husband, brother, father and grandfather. We spent many holidays saying things we needed to say, hearing things we needed to hear. And at his funeral, almost a year ago today, we celebrated his life with grief and with gladness. Meaning had been made, and we could be at peace with his lost.

This is absolutely, positively nothing like losing someone violently. There is no hierarchy of grief, and no need to compare stories, but the grief associated with violent death is sharply different and should be seen and understood as such.

In the loss of our community at the beginning of this week, a freshmen in college dies in a car accident.

The family has no time to make meaning together, in the privacy of their home, around meals, holidays, laughs and stories. They have, no doubt, been doing these things in passing, unnoticed, like we all do. But we do them differently when we see the shadow approaching. So when the shadow is not seen, they are not done. No one is to blame…it is the way we are.

But the story is immediately stolen. There are phone calls and conversations. News reports and tv coverage. Facebook updates and emails asking, wondering, trying to make meaning in places that feel meaningless.

So now, there is not only no opportunity to plan for the grief, but there is no privacy to the story. It cannot be told the way we get to tell the story of an aging grandparent.

The story tells itself. In public.

And then the news tells it. And then the neighbors tell it. Questions of why it is important, what is to be learned, and how to prevent it linger in the mouths of other people. The story is everywhere, and belongs now to everyone.

But most importantly, it is co-opted from those grieving the loss.

To grieve is––in itself––an act of worship.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

***

“Real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.”

+ Walter Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination

***

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Mar 12 2012
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learning to live, what they are teaching me

loss as loss, not as lesson

Loss as loss, not as lesson

Maybe it springs from our own deep need to protect ourselves when we know we cannot.

When a tragedy happens of some kind, especially the loss of a son or friend to a kind of accidental death, it is our nature to jump to working at meaning-making. When someone is lost to old age, or even long-term illness, there are many bedside conversations that make space for meaning to be made.

I am sorry for this.
I want you to know this.
I wish we had this.
I want us to do this.

You mean this to me.
You taught me this.
You are loved.

But when an accident happens, or a sudden death, or a suicide, or a crime…
There is no time for words to fill the space.
No hands touching hands.
No way to know they know.

And so we end up stuck on this side of the sleep, trying our damnedest to make sense of the whole thing. We look into every question we could possibly ask to make meaning, and there is none to be found. Often those closest to the loss are stuck spinning in the losing itself, until they can solve it, keep it from having ever happened, get those last words in.

Which of course, proves meaningless as well.

And then there are the onlookers among us, tucking our children in at night, kissing our spouse, patting our buddies on the back, and wondering what we would ever do if we were to lose them.

That’s when we find ourselves making the loss a lesson, as if that makes it worth happening. As if it protects us from it happening to us or those we love. We begin to talk about how “it has taught us …”

And there is an illusion to our nature of doing this that suggests there is meaning as long as we learn something from it. If we make a tragic loss a lesson, it won’t be meaningless anymore.

But I don’t want my dead son, spouse, buddy to be a lesson; I want them to be my son, spouse, buddy. We want lives to be meaningful, not deaths. We want to say their names and images of life, not tragedy, to be conjured up. And when they are gone, especially when I didn’t have time to make meaning with them, I want to grieve. And I want them to be remembered for what their lives taught others, not their meaningless, untimely, horribly tragic death.

The meaning is in remembering who they were.
The grief is in losing them to begin with.

The loss is a loss.
Meaningless.
Void.
Empty.
It is not things as they should be.
It is before all things are made new.

There is, however, meaning in remembering.
And grief is not our enemy, but a sign that we have hearts full of love and woven with connection.
In our caring for the greiving, may we, like our God, be close to those whose hearts are breaking.

Breaking hearts are not a lesson; they are breaking hearts.
And they, in themselves, are worth all the world.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

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