It has come home to me again lately, as I watch friends and clients alike mourn the loss of their unborn children, how sacred a season grief really is.  It is sacred in its capacity to bring us into contact with God, in a way completely different from all the other seasons of our lives.  Death forces us to face the question of what actually comes after life is over.  The truth is that we know very little about that great mystery, and that ignorance makes us flinch.  We try to bluff our way through it, pretending it doesn’t really matter, that we’re pretty sure it’s just oblivion and so why worry about it.  The fact is: there is no way around faith in the answering of this question.  It takes faith to believe there is only oblivion on the other side of death.  It takes faith to believe that it will be the fulfillment of all His promises.  Either way, we are committing our hearts to a reality about which we cannot have perfect certainty.  Only God knows what lies on the other side of that ultimate horizon, we can only believe one account or another.

The bluff is just an attempt to avoid what that ultimate uncertainty brings: fear, grief, sorrow, anger and shame.  These are the most difficult feelings in human experience. It is only natural that we would try to avoid them.  What might be the point of not avoiding them?  What could happen if we should turn and face the painful feelings associated with loss?  What is supposed to happen?

J. William Worden, in his seminal work on therapy with grieving clients, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, outlines 4 major tasks to be accomplished in a season of grieving. First, we must accept the reality of the loss.  Next, we process the pain of the grief.  Then, we try to adjust to living in the world without our loved one.  Finally, we make a space in our life for remembering the person who has died while moving forward with our lives.  Easily said, but not easily done.  The contribution that this approach has made to grief counseling is that it has allowed us to reframe grief, not so much as something that happens to us, as it is a season in which we have goals to accomplish, and those goals are all moments of growth and encounter.  They are the places where we meet God and one another in our sorrow and our need.

I have been moved and honored to accompany mothers who are grieving their children, and the feeling of helplessness in the face of overwhelming sorrow and anger are universal.  Not one of us is strong enough to hold the power of that pain alone.  We need something more than theory, someone stronger than an idea.  In order to speak the truth of our pain, and accept the reality of our loss, we need friends near us who can stand beside us without needing to have any answers, and we need a God big enough, and gentle enough, to bear all our pain, sorrow and anger. It is within the context of those relationships that we can come to name and accept our loss. It is by trusting those people and God that we find a path to meaning in our grief.  It is that process of feeling our hurt with an honesty that inspires interior growth that helps us make meaning and thereby to “process” our grief.  Only then do we discover the freedom to move forward in our lives, carrying the memory of the person we have lost and the scars of our grief. 

In the words of Job 19:25, “I know my Redeemer lives.”  It is only in the context of God’s fulfillment that the death of my (and my fellow mothers’) children becomes a fact that I can bear.  It is only in the context of my loving relationships with friends and family that I can find meaning and purpose in their lives and my own.  It is only by living courageously and honestly through our grief that we come to the wholeness Jesus has promised us..  Each of these assertions require faith.  Faith is that disposition of the heart that looks unflinchingly at reality, even the reality of loss, and knows that all of life can bear fruit if it is treated as an opportunity to choose relationship with God and one another over fear and shame.

If you are living this pain of loss right now, or know someone who is, remember that grief is not something that happens to you.  It is a season of change which contains within it opportunities for growth and connection.  Reach out. There is work to be done and it cannot be done alone.