"Grief doesn't change you, it reveals you." ~John Greene

I am no stranger to loss. My little family has endured tremendous loss over the years. Because of that, I have read many books on the subject. What else can you do in these situations, but seek out wise counsel from seasoned veterans in the grief department. Although it has all helped exponentially, I'd say there's is no shortcut or easy way through the journey. But along the way I have stumbled upon some invaluable treasures in how to navigate what feels insurmountable. If I can summarize some of these gems into one haphazard blog maybe it can help someone else.  

Our human nature tries to rate loss, as if one life can be compared to another. Moreover, that one loss is more significant than another. In the book 'A Grace Disguised', author Jerry Sittser beautifully articulates the conundrum of trying to measure loss. 

"Catastrophic loss of whatever kind is always bad, only bad in different ways. It is impossible to quantify and to compare. The very attempt we often make in quantifying losses only exacerbates the loss by driving us to two unhealthy extremes. On the one hand, those coming out on the losing end of the comparison are deprived of the validation they need to identify and experience loss for the bad thing that it is. They feel like the little boy who just scratched his finger but cried too hard to receive much sympathy. Their loss is diminished as unworthy of attention and recognition. On the other hand, those coming out of the winning end convince themselves that no one has suffered as much as they have, that no one will ever understand them, and that no one can offer lasting help. They are the ultimate victims. So they indulge themselves with their pain and gain a strange kind of pleasure in their misery. 

Whose loss is worse? The questions begs the point. Each experience of loss is unique, each painful in its own way, each as bad as everyone else's but also different. No one will ever know the pain I've experienced because it is my own, just as I will never know the pain you may have experienced. What good is quantifying loss? What good is comparing? The right question to ask is not, "Whose is worse?" It is to ask, "What meaning can be gained from suffering, and how can we grow through suffering?"  

Profound.  

One of the common threads I have observed with experiences in loss is that comparison is a catalyst in the discord among the living. I myself have been guilty of doing this in my own personal journey of loss and grief. We use a ‘rating system’ in how we extend empathy. And in doing this we deject who we surmise is on the lower end of the 'totem pole' of grief. When my mom died, for me that was catastrophic. People who were well meaning used this flawed ‘rating system’ to provide some sort of silver lining to my loss. "At least you didn't lose your husband" or "Burying your parents is natural, unlike burying a child." I was being told that my loss was less than. Less than that of someone who lost a spouse, or less than that of someone who had lost a child. Those words, meant to provide comfort, achieved quite the opposite. It just added to my pain and left me feeling despondent.  

Loss is individual. 

We must be careful not to assume we are the only human beings who are experiencing grief. The deepest valleys I have been in have been the ones where I fixated solely on my own hurt, pain, loss. I've noticed it also is the main driver of discord as a couple...when Sully or I position our own personal hurt over each other's mutual pain. It's not a contest. If you try and make it one, everyone loses.  

We all grieve differently. Nothing taught me that more starkly than navigating through grief with my husband. I used to accuse Sully of stuffing his emotions down deep and not working through them. I couldn’t identify with his process, so I judged it, I declared it wrong. While I tend to want to mourn and lament, stay in my pajamas and cry all day, Sully finds healing in hard labor. There are many acts of grief scattered across our twenty acres. I honestly wish I had taken just a second to step outside my opinions and self-centeredness and figured it out sooner. There was a lot of loss in our nearly fifteen years together, and I clung so tightly to my own viewpoints on the “proper” way to do; what is honestly unfathomable in the first place, I sabotaged something that could have been beneficial for us both. But isn’t that all part of the pilgrimage we call life? Some of us just refuse to learn the easy way, we must struggle ourselves into edification. My typical go-to emotion towards Sully's inability to, in my mind, properly process his grief was resentment. God exposed the error of my Pharisaical ways. And while I couldn’t redo, or rather undo the past, when we were thrown into yet another chasm of sorrow, I had the opportunity to finally grieve with my husband. 

Last summer Sully’s eldest brother was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. While I loved Sully’s brother dearly, this was a loss that was going to impact Sully staggeringly. I had to really fight off my preconceived notions what grief looked like for me and embrace the exertion that lay ahead. I mixed concrete by hand, carrying fifty-pound bags one by one, filling the wheelbarrow with measured buckets of lake water, mixing and stirring till Sully gave his seal of approval. I helped set beams. We didn’t talk about feelings, instead we worked quietly side by side and used the pain of our circumstance to create something beautiful. We jokingly refer to it as the ‘The Church of the Sawmill’, but every time I walk by it I recognize what is was for my husband. It was a way to sort through the pain of losing his brother, and a way to honor that God still has work for Sully to do here on this side of heaven. It makes me ponder how often we miss opportunities to empathize with someone hurting, because we are too busy trying to do it our own way. 

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals, or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’. But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall be given a wooden leg. But I will never be biped again.” ~ C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed) 

How many of us are wandering around with these invisible amputations of loss? I think we all too often expect each other to ‘get over’ it. C.S. Lewis so eloquently painted the picture that death is an amputation. It is something you learn to live with, but forever changes you. This realization struck a chord with me. It made me look at the choices we have in our circumstances. While I don't have a large pool of friends/family who have suffered loss of their limbs, one comes to mind. My high school math teacher Mr. Johnson. A Vietnam vet who lost his left leg at the hip and his right leg above the knee. While I wasn't there to witness the entirety of his journey, the man I knew was a living testimony for choosing to overcome. He didn't allow his wheelchair to define him, and he has continued to do more living than most people on two feet. He is charismatic, he possesses an amazing sense of humor, and has dedicated his life to education and athletics. I'm certain there were moments, laying in a hospital bed, where he may have been conflicted with how he was going to respond to this rotten hand he had been dealt. I have seen people with much less dire situations choose bitterness, anger and discontentment.  

Picture Credit: Eli Johnson

It is easy to coddle yourself with the narrative that life is not fair. The bitter root takes hold and turns into a vine that strangles you, and the only way to release its stronghold is through gratitude. Loss is overwhelming, unbeknownst to me when I encountered it, I cultivated that root of bitterness in my own grieving process. It wasn't until I was choking to death on it did I realize. God used my aunt as a lifeline, she sent me Ann Voskamp's book, 'One-Thousand Gifts', and while I read it I had to do the hard work of weeding my own personal garden of grief.  

“Something always comes to fill the empty spaces, and this is what I've come to do with white space. I invite thanks.” ~ Ann  Voskamp (One-Thousand Gifts) 

Trust me when I tell you...finding gratitude in the hard places, isn't easy. But Ann's insight is probably the gentlest healers God could use for this hard work. I am hesitant to condense her amazing book to fit into a tiny paragraph on my blog. So, I will preface with the challenge to read her book in its entirety and glean so much more than this snippet of wisdom I plucked from the pages. She writes, “Feel thanks and it is impossible to feel angry. We can only feel one emotion at time. We get to choose which do you want to feel?” We can look at our amputations and feed the natural emotion of anger, "Why me?" or we can be transformed by choosing instead the unnatural Christ centered emotion of thanksgiving. “Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.”  

It is an everyday practice to choose empathy, grace, hope, love, & thanksgiving. I fail miserably at it, because self-pity, anger, despair, unforgiveness, & discontentment come easier. I want to wallow, and I want others to accept my wallowing. Even if it is unproductive. I am a work in progress, and I can be assured of one thing, my expedition through grief is not over. I do feel better equipped to navigate the valleys that are ahead. Trusting that God is true to His character, and that He will fulfill what He has promised. Also understanding His ways don’t always align with my expectations of how things should be.  

"And regarding the question, friends, that has come up about what happens to those already dead and buried, we don’t want you in the dark any longer. First off, you must not carry on over them like people who have nothing to look forward to, as if the grave were the last word. Since Jesus died and broke loose from the grave, God will most certainly bring back to life those who died in Jesus." 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 (The Message)