Grieving Our Way Through The Holidays

The Monday before Thanksgiving several years ago, I made pastoral calls on two parish families whom I knew to be grieving painful losses. The two households could not have been more different. In one, the dining room table was already set for the feast to come, and on the chair at its head stood a large picture of the grandfather whose funeral I conducted the previous year. Other family pictures that included him were prominently displayed throughout the living room, den, and kitchen as well. This year, we're going to remember a lot, talk a lot, and laugh a lot about Pop, his son told me with a lilt in his voice.

In the other home I visited that afternoon, there were no signs of Thanksgiving preparations at all. The rooms were conspicuously devoid of any reminders that a much beloved wife and mother had once lived there. Her husband told me that that she would have wanted the family just to get on with their lives and not dwell on her. It's helped to do just that, he said, or we'd all be stuck in the past the way my mother-in-law is. His plan was to eat Thanksgiving dinner with his teen-age daughters at the local cafeteria. I made a mental note to myself to think more about whether the two approaches to the coming Thanksgiving Day that I saw in both homes that afternoon were more the cause or the effect of how each family was doing with their grieving. The best I could come up with at the time was that it was a little of both.

Recently I came across a research-oriented study on grief by two therapists in Colorado, Steve and Connirae Andreas, that helped confirm my own developing intuition back then that maintaining an active relationship with someone we have lost by means of stimulating and enjoying our memories of them is a very good thing. It works better than what may seem to be a more heroic approach of putting that person out of our minds as soon as possible and moving on. It was this latter approach that the second family I described had embarked upon, with the "help" of well-meaning friends, and it did not seem to me to be coming off very well. The Andreas have an insightful way of putting the point of this paragraph, in terms of keeping our deceased loved ones' presence "comfortably inside" us.

One thing that still bothers me about some of the so-called "classic" literature on grief and grief recovery is its taking too much liberty with what the ancient Preacher of the Old Testament teaches us about the "seasons" of life. There is a time to mourn, he wrote, and then there is a time to dance. (Ecclesiastes 3:4) He did not, however, tell us how much time we are allowed for the transition, contrary to the views of many mental health professionals who suggest not too subtly that letting heavy grieving go on for too long ---much longer than a year seems to be what "too long" means --- will put us into unnecessarily "complicated bereavement." In my experience, grief-work takes as long as it takes, and it tends to go better when we activate good memories of the one(s) we have lost rather than when we seal off easy access to those memories.

Most grieving people with whom I talk and work who either cannot get beyond its initial, intense stage, or who try to get over it by deadening themselves to feelings altogether, tell me with unnerving consistency that they feel they are required to disconnect altogether from the one(s) they have lost, that it is too heart wrenching to do it, and that they are somehow not measuring up to what is expected of them. I try to remind them as best I can that we are created to seek, love, and cherish close relationships, not to sever them entirely, even ones that may not be altogether good for us. Basically, disconnecting from them is something that God takes care of for us; we do not need to work very hard at doing it ourselves. Why? Because people we love die, physically. Our grief-work begins by accepting this God-ordained fact and by holding in our hearts and minds, that is, through memory, those we love whose lives are now being lived out elsewhere.

A lot of people are grieving a lot of things these days, more things than usual. I have been thinking a lot about their grieving, and my own, enough to warrant a couple more attempts in the next two columns to deal with how all of us might better face the holidays that are upon us in a time of loss and in the midst of national crisis.