Grief Resources

Last night I visited Barnes & Noble.  I wanted to find something new to read on grief and loss.  I wasn't looking for information.  I was looking for the companionship that all good literature provides.  I asked a sales person where I might find books on these subjects.  I think my question made her very uncomfortable, because she wouldn't look at me, as she brusquely told me that I should look in the "grief sub-section" of the "self-improvement" shelves.  I suspected that this meant trouble.  I found books with titles like The Grief Recovery Handbook: 20th Anniversary Edition: The Action Program for Moving beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses, Including Health, Career, and Faith.  I don't think so.  So, I tried the "Christian Inspiration" section, which, at least as Barnes & Noble had stocked it, didn't seem to offer me much either.  Much of it looked, at least from my brief browsing, to be a little heavy on pious optimism or on a devout "management by objectives"... or both.  Maybe I should have looked more carefully.  Maybe something valuable lay behind the often off-putting titles, but what I saw depressed me too much.  I left.


I have only read a couple of good things about grief so far.  At least only a couple of things have held my attention.   Among these, C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed has resonated with my present feelings and challenges with a unique pertinence, which many others have felt as well.  I first read it thirty-four years ago, when my mother-in-law died at 53, and my father-in-law bought copies of it for his children.   However, I didn't really "get it" then.  Although my mother-in-law's death affected me mightily, and I loved her dearly, the loss of a parent and parent-figures in my life, no matter how shattering they have felt, does not compare to the loss of Arabella with which I'm now grappling... or which is grappling with me... and Lewis writes of the loss of married love... in my case anyway, an incomparable loss.  How could I have understood that at 26?  I'm rather glad I didn't understand it back then.  I'm glad I had to wait another thirty-four years to have a reason to understand.


Lewis writes with a lyrical honesty that transcends all the writing about the "stages of grief," which dominates so much of the literature and which I find about as helpful as a bird would find an ornithological textbook, to paraphrase Barnett Newman.  I wish that I could think of this heartache as a set of "stages," which I merely have to practice and master... or simply get through, like enduring an appointment with the dentist.   The "stages" rubric, however, would seem most helpful to those trying to understand what's happened to them after they've finished going through it... or, perhaps most especially, to those whose vocation lies in helping such people.  However, the best counselors would never mistake diagnostic categories for the cure.  In counseling, relationship cures, not diagnosis, not theory.  That's why I find Lewis' book so full of solace.  He does not offer therapeutic recipes for "managing grief."  He offers the companionship of a wise and theologically-sensitive fellow-sufferer, who offers me his hand, not his diagnosis of my current "stage" or his prognostication of the unfinished business that still awaits me.  (What?  You haven't "done" anger yet???)


I will be re-reading Lewis' book frequently over the coming months.  I know that I have just begun to plumb all it has to offer.   At this moment, his comments about the relationship of tears to memory are sticking most in my mind.  He says he feared that, if he ever stopped weeping, he would at that point lose contact with Joy, his wife... that she really would be dead to him then.  However, one day, when he found himself weeping less, he realized that he remembered Joy more clearly than ever, because he was remembering her, not his loss of her.  I take that to mean that, as the months and years pass, I can anticipate, not love's dissipation, but love's anchoring.  That fills me with an indelible hope.


I suppose that someone will point out that Lewis is talking about moving from the stage of depression to the stage of acceptance.  However, I think he's talking about something else.  He's asserting a belief in the Resurrection,  a reborn awareness of the eternal durability of life and love, and the Resurrection is a gift of grace, not a stage one attains through the adoption of the proper attitudes, with the proper patience.  His book is not a psychological self-help book.  It is a confession... Augustinian in its poetry, in its unflinching honesty, in its courageous dignity, and in its universality.  His whole book on grief is like a gloss on Augustine's famous prayer on the first page of the Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you."  ---  I'm afraid I'm still pretty restless, pretty disoriented... but, thank God,  I have the companionable hands of Augustine and C. S. Lewis to steady me.