Sometimes grief hits you out of nowhere.
Smacks you right in the chest like a ball out of left field. It’s a boring old Tuesday morning like all the other Tuesdays and then suddenly, you’re crying into the dishwater for no reason at all.
Last Sunday it got me good. We were sitting in church, as we do, and the pastor was going on, as he does, and suddenly he said, “the light of resurrection,” and the floodgates opened. It was like an audible clap of thunder shook the building. I looked around to see if anyone else was tearing up the way I was. No? Oh dear. I couldn’t stop it. All I could see was Jesus holding Jeremiah and I was being resurrected and was going to get to hold him. The grief rose up in me like an unstoppable tidal wave, a terrible aching and longing.
It was ridiculous. The pastor wasn’t even preaching on resurrection; it was a throw-away comment in the midst of some other argument he was making. But grief seized the moment and pounced, and he was not letting go.
So terribly inconvenient. To be ripped open that way in such a public place and entirely out of the context of my loss.
But that’s what grief is like. He has no respect for your context.
Living with grief is a tricky thing. You can rarely anticipate when he will strike or with how much intensity. If you fight him, you will probably end up defaulting to anger. That’s the easiest emotion to use when you want to hide how you’re really feeling. Humour is another excellent (and less destructive) deflector. Make a few good jokes and stuff that grief squirming and scratching back into its basket.
But recently I’ve been learning there is another way to tango with this inconsiderate partner. It’s vulnerability.
Take a couple of deep breaths, practice the exercises that pull you out of the hospital room and back into your present context, look someone you trust in the eyes and say, “I don’t know why but what the pastor said this morning made me think of Jeremiah, and I feel really, really sad now.”
Boom! Take that, grief. Yeah, that’s right, now you’re calm and quiet and curling up to purr in my lap. Now we can live together peaceably.
I don’t know how it works, but somehow, vulnerability takes the punch out of grief.
I’m only beginning to learn this, and I’m not a psychologist or Brene Brown, but I can tell you it works (at least, for me). When I’m vulnerable, my grief is shared. It’s not so heavy or impenetrable. Shards of joy, gratitude, humility - even peace - pierce my heart and provide relief. Little cracks begin to show and let the light in.
Being vulnerable lets grief be grief; it doesn’t arm him with an arsenal of anger, bitterness, fear, resentment, or any assortment of nasty and aggressive emotions. Nor does it force grief to fester in some dark place inside you until he claws his way out in the form of depression, an eating disorder, anxiety, self-harm, sickness.
Being open and honest about our grief with safe people puts grief in his proper place. Finishing the dishes will still be difficult, painful, and unnerving, but it will bearable.