What We Bear with Grief

Mary Johnston
Volume 23, No. 2

As part of a high school English course on crisis and change, I taught C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, an account of the author’s feelings after his beloved wife died of cancer. My students and I carefully studied his stunning metaphors and shared our own questions about death and God. We marveled at Lewis’s writing and enjoyed our discussions. When my father’s brother died about six years ago, I gave this book to his widow. I thought it was a kind and appropriate gesture. 

Now, after losing a daughter and my father, I turn white with shame that I did not weep for Lewis and my aunt. For me, grief was something that inspired beautiful prose and poetry. Now it is something that sticks to me and collects the dust of mortality; my glasses, no matter how many times I wash them, will be covered with this dust. 

Before I buried my own loved ones, other people’s losses made me sad, but they did not carve wounds in my skin. Now as I weep I wonder how others bear their pain. Each day I ask the same question about my own pain, and daily I face the fact that grief has altered me. I have lost not only two people I love but also my former self. I used to assume that with enough will, intelligence, faith, and a dose of therapy people could weather storms and land safely. Now I know that storms change vessels; even if they land, they might not be ready for much more traveling. And if they are, the storms have changed how the vessels respond.

When my father was diagnosed with colon cancer, there was no end to my appetite for books about alternative cures to cancer, the emotionally healing effects of illnesses, and near-death experiences. My poor father was besieged by dozens of people offering him advice and hope, but because I am his daughter and was having so many powerful and reassuring experiences with these books, I passed on information and shared my growing faith – faith that cancer might somehow help my emotionally cautious father express his feelings; faith that helping him for hours upon hours with his memoirs would lift his inhibitions and unveil the beautiful mysteries of his goodness, patience, and love; faith that special foods, nutritional supplements, and prayer would stymie the cancer; faith that Betty Jean Eadie, who wrote two books on her near-death experience, was right: the dead are happy to be with their Lord, and they can communicate with and influence the living.

Lynn Matthews Anderson

While I was being almost reckless with my faith, one of my prayers was answered: I got pregnant. I hoped that my father would live long enough to meet my second child. On the morning I was scheduled to have my nineteen week ultrasound, I was having contractions and went to the hospital instead. After thirty-two hours of labor, I gave birth to, and lost, Savannah. All that I had read during my father’s illness about healing and eternity were no match for my empty womb, lactating breasts, and broken heart. Nothing could replace this beautiful little girl whose hands looked like they might dance well on piano keys and whose long torso brought to mind images of a strong, lean runner racing across a savannah.

Four months after this loss, my father’s kidneys shut down. Two days before he died, I asked him to take good care of Savannah and to help send us another child. He embraced me and his eyes shone with promise. After I dared to eke out my last request – that he visit me on July 28, our shared birthday – he said, "Oh Mary, don’t get your hopes up. I have no idea how things work up there." Despite all of my prayers, cancer was killing my father, and his caution was still strongly intact.

Undaunted and stubborn, I still embraced what these books had promised about visions and angels, and, as a result, approached my father’s last few days with high expectations. I was on duty the night he died. His raspy and infrequent breaths indicated that death was near. I notified my brother Dave and my mother. As the three of us sat together with my father, it seemed that minutes passed between his breaths; we wondered whether each of those long lapses meant death. Then the end came, and we could witness the difference – the stillness, the chill, the blue tint to his skin. 

I had imagined that my father’s spirit would comfort me, or that death would cloak me in peace, or that I would feel especially close to my family. Instead I felt empty, cold, and alone. I was devastated, not only because my dear father was dead but because I felt no shafts of grace or light; both the heavens and my heart were mute. I am no Betty Jean, who talks with God daily and has visions almost as often. Most of us are not. We are forced to face that our conversations, physical contact, and intimate moments are with the living, not the dead, and that those we have buried rarely, if ever, visit us.

Nonetheless, I have not felt utterly abandoned. Three weeks after Savannah died, my husband and I decided to bury her in his parents’ backyard in Wyoming. I spent a night and a day away from home to prepare for this event. While on this retreat, Savannah accompanied me on a walk and reassured me that she would watch over me and that she was part of our family. On Easter morning, as I was watching children in an African American gospel choir walk up to the front of the chapel, I felt her presence among them. Perhaps she wanted me to know my love for her could become a love for all children. On Mother’s Day, she whispered to me that she remembered I was her mother. 

I dream about my father frequently. Most of the dreams are about my father’s coming back to visit. In them I am delighted and surprised he has returned and relish holding his hand and talking with him. He has not visited me as my daughter has, but I feel his love and wisdom coursing through me. I can remember his wit, his chuckle, and his raised eyebrows. When I read his letters to me or gaze at a photograph, I remember him perfectly; death seems theoretical.

But these occasional moments with my daughter and the feelings I have about my father are not earthly fare. I am a mother of two girls but cannot share stories with anyone about one of them. I never nursed her or heard her cry. She will never be in a family photograph. When I miss my father and need to ask him a question, I cannot pick up the phone and hear his voice. I knew that death would be difficult and frustrating, but now I know what it would feel like to be in a desert, desperate for water, with no oasis in sight. Even with a promise that there will be water, the thirst in the meantime can be scathing and sometimes feel life-threatening. We are made to be with the living; trying to pass time with the dead might drive one mad with longing and disappointment. My few unexpected experiences with the world beyond have been exquisite refreshment, but I cannot survive on the unpredictable habits of the dead nor expect to be the same person after loss and grief.

During my father’s illness and the months that followed both his and my daughter’s deaths, I felt I had to introduce myself differently – not by my name but by my anguish. Even now, many months later, I want to tell people, "I am often stalked by grief. It clings to me when I try to walk and lies next to me at night." Then, inexplicably it will vanish. For days I feel as though it has finally let go. Then suddenly, while I am swimming in peaceful water, it grabs my feet and pulls me under. Angry and stunned, I come to the surface for breath and wonder if it will ever again be safe to swim, to laugh. 

After my father’s diagnosis, whenever I saw an older man, waves of nostalgia would come over me. I’d get jealous that this man could eat so well and calmly, or that this other man could take such a long walk, or that another could take his grandchild to the playground. My father was still alive, but I knew he soon would not be. Every healthy older man seemed so presumptuous, so cavalier about being alive. 

Just weeks after we lost our baby, John and I ran into an acquaintance who was seven months pregnant. She rubbed her large belly and spoke confidently about the baby’s due date. I thought to myself, "That kind of assurance comes with innocence." People who have lost a child know that nothing can be counted on and that the low probability of something bad happening (you know the stats – 1 in 10,000) are meaningless if that something happens to you. Seeing pregnant women and newborns can make me shake, weep, or feel nauseated. I can’t bear to go to baby showers. Other women’s fertility reminds me of death, of irreplaceable loss, of their plenty and my emptiness.

Grief makes the senses keen. You can see other people’s pain, smell out loneliness, and feel their rough edges that haven’t healed. Grief takes you to an underground community that only the grieving know about. Two weeks after my daughter died, I was hanging the laundry on our back porch. As I attached a shirt to the line, I felt the boundary of my skin disappear and in flooded wails from Auschwitz, Vietnam, Soweto, and Kosovo. My wounds had opened a way for the world’s grief to come to me. I was in awe at having access to so much pain that was not my own. On this occasion and others like it, I have felt honored, even grateful to have such feelings. 

These doors into others’ lives keep opening. Before meeting with a student about Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, I read that the author’s wife miscarried, later gave birth to a stillborn baby, and was never able to get pregnant again. I closed the book and wept. I prayed that this woman had found some solace in her life but could not at the time really imagine how. Sometimes I get a little concerned because this compassion leaks into the fictional world. The other day my three-year-old daughter and I watched Old Yeller for the first time. When the teenage boy, Travis, had to shoot rabid Old Yeller, who had recently won his heart and saved his life, I wept and wept and was so disappointed that Travis’s father wanted him to buck up and look for something to replace his dead dog.

There is something deeply spiritual, even redemptive about this awareness of my own and others’ pain. Christmas came three months after our baby died. As I gazed at pictures of baby Jesus lying in a manger and sang songs about his birth, I was overwhelmed at the miracle of any birth, especially His. I understood more clearly that the promise of rebirth that Christ offers us is ours only because He died. I had a glimpse of the extraordinary pain that Mary and God must have experienced at the loss of their son. I cannot imagine Mary, God, Jesus, or any of us ever fully recovering from the crucifixion. Nor can I imagine any of us unscarred from the violence and pain of this world. Healed, yes, but not unscarred.

Grief takes you out of the driver’s seat. You are not in control of how many children you have. You are forced to abandon notions of correlation in which you do this and get that in return. On the worst days you cling with tenacious claws to what you have and cry for what you do not. When you part from a loved one – even if for a few hours – you know you may never see that person alive again. Somehow you want to guarantee that nothing bad will take place but now know that anything can happen. You hesitate to ski, fly, or leave the house for fear of what you might lose. You wonder what it would be like to be your old self – someone who figured you’d always make it home safely and that saving for a child’s college tuition was not foolhardy.

On other days, letting go of expectation can be liberating. You fly free, without attachment, and let things be. You feel less driven, less in control. You have entered a universe in which fulfillment and answers are not really the goal. You know that your actions, prayers, and faith may or may not influence what happens, but if your heart is open – like a parachute – maybe you won’t crash again and break your heart. The company of others who mourn, God among them, feels sufficient.

Nine months have passed since Savannah died. Long enough for a baby to grow and be born. Long enough for me to know that I have medical problems that may mean I am infertile. Long enough for me now to see pregnant women not as signs of what I want and do not have but of what none of us can ever know. What waits to be born – from our wombs, from our grief, from our lives? Before burying my dead, I felt it was possible and necessary to know; I carried an urgent confidence with me. Now I wait and am filled with as much horror as hope at what will be born.

Passionate about her tutoring business, her Gospel doctrine class, and her daughter Sierra and husband John, Mary Johnston is logging more and more enjoyable hours with the living. Mary currently lives in Somerville, MA.

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