Work

Acquainted with Grief: 1 Grieving all the Time

by

If you are in the Third Half of Life, you are probably grieving.

The grief may be passing through your life like a thunderstorm, or sitting over you like long days of rain. Or it may, for now, be part of the climate of your life.

You may or may not believe that global climate change is real, but I bet you have noticed in this Third Half of Life that the emotional climate of your life is not as bright and carefree as it once was. Your days, no matter how bright, may be tinged with sadness, the warmest of hugs and most intimate conversations may be accompanied by a chill.

This does not mean you are morbid or unhappy, it just means that you know in your bones that things — and people — can end.

As with global climate change, ignoring these changes only makes things worse. Acknowledging the fact that grief is part of the Third Half of Life enables us to savor the sunlight and find meaning even in the rainiest of days. Grief can make us more human, if we don’t avoid the work that goes with it.

My personal experience with grief has been blessedly ordinary. Like almost everyone my age, I have seen both my grandparents’ and parents’ generation pass away. I have been spared, so far, the loss of my beloved, or any of our younger family members. My only credential is that I have watched people grieve for over half a century. More than that, I have grieved with them.

I was not many years into the ministry before I realized that part of the psychic load of being a pastor was that I was grieving all the time.

Believe it or not, I loved my parishioners. I had to. It was the only way I could stand most of them. Given all my faults, I must have been loved by them in return. So, I grieved when they died. And, I did not have to be an empath to feel the deep griefs so many of them carried in their hearts. Not that it was a constant topic of conversation, but there would be moments when:

  • A widow would recall the life she shared with the man she loved.
  • A mother would recall a child who died before I was born.
  • A man would mention that he still missed a cat that he had to euthanize a year ago.
  • Someone would talk about father who died when he or she was fourteen.

These were the vibes that people emanated whether they told their stories or not.

Most of all, I have had a ringside seat with people when they lost loved ones. I sometimes had to bring them the news myself. As we prepared for the funeral, I coaxed them to describe their loved one. I would follow up with them in visits weeks and months afterward.

That work helped me develop some deep convictions about grief — especially what the work of grief is. Most of that work is subconscious — it is soul work. It cannot be described in words.

A colleague of mine, the pastor of a neighboring church, pointed to this inner work when he described how he handled his brother’s sudden death in an auto accident. The two of them were a about a year apart in age. They had been close all their lives. So, my colleague felt the loss of his brother very deeply. He said that he mowed his lawn almost every day for months after the funeral. Pushing his mower back and forth over his large lawn gave him the space to do that inner work that no one can describe.

However, there are four things we do when we grieve that can be described imperfectly, haltingly, because we tread on the edge of mystery. These four things are:

  1. We remember
  2. We make sense out of our memories
  3. We forgive
  4. We decide what we believe about life, death, and life-after-death.

These are not “stages of grief.” You can find lots of books on that subject. This is the work we do for everyone we love and lose. It never really ends. Right this moment, you are doing that work for people who have been dead longer than a lot of the adults you know have been alive.

In the next few weeks, I am going to go into this work in more detail.

It would help me to hear from you about how you have handled the grief in your life.

Image credit: Raul Diaz, Berlin Germany, Holocaust Memorial https://www.flickr.com/photos/radzfoto/2621999611/in/dateposted/

It’s Good to Suck at Things 2: When We Suck At What We Were Once Good At

by

“We fall down and we get up.

We fall down and we get up.

We fall down . . . and we. . . . get. . . .up!”

You may remember this song, “We fall down,”* sung by Bob Carlisle,  but even if you don’t, the refrain is all you need for background music while reading  this post.

One of the realities of this Third Half of Life is that we fall down; sometimes literally.

I fell not long ago walking across a parking lot after dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. As we got to their car, I did not see that I was stepping off a curb. I went down. I didn’t hurt anything but my dignity, but my cochlear implant processor and my glasses went flying.

I have difficulty with depth perception in low-light conditions. I was a little off-balance because of a bout with vertigo a couple of weeks earlier. Probably the Guinness I drank with dinner did not help. I fell down, but I got up.

So, there you have my organ recital. I can’t see, hear, or walk as well as I used to. I suck at things I used to be good at. This happens to all of us if we live long enough.

When it happens, we have three choices:

Denial

Despair

Defiance

Denial The best way to deny that you have a problem is to blame it on someone else. Have you ever said something like this?

“Everybody just mumbles these days. Even the ones on TV.”

“They keep shrinking the print on everything.”

“Why doesn’t the city fix the sidewalks? They are a menace.”

“All these young doctors ever talk about is losing weight. I want them to give me pills, not a sermon.”

Ironically, we most likely go into denial because we are afraid that reading glasses or hearing aids will make us look like old coots. Yet, when we talk like this we sound like old coots.

Denial can be kind of funny – until it kills us or someone else. Think about Prince Philip’s recent accident. He was lucky he did not hurt anyone.

Despair

Despair is never funny.

Despair is often accompanied by depression — another thing we tend to deny.

Despair is a decision to stay down after we fall down and not get up again. When it becomes clear that what we are eating and drinking is killing us, or at least limiting our ability to tie our shoes, we choose to believe that we cannot change. Instead we put on the slip-on shoes and find pants with an elastic waist. We accept that there is a whole list of things we cannot do anymore. We spend thousands of dollars on medications. More tragically, we become more and more isolated and lonely as we lose our eyesight, our hearing, and our mobility.

Yes, we may have to learn to live with some limitations. However, most conditions can be improved with some help and some effort. Sadly, when we start to suck at things we used to be good at, too many of us just despair. We fall down and don’t get up.

Defiance

Defiance is different from denial in that it begins with admitting that we now suck at what we used to be good at. Defiance means facing what is changing in our bodies.  It is different from despair in that it means learning what our alternatives are. It means doing the hard work of getting up after we have fallen down.

One of my heroes is  a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He not only goes to physical therapy, but does the exercises his PT prescribes.

Another is a physician and social activist who, in his 80’s, began to lose his ability to speak clearly. He goes to a speech therapist and then carefully speaks in a way the rest of us can understand.

Another hero is a woman who decided when she was 60 years old that if she did not lose weight, she wouldn’t make it to 70. She has lost more than 70 pounds and is still learning how to change her eating and exercise habits to get healthier. Since I’m married to her, I am much healthier, too. By the way, she just turned 70, but does not look like it.

That’s what defiance looks like from the outside looking in.

Here’s what it feels like on the inside.

Last Thanksgiving, my 13-year-old granddaughter sang a song for our family gathering. It was an Italian art song she sang to audition for a place in a performing arts high school. In the unbiased opinions of three of her grandparents, she was startlingly good.

The fourth grandparent had no idea. Through my sound processors it sounded like someone singing on a telephone. I know that some people who wear cochlear implants hear music in all of its richness. Most of them are musicians whose brains already know how to hear music. I am not a musician. I despaired that I would ever hear music again. I also denied that I wanted to. My cochlear implants helped me to hear and understand speech remarkably well. I told myself that was good enough. That day, however, I decided that I want to hear my granddaughter sing. I want to hear her brother play the viola that he is starting to learn.

I now have an app for people like me. Several times each week, I play games that reward me for choosing the lowest note from five options. It also gives me points when I determine whether a two-note sequence goes up or down. I was able to do that after “graduating” from a series of exercises that helped me hear the difference between a trumpet and a piano. Yes, my hearing was that bad.  Now I am moving on to listening to 60’s music on Spotify. It helps if the songs are already stored in my brain.

All this takes time, effort, and energy. I am often mentally exhausted afterward.  Nevertheless, I can now hear Petula Clark sing “Downtown” and Glen Campbell sing “Gentle on My Mind” at least as well as I first heard them over my tiny transistor radio. Best of all, I feel like I am getting up after being knocked down.

So, what are your stories? How have you fallen down? What are you doing to get back up again?

 

* The story of the origin of this song is worth reading.

Retirement Grief

by

Reading Time: 1 minute

I found this journal entry that I wrote on April 19, 2016, ten months after I retired. I’ve edited it for readability, but I offer it hoping it may help someone else. It is, after all, part of living the Second Half.

Grief at Loss of Profession

I realized this morning that I am feeling grief. I suspect that I am like a spouse who has nursed their beloved through a long last illness. At first, I felt only relief. but as time goes on, I have more and more good memories and just as the widow or widower feels the loss of their “other half,” so I feel the loss of the job that meant so much to me.

Just writing this allows the feelings to flow.

The widower who has watched his beloved suffer says, “I would not wish her back”.

No, nor would I ever want to go back to the stress I felt trying to care for a church that was undergoing so much change, and they felt with me. But I loved my job. I loved being a pastor, preaching, caring about people, thinking about the big issues in life, starting things that would continue without me. I loved the Church.

This is a good discovery.

A year later, I can say that the grief is much less, although not gone entirely. Grief is, after all, a measure of how much someone or something has meant to us