This weekend I went to Grafton, Vermont to perform my grandfather’s memorial service.

He passed away on September 12 at the age of 98.

And despite being the eulogist, I found myself disinclined to eulogize, per se.

To eulogize is to speak well of someone. And I had plenty I could have said. But by the time I spoke, ten beautiful people had shared a few thousand beautiful words of remembrance of the man now gone. And the thing I felt most pressed to address was the grief of those left behind.

Most of us are not good at grief.

It goes against our conditioning. We are survivors. And we have learned in a million different ways, since we were children, that to show emotion, or effort, is to be weak. So we never let them see us cry. We never let them see us sweat. We never let them see US.

We are soldiers. Perhaps we have carried weapons and fought in wars. Perhaps we have carried families and fought to keep peace in our homes. Perhaps we have fought to keep ourselves from falling apart.

We are cheerleaders, who seek to put the best face on the worst situations, because we don’t want to appear out of control. We don’t want to appear unable to manage. We don’t want to appear in need of help. We want to be great. All the time.

We are comforters. Most of us are more comfortable with the idea of offering a shoulder for someone else to cry on than being the one who cries. And even then, we struggle. Because being in the presence of someone else’s pain can become a gateway to acknowledging our own.

My grandmother famously told my mother at her own sister’s funeral, “cheer up.” Not because she herself was cheerful, but I suspect, because she didn’t want to see her daughter suffer. Nor, in that moment, did she want to acknowledge the depth of her own pain. So she tried to offer comfort to keep sadness at bay.

Because when we allow ourselves to open that well, and peer into the abyss that represents the depth of our pain, sometimes we wonder, if falling in, we would ever get out.

But it’s ok to fall in.

And it’s ok, for a time, not to get back out.

One of my early mentors, in discussing the passing of her mother said “the pain never goes away. You learn to live with it.”

But learning to live with it can be the difference between recovering and staying at the bottom of the well.

So we need to allow ourselves to grieve:

In her 1969 book “on death and dying,” Swiss-American Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross identified five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

We respond to loss first by refusing to believe it: When our loved ones were sick, we believed they’d recover. And once they are gone, we can’t believe that either. How could someone who’s always been with us suddenly not be? How could someone who always bounced back suddenly not?

Next we move to anger. We are angry at our loved ones for the choices they made. Why did they drive so fast. Why did they smoke so much? We are angry at the doctors for not healing them. We are angry at the people who prayed prayers that we think didn’t work. We are angry at God for allowing this to happen. We are angry at ourselves for not having done more. We are angry at other people just because.

Third we bargain. We look for ways we can affect an outcome. While our loved ones are still with us, we make promises to God in exchange for healing. After they pass, we are left with a series of “if only’s”. If only we had found a different doctor, or given them the right medicinal herbs, or sang their favorite song one more time, they would still be here. And it’s not true. But it allows us to postpone our sadness.

In the depression stage, we no longer postpone our sadness. We no longer deny our loss. Now, perhaps we wonder how we will cope without them, or why we even should.

Lastly, we reach acceptance. It’s not the end of pain. It’s not some form of “getting over it.” But it’s where we need to eventually get. Here we can fully celebrate the life. Here we can cherish the memories. Here we can continue to live.

Grief is the underside of love. It is our acknowledgement of just how precious, and necessary to us was thing we are missing.

Sometimes we are grieving something we lost.

Sometimes we are grieving something we never had.

Nobody is perfect.

So as we miss the person we loved, and lost, there may also have been things they couldn’t give us

There is attention, affection, affirmation, information, and instruction we may have craved and never gotten.

There are questions that may remain unanswered.

Today, I pray we would begin to make peace with the unknown. Life is full of mystery. There are things we go through we will never understand. We don’t know why.

We don’t know why things happened when or how they did. We just know that in the midst of it, there were still miracles. In the midst of it, there was still love.

I have more to say about my grandfather.

I have more to say about grief.

For today, I will simply pray we give ourselves the grace to walk through it.

(Photo Credit: Mike B)