When we talk about grief, we need to talk about guilt.

Almost inevitably, the finality of loss will stir some regrets because most of us have some awkward conversations we keep postponing, or rifts we hope to reconcile. We probably have not fully forgiven ourselves for whatever mistakes we made in our relationship with a person who is now gone. We may even feel we are somehow responsible for their death.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief model has evolved over time to include a few additional stages. And two commonly added are guilt at the beginning, and hope, at the end.

And that’s a word in season.

The grieving process may involve survivor’s guilt: someone we love passed, while we are still here.

It doesn’t seem fair.

A soldier’s life may contain overwhelming amounts of survivor’s guilt, whether you fought overseas, or in urban jungles.

Sometimes, for reasons we do not understand, we are chosen to be the last one standing.

All of our brothers and sisters died, and we’re left to remember them and wonder why it wasn’t us.

We may feel guilty that we want to enjoy the life we have, or that we are enjoying it, and are not spending the rest of our days in perpetual sorrow.

We may find, in a season of grief, that there are times we want to laugh. There are times we want to be free of death-consciousness.

And I believe we absolutely should do that. Because that is part of living. And a life of self-enforced misery does not honor the dead. It declines to live.

On Veterans Day, we honor those who have served.

And honoring them means remembering means celebrating their sacrifices and their victories.

It means remembering them at their best.

It doesn’t mean fictionalizing them as flawless

We don’t honor the dead by creating a version of them that didn’t exist.

We don’t honor the living by asking them to conform to our preferred fantasies of the soldier’s life.

There is honor in serving a country, a cause, or a community.

And there is no single personality, or ideology that describes a soldier.

The people who have served are as diverse as the beliefs and perspectives of the country they served.

And we can honor them in ways that are as unique as they are. We can grieve them as they should be grieved.

So how do we grieve?

How do we walk through this healing process, instead of being dragged through?

The Mental Health Organization HelpGuide offers these six steps:

1. Acknowledge your pain.
2. Accept that grief can trigger many different and unexpected emotions.
3. Understand that your grieving process will be unique to you.
4. Seek out face-to-face support from people who care about you.
5. Support yourself emotionally by taking care of yourself physically.
6. Recognize the difference between grief and depression.

And I would summarize this list in four words: truth, grace, community, and life.

Truth: We have to acknowledge both the reality and the depth of our grief.

Grace: We have to give ourselves and others grace in grief. We need to be gentle with ourselves, and gentle with each other.

Healing demands an abundance of grace.

And everyone grieves differently. We can neither place our pain on a pedestal, not deny our own experience to make room for someone else’s. In our pain, we often create hierarchies of bereavement. I may feel that my loss is greater than someone else’s. I may feel I have less of a right to grieve. The loss, however, belongs to the community. And we honor the departed, and the time we shared, by honoring that.

Moments of grief can either draw families together or drive them apart.

Which brings us to our third word: community. Grief requires face-to-face support from people who care about us. Grief requires staying connected, because even though our grief process is unique, we don’t go through it alone.

In moments like these I pray for comfort and joy. Comfort because we all experience the loss. Joy because we can all celebrate the life.

And I pray for grace and peace. Because we need to be gentle with ourselves, and each other, and its easy for sadness to magnify stress and strife.

We can give ourselves and each other space and time to process feelings, or we can trample all over them.

Many of us are bad at grief because we don’t much allow ourselves to feel anything. So in times of struggle we externalize. And we live with secrets.

No matter how gifted and productive we are, secrets will haunt us.

They will weigh us down.

And I think it’s ok, when we bury someone who was larger than life to us, whether a parent, a partner, or a friend, to acknowledge that they were also human.

They probably won some battles and lost others.

They likely made contributions and mistakes.

They no doubt helped us and hurt us

And they were invariably present in some ways and absent in others.

And remembering that is ok. It takes nothing away from a hero to acknowledge that they were imperfect. Because when we do, we not only honor an actual person, we also give ourselves permission to be actual people.

And that brings us to the fourth word: life

The death of a loved one leave us with a question. How will we live?

When we bury a patriarch or matriarch, the leader of the tribe, or the glue of the family, we are left to consider how we will function as a family now. We also have opportunity to ask why we have looked to one person to hold us together, instead of doing the hard work of building our own relationships, and who we, in this new era, are now inspired to be.

So how will we live?

I’d like to suggest four things:

1. Curiosity: We can choose to learn, all the days of our lives. To take the opportunity to end each day smarter, and better, than we began it, because we never delude ourselves into thinking we’ve got it all worked out.
2. Generosity: We can choose to serve, all the days of our lives. We can choose to give the best of ourselves. We can choose to serve a cause, a family, an organization. We can satisfy what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the drum major instinct, the desire to lead the parade, through service. Everybody can be great, he reminded us, because anybody can serve.
3. Grace. We can choose to love, all the days of our lives. To show each other the grace that we need. The grace that many of us need to smooth our rough edges, and soothe a certain hardness born of hard times.
4. Truth: We can choose to shine the light on secrets, and mistakes, and hurts, so we can allow them to heal. We can choose to acknowledge our transgressions, so we can ask for forgiveness. We can apologize to people we’ve wronged, even if we don’t think they deserve it, even if we think they harmed us more. We can choose to confess our sins, so we can begin the process of making amends.

In this there is hope. In this there is life.

I pray, today, that we would grieve.

I pray, tomorrow, that we would live.

(Photo Credit: Alex Green)