Hope in the Context of Grief

I'm preparing to participate in a 7 session course on grief to be offered in the community where I serve as a pastor. It begins Tuesday and I am expected to present an overview of grief using the topics we intend to cover through the course.

I am acquainted with grief. When I was 33, my mother died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident; my father was driving. Only 14 months later, my dad died of heart disease. I know the last year of his life was lonely and, perhaps, guilt ridden. I know he drank too much alcohol the last year of his life. In the fall of 2007, the first of my six siblings died. Jim was a professor at Northern Illinois University, beloved by many students as we learned at his memorial service and thereafter.

My task for the grief course is to discover where hope resides in the midst of grief. I have been reading about hope and death. As a pastor, I have watched people travel the path of grief and have witnessed some of their trials. But grief is largely an inward laceration, one of those deep fissures few but the griefsticken can touch.

I am acquanted with grief, but I don't know if I know how to grieve. When my mother died, I learned of her death while I was in the hospital preparing for major intestinal surgery. The surgeon came in with my husband on the day after her death; my husband told me and when I began to cry, the surgeon said sternly: "You don't need to grieve about your mother; she is in a better place." (I know he was worried about my own health at the time.)

I stopped grieving instantly. Stopped and never intentionally re-started, though during my life, grief has found its way out of me in a thousand ways. Empathy enables one to grieve.

Often, I've thought about what it would be like to learn that my adult son is dying (those are excruciating thoughts). It is impossible to imagine a life without my husband--the loneliness, the emptiness that would ensue.

But would I be as one without hope? I don't think so, certainly not for long. I see hope in an acorn, in the trees outside my window, in the smiles on the faces of my friends and relations. My hope rises to heights when I am alone. Inside my heart, the presence of God grows like a zucchini patch in mid-summer.

Maybe there is a difference between the pain of loss and the presence of hope. It is possible to feel deep physical, emotional and spiritual pain, and grieve in those moments, aware that hope is fluttering inside like the earliest movements of a growing fetus.

Throughout my life I've suffered with depression. I've been on medication to lessen its symptoms for almost 20 years. When depression creeps steathily over the horizon seeking to enter my soul, it is no respector of medication. It will have its say. Underneath the most insidious depression, still there is that fluttering. I know the heaviness is temporary because, though I may not easily quell depression, neither can I quell its sister, hope.

But I have not as yet been awash with grief. If I ever am, I may find these words ring hollow in the face of a pricey loss. God help me then as She has helped so many others before me.