Personal Note: Moving Past Grief

I've lost a lot of people over my lifetime.  It's the perils of living in a small town, I guess.  I've attended a lot of funerals, officiated a handful more, and dealt with grief both as a person trying to bring comfort to others and as the mourner.  It's a formidable life experience to deal with the nearness of death, to see someone close to you slip past the veil of life and into the "after," whatever your conception may be here.

Recently, I've dealt with a lot of this and had to preside over the services of those close to me.  Granted, they were people of a generation older than me, which allows me the distance of relative "youth."  It allows me the cool remove of "I have time," but that too is a lie, a trick of the mind to push away the reality of death.  So, lately, I've been thinking a lot about what comes next, what survives death for the living?  The answer to this is Hope.  Yep, captial "H" Hope is what I land on.  But where does one find it in the midst of darkness, in the throes of depression?  The answer is simple.

It is everywhere.

For the depressed and grieving, this may appear to be a snide remark, a flippant response by someone who doesn't understand the depths of his/her personal pain.  I know. I've been there.  As a young man, I dealt with a lot of darkness, a lot of personal pain, and it  effected me deeply.  It may be that those early experience wore against my heart like an ill-fitting shoe, leaving a callused patch of skin that now protects it, but I don't think so.  It is my firmly held belief that I chose my way out.  I chose the path I wanted to take out of the darkness and I've been becoming a better man ever since.

Hope is everywhere, but it is a matter of choosing.  Many people in the throes of grief plunge themselves backwards into the river of time.  They exist on the edge of memory, looking backwards toward the past, and because of this they are unable to sometimes experience the pleasures of the present, the promise of the future.  One way is to choose to turn your gaze.  This is a Herculean effort at first.  Shifting one's gaze toward the present, toward the future, sometimes feels like a treacherous act, an abandonment of the person we love, but it is far from that.  I've been reading the book "Dreams of Gods and Monsters" lately, the final book in a trilogy, and two of the characters keep bandying around the idea that the dead do not want vengeance from their survivors.  The survivors are the ones who want vengeance.  This caused me to think about my recent experiences with grief and some grievers who are close to me.

Photo courtesy of Linda Thomas

Here's my revision of the idea.  The dead do not want our tears, our grief.  They want our fond memories, a place in our hearts, and our enduring love, but, more than anything, they want our continued happiness.  In all of my experience with death, I've never met a dying soul who wanted anything more than that last piece.  I've lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, classmates, mentors, etc.  In all of those experiences, I've never known a one who wanted their loved ones to endure the prolonged pain that is grief.  Not one.

So, how do we find the hope?  How do we move past this stagnation of forward movement, of minutes ticking away from our own lives?  We choose to...tentatively at first.  We venture outside ourselves and choose to have one good visit.  One good afternoon with your child, your grandchild, a friend, a loved one of any stripe.  We get outside of ourselves and we invest in another.  This, for me, has often been the easiest way to move past grief.  Give yourself fully to another.  Invest in them, give them your time, attention, and help them to navigate whatever troubles they may be experiencing.  When I do this, when I reach out into my community, into my social circles, I typically get swept up into a current that draws me forward.

Photo courtesy of Jodi Sunitsch

As I get swept away, I begin to make connections to things outside of myself and my grief.  I begin to learn and discover new things.  I get surprised, which causes me to emit a bark of a laugh, a thing which is also a surprise and can sometimes set me backwards in my momentum because I feel that sense of shame that I am rediscovering joy in the face of my grief.  But, one laugh typically leads to another, which leads to another.  A friends laugh will remind me of my lost loved one, or something they say will stir a memory in me, and it will soon not be tainted with a sense of shame or guilt, but it will remind me that my loved ones would have sat right by me given the chance and they would have laughed just as long, or just as loud as I did.

Soon, my emotions shift from lamentations to celebrations.  When I remember my loved ones, I remember them fondly, which is usually accompanied by a story, and I start to tell the stories.  In this way, my loved ones get what they want, what I stated earlier.  They get my fond memories, they get a place in my heart, and they get my love.  In the end, I also get something too.  I get a new strength, a new way of moving forward, a new understanding of the beautiful bittersweet majesty that is a lived life.  I get this because they left me.  I get this because they loved me.  I get this because I loved them back, and I wouldn't trade that for any other material gift anyone could give me.

In this way, our grief is a gift, for it tempers us into a stronger version of ourselves, and that strength is built directly upon the life and memories of the people we had the courage and blessing enough to love.

Family Notes: Wayne Oliver

Today finds me making another post to commemorate someone lost within my community.  My Uncle Wayne passed away suddenly this week.  It's stunned me into silence over the last couple of days.

I'm sorry if my blog is beginning to feel like a memorial page, but I process grief through words. Sometimes, it's all I have. When I'm face to face with people, I don't know what to say or how to act, but, somehow, when I sit in front of a computer screen and let my fingers dance across the keys, I find a way to say something. There's a lot to say about my uncle, too much to say here, but I wanted to capture a couple of things about him that are important to me personally.

My uncle Wayne, or Wayne O, was a formidable man. He was a successful businessman, a community presence in both local organizations and government, he was a baseball father figure to more people than I can possible comprehend, and he was a loving uncle, father and husband. These are his résumé bullet points, the place we begin when we discuss a life, but there are details underneath these facts that make them poignant, as there are with any life.

How do you sum up a man like Wayne?

You don't.  There are too many aspects about him that need attention, that deserve time and words, but I don't have the energy to do it all.  The one thing I can say about Wayne is that I love him and I respect him.  The reason for this is because Wayne never asked me for either of those things.  Many people, once they achieve success, power, or notoriety, can fall victim to their own press, to their own accolades.  This wasn't true of my uncle.  In sports, they call it showboating.  Wayne was not a showboater.  He was the consummate workhorse when it came to almost every aspect of his life.  He didn't rest on his laurels, he didn't rely on his talents, but, instead, he worked for the things he had and he didn't ask a single other person to recognize him for it.

Knute Rockne is quoted as having said, "One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than 50 preaching it." I can't think of anyone in my life who embodied this more than my uncle.  He lived to be a good sportsman.  In fact, my brother just told me the other day that Wayne was the only coach who ever benched him for a bad attitude.  It was during a baseball game and he benched him defensively in the middle of an inning.  Anyone who has ever played baseball knows how big a deal that is.  Wayne couldn't tolerate bad sportsmanship.  And, like Knute Rockne indicated, his life served as an example to the rest of us.  We'll miss you, Wayne.  We'll miss your example.  We'll miss your humor, but we'll never let go of your example.  You've coached us well.