Good Grief
Trains, Glaciers and Abiding Love
When I was in college, I was invited to a family wedding in Memphis. The wedding was just before exams for the semester, so I decided to take Amtrak so I could study on the journey. It was an adventure. I boarded in Hammond, Louisiana, and rode The City of New Orleans on my way toward the city of Blues. Somewhere along the journey, but still inside Louisiana, a train further along the track derailed. It delayed us for hours. I remember sitting in the middle of a swamp wondering if we would ever get to Memphis. I studied for a while, explored the train, and joined in conversations with other passengers. Eventually, I gathered with other passengers when the staff broke out cases of beer in the café car to help resolve the tension of the delay. The train staff took care of us, and we finally made it to our destination. That’s the thing about trains—eventually they move forward again.
The collective atmosphere was the perfect Louisiana gumbo. I encountered frustrated passengers and the train staff that were exasperated by them. I met interesting characters who were probably better suited to the days of steamships and Mark Twain. I remember praying that the air conditioning would keep working because a Louisiana swamp is not a place you want to hang out when it is hot.
My own experience of the day was enlightening. I learned more about the extent of my patience, and I developed a lifelong habit of packing water and snacks for any journey. I learned that I truly love train travel, but that Amtrak belongs in the same era as the steamships and Samuel Clemens. Eventually I was resigned to the unfolding experience.
Every year, during the first week of August, my mind drifts back to the journey on that train. As my spirit revisits the memory of one particular moment in my life and ministry, I am drawn again to consider how our lives can be like the journey on the City of New Orleans.
I also remember the feeling of delay—how the unknown created anxiety and frustration, how the boredom seeped in, and how I had too much time to study. In retrospect, I think the journey was teaching me how to resolve my own frustrations and how to process moments in life that have suddenly gone off the track.
The memory of that journey remains fresh in my mind as I consider what the train teaches us about life. The train always moves forward, it continues along the track, it seeks to complete its journey, and when delayed it maintains its desire to arrive.
I have come to understand what that particular train ride has done to give me some of the tools to make sense of a moment in life that transformed every single thing that followed.
Grief affects all of us, and it affects all of us in different ways. Sure, the basic building blocks are the same—but every single one of us encounters moments of grief influenced by both the magnitude of the loss and the state we are already experiencing at the time. Complicating things further, every experience of grief we encounter risks revealing the cumulative effect of past grief. Like the train, the process of exploring grief deposits us somewhere along a journey toward healing but we often find that we have not progressed very far on the journey of a past encounter with grief. That was the case with me, as I was still working to make sense of my time in mortuary affairs—a journey that even now continues. And I found myself dropped into an experience of grief unlike that deployment but even more immense.
The experience of new loss—however that presents—has a way of returning us immediately to the moment of a past grief. For me, the magnitude of loss in that August immediately ripped off the bandaid of mortuary affairs that I was so carefully and diligently maintaining. It exposed for me just how deep the journey can be and how much further I still need to go just to find something approximating normal.
Grief is a part of the human condition. In many ways it is life’s attempt to heal loss and fill in the absence created through that loss.
No matter where I have found myself engaging grief in the lives of the people I have encountered, the concept of closure is never far from the surface. We seem to have created a cultural norm that defines closure as the ultimate goal of grief. I have, however, found that closure is a fleeting concept—that truth be told—closure is an ideal that we never fully realize.
It’s understandable why we have spent so much time developing this potential outcome. Grief hurts. It immediately shifts us from the day-to-day experiences of our life directly to the deepest parts of the valley of the shadows, inviting us to struggle deeply with both the journey through the valley and any number of paths that promise a route back to the summit.
On top of this reality, I have observed that people very much want to arrive in the mythical land of closure but simultaneously deny themselves permission to journey down the path because they conflate their own progress with the sense that they are being disloyal to the person lost.
At least in my own experience, and from what I’ve gleaned over thirty years of ministry, there is no such thing as closure per se. That is to say that we never arrive at a place where the grief is fully resolved and that we are restored to where we were before the loss. Instead, we are all transformed—the question is what we do through that transformation.
In my own life, I’ve encountered grief almost constantly. Some of that grief has been realized through the loss of family members, but it has been compounded by the loss of those I have served in ministry. And unlike many of my clergy colleagues, the losses I encounter are almost always the young instead of the aged. At least for me, this makes the burden different.
In time the weight of compounded grief has changed how I see and approach the world. It has made me increasingly introverted and isolated while also making me much more empathetic toward the needs of others, especially in crisis. I’ve also noticed an increasing desire to ensure that people receive just treatment in their lives—especially when they are beholden to a system that is designed to treat people equally but sometimes fails. These may seem like positive outcomes, but they have become intensified and as a result affect relationships in ways that I do not always perceive or understand. And at the same time, they have honed my pastoral care skills around death and dying such that it is my strongest skillset—I no longer walk into the presence of loss wondering what to do or say.
I’ve come to believe that grief follows a journey much like a train, but that it appears like a glacier: large, overwhelming, and multi-faceted. Sometimes it grows, sometimes it recedes, and on occasion it calves. The formation and recession of glaciers unfolds at a glacial pace. The same can be said of grief—nothing is fast, nothing is certain. But also, like glaciers, different processes can be occurring simultaneously—affecting different facets at different rates.
The ideal closest to the mythical concept of closure is the return of Joy to our lives. Joy polishes the facets of the glacier. I’ve come to believe that Joy is the closest thing to what I think people mean by closure. Grief can still be part of our lives, even if combined with a return to Joy.
Joy helps us move forward on the journey, but love is what makes it meaningful.
In the end, I believe love—abiding love—for the one we lost is the summit we are struggling to reach. It is where the train has always been heading. It is what happens when grief calves and abiding love remains.