Grieving the Injustice Suffered to Those Lost to Us

PEERING into an image of my deceased son held by his mother in her hospital bed, the Lord showed me a fresh vision: a substantial grief is experienced by those of us left behind because we sense the vast injustice that has been done to the one lost to us. In the case of Nathanael he not only missed out on a whole lifetime of knowing his mother and father’s love, he missed out on a chance of ‘heroic’ medical intervention because he was given up due to his syndrome.

In this world, he experienced great injustice despite the fact he never lived outside the womb.

Your grief may possibly cause you to reflect on the injustice suffered by your loved one. Taken far too early, under unfair circumstances, possibly in great pain, without the ability to say a proper goodbye, within a variety of other reasons, loss is lasting. The fact we can no longer commune with our lost loved one is the finalising grief.

As I peered into Nathanael’s beautiful little face, a face at peace, I wondered what he had to go through to get there. I wondered if I would ever see him again. And then I missed him, again. That ache of my heart returned. His experience of injustice is also mine. I have missed out on him. He has missed out on me. Yet I have those four children who remain, as we pray for another.

Because our loved ones are lost to us we suffer an injustice that has no solution other than acceptance. And acceptance stands as its own mystery, the foretaste of which we experience temporally.

We get caught between death and life. We begin to think kindly about our ultimate destination, but there is still so much keeping us here. We are stuck in the past when we had them with us. Anything for five minutes or a day as it was.

Despite recognition of the injustice meted out to us and those of us remaining, we hurt more for the injustice and finality of the one lost.

God, make of this injustice a justice that redeems justice from injustice. God, help soften our hearts past the injustice into acceptance. God, help us to accept the injustice in faith that justice will one day come and make things as they were intended to be. AMEN.

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Loss is about injustice, myriad injustice. There is an injustice in grief because of what was lost. Injustice that cannot be reconciled in loss leads to an ethereal conundrum: grief. Grief ends in acceptance, but not before we wrestle with the injustice of loss.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.