Enduring the stormy seas of a common grief

At a nonchalant time when we weren’t in a pandemic, I had a common morning experience of grief.  Not a depression.  A grief.  I would arrive at work — a port authority — and closet myself in my site office and get through emails before meeting a crowd of 12-20 burly tradesmen to give them a safety and health induction to the port.  I did this three mornings a week, from 0700hrs, eventually arriving at my office at the main part of the port at about 0930hrs.  I did a couple of hundred of these induction sessions.  And almost every time I had the same sinking feeling as I gazed out the lonely large window over the often dark and gloomy Indian Ocean view.

It was always the same solemn sense of cosmic aloneness, but with it a semblance of reluctant faith.  I hated feeling that way, but I felt it so many times I learned to tolerate it.

“When hope is deferred the heart grows sick,” it says in Proverbs 13:12A.  That’s what I had.

But not just that; I had some assurance that eventually fortune would turn.  Part B of this proverb is, “... but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

I cannot tell you how much fear coursed through me in those fleeting private moments when I was leading a room full of compliant men through their training.  None of them knew.  It would be little things like their birthdates and other details on their identification that would trigger reminiscences of a life that I’d lost.

So many moments exactly the same in the dimensions of grief, and yet within each one the tiny echo of the Spirit of God, “Do not grow weary in doing good, for a the right time you will reap a harvest if you do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

I was in that place for the better part of 18-24 months.  It never left me completely.  It was always there lurking.  And yet I had no way of giving up.  My only chance was faith.

What we’re all facing right now is a blend of anxiety and ambiguous grief.

The fact that we’re all at war with a common yet invisible nemesis is something we cannot escape from.  We wake to the same nightmare each morning, and yet like the shifting sands under a house above the tsunami, we have no steady base; what seems bad enough already is bound to get worse.  We know this, but somehow it seems unbelievable.

Even though we’re grieving, it’s abysmally disconcerting, because the full force of it hasn’t hit yet.  It doesn’t seem real.  Yet, that’s what grief is like, and we’re all experiencing it on a common scale.

As we endure these days together, we will doubt that we’ll get through them, or maybe we know we’ll get through them.  We can endure this grief if we know we’ll get through.  We can get through if we know we’ll endure.  So, endure.

We will get through this storm.  But it won’t be without unparalleled loss, and these times will have the effect that they will change us.  We can choose to resent what changed us or be thankful we survived.

We do not endure significant grief without being significantly changed.  The key task of grief is to learn to accept what we cannot change.

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash