What only grief and grieving can teach about time and tears

“Time is a season of the heart.
Only heaven knows how to measure it.
The tears of this season are precious and saved by our Saviour until you are reunited again.”
—Deb Hudson

There is a thing coming back into view in the context of recent loss.

The thing is the value of tears and the process of time in grief and grieving.  Now, these are two things, grief and grieving, for grief is what all who face loss experience, but grieving is a choice to enter in upon that grief, to transact with it, to be transformed by it.  That said, let’s now imagine the value in grieving our grief — of going there in faith knowing it is not only right to remember but that it is healing to do so.  Healing one entry at a time — as each entrance to the truth of grief is made, to allow ourselves to be swept up in the sorrow of it.  I understand.  That takes a lot of trust.

First, let’s take heed of the eternal wisdom nested in Deb Hudson’s quote.

Read that quote and embellish it on the soul for a moment.  Ruminate.  Crystallise it.  Ponder its meaning.  Ask the Lord to take you deeper into it.

Certainly, the Lord keeps our tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8).  Our God wastes not one drop.

One of the enigmas about grief is the myth of closure.  I say it’s a myth because time doesn’t heal all wounds.  Time might lead to acceptance, but time doesn’t reconcile the matter of the missingness in loss.  We might get used to living without a person we’ve lost, but we will never stop missing them.  Even when something happens to make their loss a little or a lot more palatable.  I think that’s why time is a season of the heart, and that only heaven knows how to measure it.  Concepts of time within grief are an unsolvable conundrum to us.

The mysteries of time are only unpacked and more fully understood in the eternal realm.

There is a paradox to be known in the dimension of time in juxtaposing it between it being a reality here, yet a concept only unpacked in heaven.  That paradox is we only experience healing for what can heal us here, and we cannot escape the tyranny of that dimension of time that exhausts us — our missing them.  In heaven, all is resolved in the time conundrum.  Instantly.  As if time can even measure it there.

The paradox continues, however, as we dig deeply into that which threatens to tear us apart.  Those tears threaten to undo us to such a degree that we’d enter a sharply descending depression, inviting anxiety and panic attacks.  But tears also invite us into a truth-telling exercise that we, by faith alone, enter trusting that with each entering we advance upon the journey of healing just that little more.  Even though we do it hundreds of times and still feel we’re back at square one.

Healing is an intransigent thing.  It’s both a present-tense and a future-tense concept.  As we shed tears for the honouring of the truth in our missing and remembering, those tears of the lacrimal system provide the means to healing.  Tears heal our pain for that moment they’re shed, and ultimately tears are the way we traverse our grief each and every time pain rises up.

And for those who struggle to close the flood gates, my encouragement is to create space for a philosophy for sadness that allows curious exploration of the redemptive.  It’s about a core belief that healing is a possibility.  And I’ve never met a person who wants to give up on their belief for healing when they see hope.  Hope is the fuel for life and the motivator of faith.

~

Time and tears.  The initial quote heralds an eternal truth.  There are some tears that will never go away.  For us, they’re still there eight years later at times.  We’ll always miss Nathanael.  And for me, it’s Mum, too.  For 55 years and 24 days she was in my life.  But until it’s my time, I must journey without her.  But I journey with the sure knowledge that the best is still yet to come — my being there with them at the right time.

Some of those times of deep missing come back in a flash, as in a tsunami tide that washes over you no matter where you are.  Sorrow is no respecter of situation.

It doesn’t matter how much time has passed.  That sense of loss remains the same.  There, for the most part, is a sense of adjusting, of getting on with life, because you must.  But one moment is all it takes to be back there, missing that loved one, that former life, that way that life was and is no more.