This essay is a product of the Collegeville Institute’s Emerging Writers Mentorship Program, a 9-month program for writers who address matters of faith in their work. Each participant has had the opportunity to publish their work at Bearings Online. Click here to read essays from Emerging Writers Program participants.
As this past March rolled around, I felt a heaviness in my body I couldn’t understand. Signs of spring were all around me: the daylight longer, the sun warmer, the birds singing in the early morning. The slushy gray of our late New England winter would be over soon. I should feel lighter, I thought. Then I remembered: it was in March of 2020 that our country and our world were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, thousands of people were dying each week, isolated from family and friends while those of us not called to serve on the front lines of the pandemic hunkered down in our bubbles.
Three years later, equipped with vaccines, treatments, and a better understanding of the virus, we have returned to living something closer to our pre-pandemic lives. Yet in the span of those three years, over a million people in our country and over seven million people around the world died of Covid. The heaviness I felt was grief. Even as I, like most people around me, was moving on, my body remembered the magnitude of the loss.
In my office, I have two shelves devoted to books about grief. Each of them defines grief as the profound loss of someone or something we love, causing emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual suffering. They detail in different ways the complexities of navigating these layers of suffering as grief challenges our trust in life, our belief in God, and our understanding of who we are. But two works, The Wild Edge of Sorrow and In the Absence of the Ordinary by psychotherapist Francis Weller, offer a unique and expansive approach that demonstrates that grief is integral to being human.
Grief is more than an emotion; it is also a faculty of being human. — Francis Weller
Weller calls grief “an apprenticeship with sorrow,” a pilgrimage of the soul that every one of us undergoes in our lifetime. While the experiences of losses themselves are heartbreaking, even traumatic in the moment, grief extends long past mourning. Weller writes: “Grief is more than an emotion; it is also a faculty of being human. It is a skill that must be developed, or we will find ourselves migrating to the margins of our lives in hopes of avoiding the inevitable entanglements with loss. It is through rites of grief that we are ripened as human beings.”
Weller studied other cultures, particularly indigenous ones, and found that they understand the rites of grief to be a responsibility of the community. In the villages of the traditional peoples he visited, everyone participated in offering sacred time and space for those who were grieving, allowing their losses to be acknowledged, witnessed, and woven into the fabric of the living. In these cultures, grieving is understood not as something that people must get over to be productive members of society, but rather as a rite of passage that grants honor to those who undergo its apprenticeship. Those who grieve are valued for their wisdom and their experience of what it means to live meaningful lives even after death or deep loss, understanding intimately how grief makes us human.
Grief is a responsibility of the community. — Francis Weller
In modern Western society, we have made grief the responsibility of the individual who bears it. Mourners are expected to work through the recognized stages of grief, find acceptance and closure, let go of their loss, and return to “normal” as soon as possible. If they continue to struggle, well, we offer therapists, grief support groups, and medications to help them, as if grief is a personal problem or failure rather than a natural and appropriate response to loss. Grief, we too often believe, can be worked through in chronological rather than sacred time. But it can’t. Grief will continue to make itself felt. If we do not develop the faculty and the skills to make it part of our living, it can deaden parts of our bodies and our spirits. It can come out sideways and hurt us or others around us.
photo of Vietnam War Memorial by Robert Linder for unsplash
I lived in the Washington, DC, area for fourteen years, and in that time, I would often visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Although I had no personal connection to any of the more than 58,000 names listed on the wall, I felt drawn to it. I found it powerful and haunting. I remember the shiny, black granite emerging slowly out of the ground, beginning at my feet. As I walked down the gentle slope of the brick pathway, each of the wall’s panels would rise higher than its neighbor until I reached the center. There the wall towered over and surrounded me with thousands of names of the war’s dead, etched in matte gray against the reflective black. I could only begin to grasp the enormity of the grief contained here: the violence of war ending not only these people’s lives but the futures they would have otherwise had. I felt the grief of people in Vietnam whose names we will never know, their lives, homes, and communities destroyed. No wonder it took years for the memorial to be built, controversial as it was, in a country that wanted to move on from the brutal and contentious war that divided us.
On every visit, I saw people touching the names of those they knew, and crying, praying, or making a rubbing with tracing paper and charcoal. I saw the array of gifts left on the ground: boots, dog tags, flowers, letters, and poems in Ziploc baggies, cigarettes and lighters, teddy bears, and baseball caps, all offerings of love and memory left as tangible connections to loved ones lost. Each one of these names once belonged to someone—a brother, father, son, husband, sweetheart, friend, or comrade. I was grateful to experience the wall as a living memorial. The wall provides a sacred ground, a container to hold the release of individual and communal grief. Even when no one is alive who remembers these particular war dead, the memorial will exist as it is often described, a scar on our national body.
Grief’s challenge and gift is its reminder that we human beings abide in sacred as well as chronological time.
While we lived divided about how to respond to the pandemic, a million people died in three years in our country. This May, the U.S. Government and the World Health Organization declared an end to Covid-19 as a public health emergency. It is also the month we set aside a day to honor those who served our country and died in the line of duty. On today, Memorial Day, memories of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial make me wonder how we might metabolize the grief of the pandemic in sacred, tangible ways. Grief’s challenge and gift is its reminder that we human beings abide in sacred as well as chronological time. Each of us will experience the sadness and anguish of the inevitable losses in our lives in our own way and at our own pace. We will live with the scars, seen and unseen. But we can, as a people, become more skilled in the rites of grief, allowing grief to deepen our connection rather than divide us.
Like this post? Subscribe to have new posts sent to you by email the same day they are posted.
Wow. I hadn’t thought any of “this” had to do with grief. Or the pandemic. Thank you for writing and sharing this beautifully written reflection.
Thank you, beautifully written. You moved me to tears. You are right…we are communally applying our “get over it” approach to grief to the pandemic as a whole. Those of us who have experienced loss know that does not work.