Richer
for the Sorrow
Elaine
Rockwell andRev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
5/29/05
“Doesn’t
everything die at last and too soon? Tell
me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild
and precious life.” – Mary Oliver, from “The
Summer Day”
Reading
Excerpt
from All the Little Live Things by
Wallace Stegner
This
morning’s reading is a passage from a novel by
Wallace Stegner entitled All the Little Live
Things. The narrator is
a crusty guy who, after enduring neighborly
disagreements with the young mother next door,
finds himself distraught with grief over her
untimely death. In this passage, he begins by
recalling something the woman said to him before
she died.
[She
had said…] You wondered what was in whale's
milk. Now you know. Think of the
force down there, just telling things to get
born, just to be!
I
had no answer for her then. Now I might
have one. Yes, think of it, I might
say. And think of how random and
indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we
must submit, think how impossible it is to
control or direct it. Think how often
beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by
weeds. Think how endless and dubious is
the progress from weed to flower...
Think
of the force of life, yes, but think of the
component of darkness in it. One of the things
that's in whale's milk is the promise of pain
and death.
And
so? Admitting what is so obvious, what
then? Would I wipe…[her] out of my
unperfected consciousness if I could?
Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to
escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I
go back to my own formula, which was twilight
sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?
Not
for a moment. And so even in the gnashing
of my teeth I acknowledge my conversion.
It turns out to be for me as I once told her it
would be for her daughter. I shall be
richer all my life for this sorrow.
Reflection
from member Elaine Rockwell
“Think
of the force of life, yes, but think of the
component of darkness in it…the promise
of pain and death.” Stegner
Three
years ago, when my husband Al died after five
years of steadily declining health, I attended a
series of classes sponsored by Central Iowa
Hospice entitled “Growing Through Grief.”
They asked us to consider the question:
“What
is the worst kind of grief?”
What
IS the worst kind of grief?
Is
it the loss of a mother or a father?
The
loss of a child?
The
loss of a sibling or a friend or a confidant?
The
loss of a spouse to death or divorce?
The
loss of your health?
The
loss of a job?
The
loss of a beloved pet?
“The
worst kind of grief,” they said, “is yours.”
YOUR
grief.
YOUR
grief, YOUR loss is the very worst kind
of grief.
I
am humbled this morning that Mark has asked me
to share some reflections on this subject,
knowing that each of us has our own well
of sorrows, that any one of
us can speak to this subject with equal
– and ever-increasing – authority.
In
many ways, it was grief that brought me here in
1989 when my 13-year-old godson, Michael, was
struck and killed crossing a busy street in his
hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.
It
was the first time in my 37 years that someone I
had loved with all my heart had died. It was a
shocking and life-altering event.
I
was beside myself. I didn’t know what to do
with the immensity of that loss.
Among other things, losing Michael caused me to
realize I had lived for many years with no
spiritual home, and no community to turn to for
solace, compassion or support.
I
remember consciously thinking that I never
wanted to be so alone with such loss
again. I began to search for a church that I
could accept theologically, and which could
offer me something of the feeling of community I
had known in the small country church of my
childhood. That was 1989. I am still here.
Experts
say that engaging in learning activities is one
way adults cope with life events and
transitions. Studies have shown that more
learning happens in periods people perceive
as good times (about 10 times as much
learning); even so, they say, it is the bad
times in which learning is more likely to
be transformative – the difference
between incremental progress and quantum
leaps of change.
In
preparing to share these thoughts today, I have
reflected on what I have learned as a result of
sorrow and loss, what learning has been
incremental, what learning has been
transformational.
As
I said, Al died following a lengthy illness. His
death was not unexpected, so I thought I knew
what it would mean. After all, every biography I’d
ever read had treated death as a piece of
factual information couched in terms like this:
“and his wife died in 1953. So he moved to
California and blah blah blah life went on.”
Therefore,
when the time came, I expected I would “do the
next thing, whatever that was” and life would
go “on.” I did not understand that I would
enter a period of Humpty Dumpty living when all
the kings horses and all the kings men could not
even find all the pieces again. And there
was no global positioning system to tell me
where “ON” IS, as in “MOVING ON”.
One
of the first things I learned was that grief is
like a new full-time job. There is “grief work”
to be done and you can either do it now, or look
up months or years later and find it very
inconvenient to have to stop and do it then.
Another thing I learned is, with each new loss,
a separate and parallel process of grieving
begins, triggering a recurrence of any
unresolved losses.
Taking
in the magnitude of loss was an ongoing
challenge – it was the little things that were
so large.
-
I had
been Al’s primary caregiver. All of a
sudden, there was no structure to my days.
For several months I comforted myself by doing
the small things he had always done each day –
getting the morning paper in from the front
porch, making the coffee, checking the
obituaries, responding aloud and arguing
vigorously with the opinions expressed on the
editorial pages.
-
Al was
always the one who dealt with the physical world.
All of a sudden I had to deal with the house all
by myself. One Thursday at 5 o’clock in
the morning, eight months after Al’s death, I
was awakened by thunder and the sound of water
cascading over the eaves trough onto the patio,
splashing and crashing like Niagara Falls. In
our nearly 20 years of marriage the patio drain
had never plugged up – because he had always
swept up the leaves. As I scurried outside in
the near dark, standing in six inches of water,
reaching down into the drain to pull out the
sludge in the midst of the downpour, I was
suddenly filled with irrational fury. How
dare he leave me with all of these
problems?
To
say the least, it was a disorienting time for
many months. In all of the reading I have done
about grief since Al died -- and I have done A
LOT OF READING -- I have read over and
over that it is normal to be crazy
in response to significant loss.
Actress
Helen Hayes, after the death of her husband,
said: “I was just as crazy as you can
be and still be at large. I didn’t
have any really normal minutes during those two
years. It wasn’t just grief, it was total
confusion. I was nutty.”
Studies
have been done that rank the various kinds of
losses according to how much stress each may
cause. Losing a spouse is invariably NUMBER 1 on
all these scales.
Having
scored at the top of the Richter scale of grief
gave me the illusion that I was somehow immune
from any other bad thing happening: I told
myself I would sit with my grief awhile, get
over it and go on to a pain-free life.
Nothing
could have been further from reality. There was
a compendium of new griefs waiting in the wings
for me, like so many jets endlessly circling O’Hare
airport. During the three years since Al’s
death:
-
My
mother suffered a debilitating stroke and now
lives in a nursing home.
-
My
great Aunt Helen who was my dearest friend, the
person in my life with whom I had always felt
unconditional love; the one person in my life
with whom I had maintained a monthly, 30-year
correspondence died at age 92.
-
My
brother Mike’s companion Dianna died suddenly
last September of a brain aneurysm at age 47.
-
And
hardest of all to bear, my 21-year-old niece
Mary, died in a traffic accident this past
December. She is the second of my brother Mike’s
three children to die, and the second death he
has had to absorb in a three-month period. She
was the darling of my heart since the first time
she toddled across my kitchen floor. And she was
Al’s favorite of my seven nieces.
In
the midst of these, at times, crushing
losses, how can I begin to say I am “richer
for the sorrow?” And yet, I believe it is
true, however conflicted. I am flooded with a
feeling of strange gratitude in the face of each
of these traumas.
One
of the gifts of my mother’s stroke is a deeper understanding
of and compassion for my mother. The stroke has
left her with some limits on her ability to
speak in sensible sentences and understand what
is going on around her. My friend Brent and I
went to visit Mom and Dad on Mother’s Day, and
we were touched by the considerate things the
nurses had done to prepare her to go out to
lunch. When we arrived, she had had her hair
done, she was dressed in the bright and colorful
outfit that I had sent her for Christmas, and,
to me the most touching, they had given her a
manicure and painted her nails a pale,
translucent pink. For a woman whose working life
had been spent alongside my dad doing rough and
dirty farm chores, this small detail was a
poignant kindness.
One
of the gifts of losing my great aunt Helen was spending the
week before her death at her bedside with my
cousin and lifelong friend Leann, and,
afterward, helping Leann and her brother Pete go
through Aunt Helen’s things, retelling stories
of raucous times we had together as children.
Seeing each other in these older bodies, but
seeing ourselves as children still. Among her
things we found many of the cards and letters I
had sent her over the years, saved and reread
during the long lonely winters of her later
years on the farm.
One
of the gifts of losing Mike’s companion Dianna was that I
went to South Carolina in September and had
important time then with my niece Mary…Time in
which we reconnected and talked about her many
visits to Des Moines over the years, talked
about the one big fight we ever had and how mad
she was at me about that for a long time, and
talked about the difficulties she was facing as
she was going through a divorce. And another gift
from Dianna, my heart broke open in an
entirely new way in compassion for my brother,
as the two of us became a kind of club which we
would rather not have joined.
One
of the gifts of losing Mike’s daughter Mary has been the
realization that we made the very most of every
single opportunity we had in which to be
together over the years. I never doubted that
she loved me, she never doubted that I loved
her.
Oprah
Winfrey writes a monthly column in O, the Oprah
Magazine, entitled “What I know for sure.”
Since Al’s death, I would be hard pressed to
fill even one paragraph to fit that heading. It
seems I know less for sure all the time. In the
interest of full disclosure, I should be wearing
a T-shirt that says “Don’t follow me, I’m
lost.”
This
is the most paradoxical of the gifts
I have found from knowing grief. I know less for
sure all the time. I am less likely to be
convinced that there is only one right
way, only one answer, only one
best possible outcome, only one way to
grieve.
I
am at long last more tolerant of ambiguity…what
Eastern philosophers call “living with the
questions.” And, strangely, the ability to
tolerate ambiguity is one of the characteristics
of resilience, one of the qualities that
experts say is a critical factor in deflecting
the negative impacts of stress, maintaining
health – even surviving.
“The
world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote, “and
afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
That may be true, but it’s just as likely to
be true that many are broken forever.
I
have found strength from many sources including
a book written in 1986 by Judith Viorst. The
book is “Necessary Losses: The Loves,
Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible
Expectations that all of us have to Give Up in
order to Grow.”
She
says we have three CHOICES when someone we love
dies:
1)
to die when they die;
2)
to live crippled; OR
3)
to forge out of pain and memory new adaptations.
“Through
mourning, we acknowledge that pain, feel that
pain, live past it.
Through
mourning, we let the dead go and take them in.
Through
mourning we come to accept the difficult changes
that loss must bring – and then
we begin to come to the end of
mourning.”
“Would
I forego the pleasure of her company to escape
the bleakness of her loss?” Stegner asked. In
the end he concluded: “I shall be richer all
my life for this sorrow.” It’s a beautiful
piece of literary writing and falls poetically
on my ear as I read it aloud.
Maybe
I’ve “grown through grief.” I would gladly
give up these new-found learnings to still have
those I’ve loved and lost present to me.
Even
so, in the end, I believe Shakespeare was right.
It is a better thing to have loved and lost than
never to have loved at all.
Bittersweet,
but a better thing. Maybe, even, richer
for the sorrow.
When
I am asked
how
I began writing poems,
I
talk about the indifference of nature.
It
was soon after my mother died,
a
brilliant June day,
everything
blooming.
I
sat on a gray stone bench
in
a lovingly planted garden,
but
the daylilies were as deaf
as
the ears of drunken sleepers
and
the roses curved inward.
Nothing
was black or broken
and
not a leaf fell
and
the sun blared endless commercials
for
summer holidays.
I
sat on the gray stone bench
ringed
with the ingénue faces
of
pink and white impatiens
and
placed my grief
in
the mouth of language,
the
only thing that would grieve with me.
In
this way, my mother’s untimely death became
more than a poignant plot twist in the story of
my life. It actually opened me to what it
means to be human…a finite creature with
access to a world of experiences, some joyful,
some painful, but all part of a greater story
that we share by nature of our very
humanity. Eventually I came to see
that my mother’s death had offered me wisdom
that actually led me deeper into my life rather
than away from it.