Every person’s experience of grief is different, and the order in which our reactions take place, but it is possible for us all, I believe, to share some aspects of what has happened to us that will be of help to others. It is often a time of great pain that is not easily shared with everyone around us, and only those who have been deeply enveloped in grief’s shadow can listen and really understand.
I started writing some of my thoughts down, nearly 2 years after Pauline my wife died which still seems as near as yesterday. Sorting through old papers,cards, calendars and letters reminds me of so many fine things that we experienced together during almost 54 years that we were married. Thankfully Pauline had recently celebrated her 80th birthday, and there were no signs of serious illness, but two months later there was a minor stroke followed shortly afterwards by another.She was not able to speak, and in the late stages of ovarian cancer.
This all came as a great shock.
‘Viewing things from the other side.’
How different it is to write about bereavement after serving many years of ministry having taken over that time many hundreds of funerals, and now experiencing grief from the deeply personal hurting side!
Many friends who had been under my Ministry as a Methodist presbyter, wrote letters of condolence, expressing the hope that ‘I would receive the kind of support that I had tried to give to others’. I have been thankful for support both inside the church and from people in the community around me, but I also found it helpful to make notes on how I felt They are not in any particular order-simply dated as they have been written up. Many thoughts expressed are still in the process of evolving!
Grief hits us from many different directions.
Remorse sometimes comes like a heavy bombardment-firing at your failures to respond to your loved ones needs, your lack of sensitivity, blindness and indifference to needs that have been frequently mentioned, and promises unfulfilled.Grief can shake your very foundations, lowering your resistance, undermining your confidence, and it seems to last a long time.
Grief can snipe at you, catching you unawares, even in moments of heightened positive and pleasurable activities. In moments when grief hits, we need to lie low, if we can, and be thankful to God for the fact that he understands us, forgives,and helps us to see the frailty of our humanity, and the frailties of our loved ones too.
‘Father-like he tends and spares us,well our feeble frame he knows……’
Lord, in our times of bereavement, show us the way forward a day at a time. (12th of October 2016.)
Friedrich Nietzsche the philosopher was right when he said that a good marriage and friendship are closely related, but when we lose our partner there is the shattering of the marriage bond. CS Lewis compares bereavement to the losing of a limb, and the longer the marriage bond has been there, the harder the sense of loss is. The archaic language of the older marriage service says that ‘the twain shall become as one flesh,’ or others describe marriage as a glue, and death is often a painful tearing apart of people that have been devoted to each other.they have not always got things right over the years but to the best of their ability
In a long marriage,the physical bond, in other words, the sexual bond is as missed as desperately as the friendship is.this frequently leads into a complicated world of changing relationships, often with people whom we have known for a very long time.It is particularly true of our relationships with those of the opposite gender. We are now single people again and there can often be a kind of nervousness present in our conversations where the other person feels there are overtones on our part desiring intimacy with them which is more than just friendship. There can be confusing ‘signals’ which can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding,and a distancing of relationships which were previously quite close. (to be continued.
Some married couples cannot cope with us on our own, and we might feel very strange ourselves being ‘on our own.’ Withdrawal however, from social life in the long run, very quickly creates a situation where ‘we turn in’ on ourselves,which can rapidly lead many to feeling depressed and under the weather all the time, often undermining our state of health.
