Last night, Emma and I (Scott) were processing the last year and a half and the loss that we have experienced and the people and places that we miss. As much as we would love to avoid loss, it is an inescapable, inevitable reality. The absence of a person or a place can at times be gut-wrenching and infused with sorrow. At other times, it may usher in a warm memory of a better season. Grief can be such a confusing thing. There are some nights when I lay awake wrestling with the past in my mind. As much as I yearn for silence, I often have to put on a podcast or music to drown out the internal dialogue.
The hardships of the past, the loss and grief that we experience, can often feel like an impassable, immovable obstacle. The easy path is to throw in the towel and dwell in the past. It is often hard to see hope or purpose beyond what lies in the past and therefore current circumstances. As much as we might like to escape, the reality is that it is inescapable. The novel Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry (which I consider to be one of the greatest books ever written), is the autobiographical life story of a man named Jayber Crow who embarks on an exploration and reflection of all the stuff that life is comprised of. His thoughts on grief are as follows;
“New grief,
when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”
I think that there is something profound in this.
Friend, your past, your grief, your loss, do not define you.
It is formative.
It does shape you however, it does not have the final word.
Your story has not reached its conclusion.
This is something that I often must remind myself of. I can’t help but think of the movie What About Bob? (which I consider to be one of the greatest films ever made) and the self-help path of “baby steps” that the psychiatrist Dr. Leo Marvin sets his patient, Bob Wiley on. We must move forward.
We can move forward, one “baby step” at a time.