Readings: The first of two readings is from Companion Through the Darkness by Stephanie Ericsson. This book is a journal of Ericsson's experiences after her husband suddenly died while she was pregnant with their only child.
 

What is there to say about grief?
Grief is a tidal wave that overtakes you, smashes you up into its darkness, where you tumble and crash against unidentifiable surfaces, only to be thrown out on an unknown beach, bruised, reshaped.
Grief means not being able to read more than two sentences at a time. It is walking into rooms with intention that suddenly vanishes.
Grief is three-o'clock-in-the-morning sweats that won't stop. It is dreadful Sundays, and Mondays that are no better. It makes you look for a face in a crowd, knowing full well the face we want cannot be found in that crowd.
Grief is utter aloneness that razes the rational mind and makes room for the phantasmagoric. It makes you suddenly get up and leave in the middle of a meeting, without saying a word.
Grief makes what others think of you moot. It shears away the masks of normal life and forces brutal honesty out of your mouth before propriety can stop you. It shoves away friends, scares away so-called friends, and rewrites your address book for you.
Grief makes you laugh at people who cry over spilled milk, right to their faces. It tells the world that you are untouchable at the very moment when touch is the only contact that might reach you. It makes lepers out of upstanding citizens.
Grief discriminates against no one. It kills. Maims. And cripples. It is the ashes from which the phoenix rises, and the mettle of rebirth. It returns life to the living dead. It teaches that there is nothing absolutely true or untrue. It assures the living that we know nothing for certain. It humbles. It shrouds. It blackens. It enlightens.
Grief will make a new person out of you, if it doesn't kill you in the making.[1]

"The Five Stages of Grief" by Linda Pastan
The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast--
you sat there. I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing,
though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.[2]

I opened the first sermon of the series with the story about the the Buddha and the woman carrying her dead baby. The story illustrates the universality of loss and grief. Every human experiences loss and grief. I spent a year working in a drug and alcohol treatment center. I always found it somewhat ridiculous that I was asked to diagnose which addicts and alcoholics had grief issues. Who doesn't have grief issues? Show me an alcoholic or addict in particular who doesn't have a grief issue! All of us human beings experience grief all of the time. Any time there's a change in life, we experience grief: leaving a job, graduating from school, moving to a new apartment or house, giving a favorite but worn pair of pants to St. Vinnie's, a hamster dying, our twenty-year-old cat being put to sleep, a grandfather dying, the old woman next door dying, a divorce.

Some griefs are tougher than others, depending on who we are and on the relationship we had with the lost object or person. Some griefs can completely shatter our life, leaving us feeling as our life is lying in a thousand random pieces on the floor. The death of a child can certainly do this--usually does it, really--partly because it feels unnatural: I'm supposed to die before my kids, right? Death may not be a friendly companion, but it does have a natural order about it: the older die before the younger. Right? Not necessarily! The death of a child reveals the harsh truth: death really has no natural order other than the one rule that everyone, sooner or later will die. When a child dies, we also face saying good-bye to a lifetime of dreams we had for him or her. The death of a parent often brings tough, sometimes shattering grief, causing us at whatever age to feel somehow alone and cut loose in the world. The death of a parent often brings up a jumble of feelings since most of us struggled for years to cut ourselves loose from Mom or Dad. The death of a life partner, especially at a young age, brings tough grief. Feelings of abandonment and loneliness and unfulfilled dreams are common. I know that several people in our Fellowship are living through the grief that comes when a sibling dies--especially a sibling who dies at a young age. This is another tough grief. Grief over a divorce is tough, partly because it lacks the finality of death and because usually a sense of failure is mixed in. There are countless other griefs that are tough, too. Today I'm going to focus on grief over deaths, but I want to acknowledge that there are many other things we grieve over.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has done more than anyone else in recent memory to refocus the Western mind and imagination on death. Her pioneering work charts many of the characteristics and stages of grief. The trouble with her work is that too many people have made an idol of it. Here are the stages of grief: first there's denial, then anger, followed by bargaining. Then there's depression, and, finally, acceptance. That's how grief works. You proceed through them linearly, like driving from Chicago to Appleton. You take 294, then 94, then 894 around Milwaukee. Follow the signs to Fond du Lac, and from there it's easy: just stay on 41. Presto, you're in Appleton! You can't miss it! This interpretation is probably not fair to Kubler-Ross: she didn't ask or expect her followers to make her words a nearly scriptural description of grief. Furthermore, she focused her research on dying people who knew they were dying. Theirs is a specific kind of grief, and I don't know that Kubler-Ross wanted or expected people to make the grief of dying who know they are dying to be the universal experience of death and grief.

As the poem I read by Linda Pastan suggests, grief is not typically a linear process. Though there are commonalties in the process, each person's grief journey is unique. How each person responds to each specific loss is unique. No one's grief is like anyone else's.

The grief journey is more like being completely lost without a map than following the map from Chicago to Appleton. Grief is being lost and not knowing for sure even what your destination is. Grief is more chaotic than organized and orderly,[3] more circular than linear. Ericsson defines the disorientation of grief this way: it is the place that "exists somewhere between the past and present, but surely isn't between freeway exits...[The bereaved] are strangers in a strange land without a road map."[4]  Worse, there's no guarantee of safe return,[5] and no limitation on how long you'll be lost. Grief doesn't take exactly 365 days to work through. There's no time limit. The only guarantee in significant grief is that you won't get back to the place you started. You can't go back to what was. That's the nature of grief.

There are not any obvious signposts to help you find your way, either. Each grieving person has to find her or his own way. Though hopefully you will have helping hands, other people can't do it for you. Maybe, though, the characteristics of grief are signposts. Yes, you're lost. Yes, it's completely unfamiliar. But these emotions you're feeling--other grieving and lost souls have had similar emotions. You're alone, but you're not alone. The greatest value of Kubler-Ross's and others' work on grief might be that they have named some of the signposts.

A couple signposts Kubler-Ross has concentrated on are shock and its first cousin denial. Shock and denial are often our initial responses to significant losses--especially losses that hit suddenly and ferociously. Shock and denial are good things: confronted with significant losses, our bodies, souls and minds can't possibly absorb the whole reality all at once. It's too much. Shock and denial give us time to absorb the reality piece by tiny piece. Though usually temporary states, shock and denial can hit again and again. Again, it's not usually linear. Instead, shock and especially denial come back in waves. One moment we comprehend the reality of our spouse's death six months ago, and the next we're shaking our heads muttering, "I still can't believe she's gone." Denial gives us time over the long haul to absorb the reality of loss.

A third signpost is the complete opposite of denial: it's a stark realization of the harshest realities of life. I am going to die. Everyone and everything I love are going to die. Even our planet and the sun are going to die. Maybe the whole universe is going to die. Death can visit us or our loved ones at any moment, sometimes in the most cruel ways. We humans are ultimately powerless over the most important things in life. Significant grief takes the blinders of denial off, and it's awfully hard to put them back on again.

Another signpost of grief is immobilizing inertia. The grieving body at rest doesn't move. Stephanie Ericsson describes inertia like this:
 

You know the walk has to be shoveled and instead of saying, "In a minute..." you say, "Maybe next week..." You know there are a million things to do, but you just have to sit for a while. Just for a while. And a while turns into months.[6]  One of the hard things about the grief process is that a lot of it is about waiting. You're lost and driving in circles in a strange place? Maybe the best thing to do is to stop and sit for a while. Maybe it's the only thing you can do, anyway. Stop and sit and wait for whatever will happen to happen. Buddhism, with its emphasis on the practice of sitting and waiting, can instruct one well in the art of grieving.

One of the feelings that grieving people cycle through is anger: anger at God, anger at life, anger at the cosmos, anger at the dead lover or father or daughter for leaving so abruptly and completely, anger at the dead for mean or thoughtless things they said and did, anger at the acquaintance who tells us there must have been a reason for the death, anger at bank teller who cheerfully and unwittingly asks, "How are you doing today?" The anger has to come out.

And then there's guilt. Guilt comes in so many stripes; I am awed by the human creature's virtuosity at creating and nurturing guilt feelings. Most of us are masters at it, and not just the Calvinists or Catholics among us! Grief especially seems to offer a standing invitation to guilt. We feel guilt over what we said or didn't say to the dead loved one. Guilt over not being there at the end. Guilt over being angry with the dead. Guilt because I'm alive and my lover's not--God, I didn't ask for that. Did I? Guilt seizes with a fury that can keep us tossing and turning all night long for months at a time. Ericsson writes:
 

The guilt emerges like a thick fog that permeates every air space available, surrounds everything, tucks itself away in corners and hovers close to the ground, waiting to trip me.[7]

A final signpost is intense missing. Over time, and in fits and starts, the missing often gives way to memories. The funeral or memorial service, with its focus on memories, hints at and starts this process. Over time, the sharpness of the memories fades. Ericsson writes about the journey her husband took in her consciousness from person to concept. [8]  She writes:
 

Memories fade. They are replaced with the new life we are living. Like a zoom lens, pulling back, the focal point changes. What was once so vivid, blurs. Try and hold on to yesterday and we become blind to today. [9]

At some point, if the grief doesn't kill you, you figure out where you are. Even without the map, you find your way home. Only everything's different. While you've been driving around lost, interior decorators completely redid the insides of your house, and someone painted the exterior a different color. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that you're different, not your house. Grief has changed you. As a result, everything looks and feels different. It's a new life. Like the dead, you've died. Maybe like the dead, you've also been reborn.

Kubler-Ross labels this final stage of grief "Acceptance." I don't know if this is quite the right word. Sure, it's acceptance in terms of accepting the reality of the loss. Working through the grief process helps us replace denial with acceptance. Sometimes, though, by "acceptance" we mean embracing the loss. I'm not at all sure the grieving person needs to embrace the loss. Maybe a better word for this stage of grief is "accommodate." You make room in your life for the reality of the loss. You learn to live with it. It becomes part of who you are forever.

This is where growth comes in. Grief can awaken us to new values and new and deeper appreciations. Grief can cause us to re prioritize things in our life, to recognize what's really important and put it first. Grief can heighten our gratitude as we cease taking the gifts life bestows on us for granted. Grief can give us the wisdom gained from being with death. Grief can make death the companion on our left who guides us and gives us advice. None of this growth makes it good and worthwhile we suffered the loss; but it is the good that come out of the bad.

There's one problem with this final stage of grief. It's not necessarily final. We're back to the Linda Pastan's circular staircase image. Even after years of being in the acceptance or accommodation stage, you can find yourself lost in grief all over again. Another loss can trigger this; so can a significant anniversary you associate with your dead loved one. The bad part of grief is that it, like death, lasts forever. It ain't over 'til you're over. The good part of grief is that the growth it offers is forever, too. I've seen many people circle back into active grief when they're ready to go to a new, deeper level of wisdom and understanding through their grief.

Not only are all of us touched by grief, but sooner or later we are touched by the grief of friends and family. I don't want to end this sermon without some quick thoughts on how we can give helping hands to grieving friends. My wife Amy, a Hospice chaplain, shared a list of helpful things with a Rotary group this week. First, she said, be instead of do. A person in grief doesn't usually need you to busily try to fix things around them and with them. Be with them. Even in doing things, you can be with them, taking the time to listen in a relaxed way. Second, acknowledge the obvious, namely the loss. Don't be afraid to talk about the person who has died. Most of the time, your remembering the dead will be a great gift to the bereaved. Amy sums this up this way: Avoid avoiding. And finally, don't minimize the loss. Amy suggests that you skip saying anything that starts with "At least..."
 

"At least you have other children."
"At least her suffering is over."
"At least he lived a long life."
"At least you can go on with your life now."

Finally, I want to share a few more words of wisdom from Stephanie Ericsson. This lesson may be the most important any of us can learn from life. It is a good lesson for all of us to take it to heart, every day. It is a lesson she learned from grief:

If I can tell anyone anything, because I know so little anymore, I would say to make sure that people you love know it. The rest is trivial, biodegradable. It's not important, the fights, the spats, the disagreements. They are all so minuscule in the bigger picture. [10]

[1] Stephanie Ericsson, Comapnion Through the Darkness (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), pp. 7-8.
[2]Linda Pastan quoted in Mary Jane Moffat, ed., In the Midst of Winter (New York: Vintage, 1992, p. 255-257.
[3]Ericsson, p. 21; Moffat, p. xxvii.
[4]Ericsson, p. 18.
[5]Ibid., p. 78.
[6]Ibid., p. 9.
[7]Ibid., p. 11.
[8]Ibid., p. 163.
[9]Ibid., p. 164.
[10]Ibid., p. 57.