Grief and Gratitude

Wednesday, November 23rd, marks four years since my brother-in-law Paul left us to join the heavenly ranks. He was just thirty years old. We keep his picture in a frame all year long and speak his name in the sharing of memories. When my daughter was younger she drew pictures and wrote letters to Paul in heaven, a precious coping mechanism that served her well. My big-hearted boy was only three when his Uncle Paul died, but he vividly remembers watching Paul’s casket descend into the soil. He sheds tears for Paul as if it happened just yesterday. It’s in those moments grief and gratitude perform their beautiful dance. I thank God for the hope of heaven, and for the opportunity Paul’s death has given me to share it with my children.

Two days a year, on Paul’s earthly birthday and the anniversary of his death, we pause as a family. Sometimes we make a birthday cake and sing to him, trusting he has his ear bent to hear our voices. (But we never have ice cream with our cake; Paul hated to combine his food and the idea of ice cream touching cake would have made him cringe.) Sometimes we fry up churros, Paul’s favorite Disneyland dessert, and we enjoy every sugary morsel on his behalf. This year we will indulge in chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, another of his favorites, and snuggle on the couch in front of the tv to watch a Star Wars movie. Paul loved Star Wars. These small gestures we make serve as a memorial to him, far better than any words on a headstone. Tangible as those may be, they won’t bring him back. Neither will churros or sharing the story of how my husband convinced Paul to climb into the dryer for a game of hide-and-go-seek, but they’ll bring his memory to life in a way that no candle or bouquet of cemetery flowers ever could.

Memorials take many forms but their purpose is always the same; to cause you to pause, reflect, remember, and grieve. Revisiting a memorial, be it in a park, the side of the road, or only in our minds can be painful, but it can also be healing. “Memorials, while they are locations for collective remembrance and mourning, also carry within them a kind of reassurance: That happened. We lived through it,” (Mark Harris, New York Times Magazine). Our loved one is no longer living, but we are. There is grief in the loss and gratitude in the survival. Difficult as it was, we came out on the other side. We still have a story to share, a life yet to live.

I can’t pretend to know, but I imagine when New Yorkers visit the World Trade Center monument the grief they feel closely intertwines with gratitude: That happened. We lived through it. Remembering those we’ve lost reminds us that our existence here on earth is only temporary. We could be here one day and gone the next. We are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:14). Like the memorials themselves, we are not permanent. Makeshift wooden crosses left by the street corner and teddy bears wedged in chain link fences eventually blow away. Monuments corrode and crumble. Memorials “increasingly ask us to consider not simply the past but our relationship to grief, community and endurance, our own mortality and even the fallacy of imagining that monuments themselves are always permanent,” (Harris).

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Road for my Popular and Contemporary Fiction class. It’s the story of a father and son traversing a post-apocalyptic world. The duo is among the few survivors of some unknown catastrophic event. The landscape around them is lifeless and covered in ash. Each day they scrape by, doing whatever it takes to make it through the night. In their travels, they encounter horrific things. The odds are always against them. I won’t lie to you, it’s a bleak, depressing piece of fiction. Cormac McCarthy was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about the book. When asked, “What do you want us to get from this book in particular?” McCarthy said, “We should be grateful. We should be thankful for what we have.” In a story about loss and devastation, the author wanted his readers to find gratitude. That is the beautiful dichotomy of paying tribute, of memorializing.

For my other class, a Creative Writing Workshop, I was asked to share a story about a significant twenty-four hours in my life. I chose to write about the day our first adoption fell through, the day our agency called me and told me the birth mother we’d spent the last few months caring for and building a relationship with had changed her mind. Though I received an A on the assignment, my professor encouraged me to think long and hard about whether or not this was a story I wanted to continue writing about for the remainder of the class and into the next one. This piece would be developed into a fifteen-page story over the next two terms and would be pitched for publishing. Was I sure I wanted to write about such a deeply personal and emotional time in my life? I was sure. This piece would be my tribute to loss and pain far in my past. I revisited my old adoption blog to help fill in my story's gaps. Twelve years had passed and I was a little fuzzy on the particulars. I read through the pages methodically. Once I got over the atrocities of my unhoned writing skills and the naive ramblings of a first-time mother, I sat in a pool of memories, the waters of which have gone shallow over time. I remember how I used to drown myself in them, immersing so deeply that I couldn’t get up for air. So many details had been forgotten, swept away like burned-down candles and wilted flowers on a dusty altar. My eyes read words of hurt, frustration, and hope snuffed out. I ran my fingers over them as I would a monument. I paid my respects. I thanked God that happened and that I lived through it.

We are all grieving. For some, the grief is fresh, for others only a faint memory. If you are feeling the searing pain of loss, be assured it is no more permanent than the life of the one you miss. Memorialize your loved one in a way that honors them and keeps them alive in your heart. Build a monument and visit it often. Let it anchor you for a while, then let it remind you of what happened and that you lived through it. Grieve and be grateful your story is not yet over.