Unresolved Grief (Part 2)

"...I know this: I was blind but now I see" (John 9:25, NLT

Hmm. 

Except now that I do see, images crowd in and upon me.  Words flow like water from a spigot that slows but doesn't stop. Pictures from the past intrude on space reserved for holding grudges, resentments, and offenses! Startling visions crowd me, making it difficult to navigate either physically or emotionally.  I stand hapless, trying simply to inhale and exhale in the same hour, day, week, or month.  

"Stop the world I want to get off
And find myself a better ride
Stop the world I want to get off
Paid in full and now goodbye." 

These dated lyrics illuminate my reasoning for avoiding substantive interpersonal connections.  Rather, the words more than likely explain avoidance.  Because I didn't have the gumption (one of my {Grand} Mama's words) to try and find intention, coherence, or meaning in what passed as my life, I floundered.  Akin to beginning a science fiction novel in its middle and never going back to chapter one, most aspects of my life held little relevance. 

I couldn't fit a current grudge against someone from my past with grief experienced previously.   I did not see the nexus between a ''feeling I picked up from her vibes the instant we met," with the loss of a friendship decades earlier.  Since I barely recognized grief and only knew folktale-like "stuff" about it, grief felt merely like an episode, a short story, or an essay.  I accepted grief packaged neatly with a beginning, middle, and end.  After all and for goodness sake, should grief consume my whole life?

 The death of Philip, my firstborn grandson, actually threw me into a tailspin.  Then, I questioned everything and found answers nowhere.  Group grief sessions, personal counseling with both psychologists, and (even) psychiatrists offered no respite.  I couldn't find enough books on grief to read!  Question dominated.  Why? Why? Why? What could anybody--- mother or clergy or confidante or relatives or friends---anyone or anything--do? Where was the balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole? When would pain and anguish subside, disappear?

Hmm.

Elna, everyone's favorite big sister, died. while I had barely finished college. Then Daddy died.  The best big brother in the whole wide world, Walter, died.  Gerald, a great-nephew, died.  Mother, our magnificent Matriarch, died.  Then Jimmie, the second-best brother in the world, died. Suddenly Courtney, my younger daughter, died.  And I have never adequately grieved or mourned any one of them adequately or completely!  No wonder I'm an emotionally distraught Raggedy Ann. 

Yet somehow or someway, revelation-knowledge intruded, enlightened, and illuminated. I came to know, really know, God in the fullness of Truth.  In fact, the Holy Spirit introduced Himself.  Reading and studying the Holy Bible took on energy and intentionality beyond human understanding.  My world expanded past mundane knowledge.  Now on a journey whose terrain I cannot navigate alone, Spirit continues to live in me, enlarging as I surrender to"Somebody bigger than you and I." 

 Poet John Donne wrote, "No man is an island entire of itself;" to explain our relentless oneness. "Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore, never send to  know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

Amen.