Grief’s Liturgy. Gerald J. Postema
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me. And sometimes . . . sometimes, the pain is more than I can bear.
Day I: Mid-Morning [Terce]
For love is as strong as death . . .
—Song of Songs 8:6 (NIV)
Linda died just two weeks before our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary. We were married on Memorial Day weekend, 1969. We were just kids, not yet 21 years old. Our story began nearly five years before that, in November of 1964, when Linda asked me out for our first date. Actually, if legend is to be believed, the first sparks of our love may have been struck long before that when we were kindergarten classmates. You see, Linda and I did not fall in love; it did not just happen. Love was prepared for us; it prepared us and nurtured us. In its embrace we matured into adults, and as we matured, the embrace grew stronger, the roots struck deeper. Our love was tested—by shattering disappointments, by long periods of physical separation, by thoughtless and long-regretted wounds—but it proved stronger for the testing, deeper for the challenge. Our rich, shared, and mutually treasured history and the love it nourished has extraordinary tensile strength. Stronger than death.
Day I: Noon [Sext]
Loud as a trumpet
in the vanguard of an army,
I will run ahead and proclaim.
—Rilke
Linda reacted to talk of her courage with a wry smile, not believing a word of it. Friends called it extraordinary courage, but she insisted it was nothing more than facing reality. “It’s not courage. When something like this happens, you just call it what it is, and deal with it.”
The truly courageous may not be the best detectors of courage.
Linda would not be comfortable with elegy. She hated embellishment. “Just tell the story, Jerry,” she would so often say. “Leave out all the extra stuff and get to the point.” She preferred the light of the sun to the glow of sentiment.
I, on the other hand . . .
I want to paint her in brilliant colors “in one broad sweep across heaven.”
Day I: Daytime (2)
Diary entry: Friday, July 11, 2008
I have been feeling especially vulnerable and at sea this week. For most of the day on Monday I experienced abdominal pain, and in the evening I discovered I was bleeding from my gut. Disoriented and alarmed, I drove myself to the emergency room. A series of tests administered through the night showed that nothing was seriously wrong. I was discharged Tuesday, armed with antibiotics to fight the invading infection. The bleeding had shocked me, but what knocked the pins from under me was the realization that for the first time since I was a teenager Linda was not by my side, calmly assessing the situation and focusing on what needed to be done. Like an earthquake victim, I felt that something absolutely solid, a point of reference for everything else in my experience, was no longer there.
Day I: Afternoon [None]
John of Damascus wondered whether any pleasure in life is unmixed with sorrow. Grief asks whether sorrow will ever again permit pleasure into the mix.
Diary entry: August 2, 2008—7:20 a.m.
I sit here in the airport waiting for the departure of my flight to Chicago. Today I begin a ten-day trip via air, train, and automobile to Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, and back to Chicago. It is the first vacation trip I can remember without Linda. I feel apprehensive and not a little fearful. Can this trip hold any pleasure for me? How could there be pleasure if it cannot be shared with her? Can I bear for ten days the heavy burden of emptiness I carry? At home I could lean on friends if my emotional skies turned dark. And I had my work to distract me. Yet, I don’t want to be distracted. I’m living a paradox: I want to find a way of living without Linda that is not living without her. When at work, I live without her. That’s the last thing I want.
My hope is that this time away from work will give me an opportunity to think about what is ahead for me, about how to live into the future. I am entirely at sea about that future. With Linda gone I scarcely know who I am. I feel like an adolescent again, with one major difference. As an adolescent I didn’t know what to do with my life, with my future, but I never doubted that there was a future for me. The future was there, a vessel to be filled, though I knew not how. Second adolescence comes with no such assurance. I am not sure there is a future for me, or at least I am not sure whether there is one worth filling. Life without Linda is grim, colorless, and painful. Why live with this? Can I find something that moves me again? I do not know adult life without her. I have no adult memory that is not filled with her presence. Life, perhaps, can go on without her; but can my life go on?
[Sung]
Lord help us to gather our strength in difficult times
So that we could go on living
Believing in the meaning of future days.
—Zbigniew Preisner
Day I: Twilight [Vespers]
C. S. Lewis writes:
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. . . . It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are “taken out of ourselves” by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn.
I cannot accept that our dance has not been truncated. It has. We were in mid-stride. We were just about getting it right. Sometimes we were really spectacular—dancing with the stars. Sometimes we were pedestrian—inconsistent, but showing promise. We just needed a little more practice.
Still, Lewis does hit the right note at the end of this passage when he writes, “to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.” That’s the great difficulty, I believe, and my great fear. In this new phase of our dance of love, how am I to love Linda, the very her, and not my memory of her, or some fiction I have created of her? Loving the beloved who has died, Lewis observes, is like loving God:
The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.
But “this” is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her.
Lewis seems right about this. But he names a challenge that I don’t know how to meet.
One way I have tried to meet it is to gather, greedily, perceptions and stories of Linda from others who knew her, who saw sides of her I rarely saw. I grieve that I will never again be startled by her unpredictable, utterly singular self, surprising me again, giving birth to new dimensions of our love, revealing new facets of the diamond.
Day I: Close of the Day [Compline]
[Sung]
| In manus tuas, Domine, | Into your hands, O Lord |
| Commendo Spiritum meum: | I commend my spirit: |
| Redemisti me, Domine, | For thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, |
| Deus veritatis. | God of Truth. |
—Roman Breviary
Day I: Night [Vigil]
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
My soul waits for the Lord
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