Paula darcy and grief and morrie schwartz

Three things that lodged in my heart as I was reading her simple but profound story of Morrie were the ways we bury grief, the danger but necessity of the journey to uncover it and the promise of freedom as we learn to speak and live from the heart.

Buried Grief

It sometimes seems that all of us are gravediggers who spend our time tunneling through the earth to bury what is most precious to us under layers of dirt and rock. Griefs come at us in life, and often arise because of the gap in expectations between our original dreams and the way that loss challenges or destroys those dreams. We all approach life with a series of expectations, of commitments to the way life is supposed to work, and when it does not work as planned we need to adjust. But challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Some are only "stepping stones" that we feel help us refine our dreams, but others are debilitating losses that come our way, challenging faith and security and all sense that we know anything at all in life. We deny griefs, rail against them, have well-meaning friends that say exactly the wrong things when we have experienced the loss, and we sink into inconsolable bouts of despair and hopelessness.

But the stark reality of life is that we don't have or take the time to search out the ways of grief and understand their grip on our lives. We often have to (or want to) go back to work, resume the normal course of life, and deny the effect that this deeper shade of grey has had on our lives. And so we patch ourselves up and head back into the action, unaware of the way that our lives have been changed and powerless to handle some of the debilitating new realities of life.

Opening the Door

Paula calls her book the "Sacred Threshold." It suggests that there is a point where we can enter into a new "building," go into the new and unexplored territory that grief has brought with it. But, make no mistake about it. It is a terrifying journey, taking us to the brink, and sometimes over the edge, of our poor abilities to defend ourselves against it. Grief is like a tsunami that not only washes over us but has a way of upending everything we thought was stable in life. But until we have tried to sort out the emotions attendant upon the experience of loss, we live without a sense of freedom, bound up as we are in interior constraints that sap our energy and terrorize our minds.

I have found the Book of Job to be my most comforting companion in exploring the ways of loss. Job was a "big guy," the "greatest man in the East." In a short space of time he lost everything on which he had depended for social and religious recognition--his wealth, his children, his social status and his health. The Book of Job explores the emotions attendant upon this kind of loss. It reflects the waves of emotion that attend those who have experienced great grief. At times, however, the Book of Job appears simply to enlarge our vocabulary of loss, as if reading the book actually makes life more dangerous for us--because now we are given ways to express a hatred of what has happened to us with true eloquence. That is, I think the Book of Job is both comforting and dangerous. It is a mirror reflecting our losses, but it is also a sort of scythe with which we can cut down all the people who try to help us, and come up with an "airtight" explanation of why life is absolutely hopelessly convoluted. The words of Job are words of poison as well as healing. They are, for me, the most potent words in the universe.

Freedom

But, as Paula teaches us, and as her story with Morrie shows, when the barriers have come down and the honest process of grief confrontation is going on, we can be led to freedom. Well, she doesn't actually use this word, but I think it suffuses her treatment of Morrie's last illness. He was discovering a new world inside himself, and learned the vocabulary of hope and fullness and yielding and abandonment to a greater Spirit even as his days ebbed away.

But the point I could not get out of my mind as I read Morrie's story was what would happen to us if we were to discover this freedom well before we died? What would happen to us if we had the maturity, the time, the guidance, the courage, to admit the futility of our hopes, the end of our original dreams, the twisted wreckage of our lives, the way that pain has reduced us to ghostlike images of ourselves....and then were able to release ourselves into the care and hands of some greater and possibly indefinable power? What would life look like if we could trust its gifts each day and live by the power of love? For, as Paula wrote to me in inscribing my book, "The final say is always love." What would life look like for us if we actually would discover the power of love, that we would abandon all of our pretensions and striving for the building of a dream that has died, and learn to live with the confidence borne from a power outside ourselves?

When God actually spoke to Job in Job 38-41, he spoke in a way that Job had not anticipated. Job had wanted God to appear and answer his complaint. Job wanted God to admit that what he had really done was to wreck his life. Job wanted, no needed, to be vindicated. But God refused to speak to Job in that manner. God would speak to Job in His freedom, and God's words would make Job realize that he was small and impotent, even though his issues were the most important issues in the world for him. When Job yielded himself to God in ch. 42, falling into the outstretched arms of God, he says, "I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes (42:5-6)." Job's inner "work" was not all done, of course, but he caught a vision of the overarching and overwhelming power of a good God in the universe.

Conclusion

Grief work is individual work. Despite the friends and the support groups, we are basically alone in our efforts. It takes degrees of patience and honesty which we may not feel we possess. And, we may never get "on the other side" of grief. "Restoration" may be a sort of mirage. But once we begin the journey we need the courage not to turn back. For, once we begin the journey, we recognize it is the most important one of life. Indeed, our lives depend on it.