I’ve been hanging out with grief a lot this spring. In March, my dad passed away, and then over Memorial Day weekend I had the privilege of staffing the TAPS Good Grief Camp, a camp for military families who have lost a loved one. This is my one opportunity a year to work with kids: I lead the group for six year olds, and this year I had twenty three of them.
The training for volunteers for this camp is remarkable, and this year I was reminded of one very important thing: grief is messy.
Its messy because, despite what our culture believes, it isn’t quantifiable and it doesn’t follow stages (this article, by Megan Devine, entitled The 5 Stages of Grief and Other Lies That Don’t Help Anyone, helps explain this). It’s messy because it shows up unexpectedly, inconveniently, unbidden. And it’s messy because it never, ever goes away – although it does get easier. Ann Lamont writes “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
Grief shows up through out our life. When a child loses a parent, they grieve that loss as best they can at their age – and then grieve the loss again as they pass through new stages: school graduation, marriage, etc. For me as an adult, losing a dad meant being shocked when I realized he wouldn’t be around when I retired (no matter that that was somewhat unrealistic – my dad would have been over a 100 when I retire!). If we’re lucky, we grieve our losses as well as we can at each stage of our life, and when a new stage arises, we bring our grief to that stage.
Grief is messy – just like love is messy. One of the things that struck me this year at the TAPS Good Grief Camp was the intertwining of love and grief. Grief arises out of love – grief is what we sign up for when we love. We gathered to grieve the loss of moms and dads, brothers, sisters, friends. And the space was tender and full, heartfelt, compassionate, healing. Love was palpable.
