7 Lessons of Loss: Three Months Later

I was sitting on the squishy green couch with my feet on the coffee table, watching a commercial when it hit me:

a sad bomb.

They come without warning,these unanticipated moments of grief;the sorrow ignited by a gum commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxZu-6jewL4

(Worth the sweet, one minute view).My dad has been gone now for three months. I would like to say, "Wow, it seems like it happened ages ago."But I would be lying. It still feels like it happened yesterday.Today I am doing a three-month check-up, to see where I am in the grieving process and to share seven lessons I have learned.

7 Lessons of Loss: Three Months Later

1. The anger part of grief is real.

At my dad's burial, a woman came up to me and said, "Your dad wouldn't want you to be sad. He wouldn't want you to cry." I had to bite my tongue to keep from taking off her head.  I was Hot Blazing Furious. Totally over the top. Out of proportion.

Later when I was able to think rationally, I knew she was only doing what many of us do in similar situations - placing a platitude on a gaping wound.

And for the record, my dad was never ashamed of his own tears. Or mine.

Lesson: Grief often wears a mask, tricking you into thinking you are mad at someone or something else. But it is the grief talking. Or shouting. Or biting your tongue.

2. Sadness happens.

I catch myself wanting to call and talk to my dad. To hear him say, "I love you, Pooh Bear." Because he lived across a continent, I can rationalize he is still in his favorite chair, doing his Sudoku puzzles, waiting to pick up the phone. Another sad bomb explodes when I remember he is gone.

Lesson:  Don't be so quick to push yourself to "get over it." Your normal now includes the loss of someone important to you. You have changed in ways you may never fully grasp. Mourning is part of the process of healing.

3. Grief can manifest itself in physical ways.

Three weeks before my dad died, I got on a plane to hear his final solo and say goodbye. Beginning that day and for 2 1/2 months afterward I had diarrhea. Every stinking day. Pun intended. (Yes, I am writing about diarrhea. Sorry if that is TMI, but it's the truth.) I had every test done. All tests were normal.

Finally I sat in the office with my family doctor who has known me for years. She asked me, "Have you tried journaling?" I told her I was the Queen of Journaling, that I was talking openly about my dad's cancer journey, that I was blogging about it, that I was being as healthy as I knew how to be.

"Grief has to come out somewhere," she said. (Pun not intended.) "This is your body's way of dealing with it." Then she told me about her own dad's recent death and we cried in her office together. (I seem to have this effect on people lately, but honesty in grief allows others to be honest with their own loss.)

Lesson: See the professionals. Have the tests. Take the medicine. Give your body time to heal.

4. Remember.

When attending a niece's wedding one month after the funeral, we all recalled how Dad liked to ask a married couple, "Are you still in love?" We all smiled at the memory. When visiting my mom, we joked how Dad would always say that Minnesota had two seasons - winter and road construction. First we laughed. And then we cried. Just a little.

Lesson: Some feel that it is too painful to bring up the memory of someone who has died. The opposite is true. The grieving person needs to talk, to remember, to laugh, to cry, to know that the person they loved is not forgotten.

5. Create a tangible memorial.

It was important for me to make a quilt of my dad's cancer tshirts and give it to my mom. (Purple, my mom's favorite color, is also the color for cancer survivors.)

Lesson: Memorials (planting a tree, sewing a quilt, creating an online page, participating in a charity event in the name of a loved one) are healthy outlets and an important part of the grieving process for many people.

6. In the darkness, God may seem silent, but He is there.

To be honest, some of my usual spiritual practices seem dry as dust at the moment. But I have been at this faith thing long enough to know that in all relationships there are seasons of closeness and seasons of distance and you don't abandon the whole thing when you are groping around in the darkness trying to figure it out.

For me the main thing that has saved me alive is the meditation and memorization of scripture, a relatively new discipline. Earlier this year I memorized Psalm 139 with a group of ladies, including these verses, "If I say, 'Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,' even the darkness is not dark to You and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.'"

Lesson: In the darkest pit, the love of Jesus goes deeper still. 

7. Part of the difficulty of grieving is returning to routine tasks and rediscovering purpose and meaning there.

In my dad's final months, he gave me carte blanche to write about his cancer journey. Coming from the man who used to correct my English usage in public, this surprised me, until I realized that my words were giving voice to his suffering and sometimes the greatest gift of compassion we give the dying is not to look away.

After he died, I struggled to find words. After months of writing about eternity and dying, everything else seemed meaningless. My journal entries the past three months have been almost nonexistent -- snatches of words - as if the syllables were struggling to leak out the end of my pen. Words became incapable of expressing what I had lost.

Lesson: I am still working on this one, so I have no lesson to share on what I have learned. I can tell you one thing, I am hearing again, the faint whisper of words.

This, more than anything, tells me I am healing.

Today,

on your journey of faith,

if you are in a season of loss,

I pray you will be kind to yourself,

and you will create space

to heal,

to mourn,

to remember,

to find God in the darkness.