Audio Resources
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You can listen to audio recordings of Quest Monthly, read back issues or get electronic versions of the text to share with friends (and much more) at questformeaning.org Read more →
Jeremiah 9:17-21
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17 This is what the Lord Almighty says:
“Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come;
send for the most skillful of them.
18 Let them come quickly
and wail over us
till our eyes overflow with tears
and water streams from our eyelids.
19 The sound of wailing is heard from Zion:
‘How ruined we are!
How great is our shame!
We must leave our land
because our houses are in ruins.’”
20 Now, you women, hear the word of the Lord;
open your ears to the words of his mouth.
Teach your daughters how to wail;
teach one another a lament.
21 Death has climbed in through our windows
and has entered our fortresses;
it has removed the children from the streets
and the young men from the public squares.
Grief
October 2020
Grief is just love with no place to go. — Jamie Anderson
Articles
Letting Go
When you’re a capable, confident, 28-year-old child of privilege and experience, then you are accustomed to taking the challenges that come up in life and simply…managing them. Read more »
Carve Meaning
One of the many ways to carve meaning out of grief is to honor the memory of those we have lost. Read more »
Grief and Gravity
The movie Gravity, which came out in 2013, is about grief. And it’s worth watching with this in mind, because what Alfonso Cuarón, the director and co-writer, and Jonás Cuarón, the other co-writer, have to tell us about grief can help us through it. Read more »
No Words Needed
When you lose someone you love, there are some things that are just really hard to hear: They’re in a better place. Time heals all wounds. I know how you feel. Read more »
Good Grief
Grief is more than just an intense form of pain. It is the emotion triggered by severe loss—a loss of a part of the self. Read more »
Pay Attention
“Sit, Naomi, and pay attention!” This was my ongoing, never-ending command to my Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier. Read more »
REsources for Living
We tend to talk about grief as the feeling that arises when someone we love dies. Read more »
Audio Resources
You can listen to audio recordings of Quest Monthly, read back issues or get electronic versions of the text to share with friends (and much more) at questformeaning.org Read more »
Jeremiah 9:17-21
17 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come; send for the most skillful of them. Read more »
When I Wake Up by Gary (incarcerated member in NC)
When I Wake Up
When I wake up ,I find myself in an environment
That’s so different from the one I once knew.
I find that I’ve not merely traveled out of society,
But to a place no one warned me about.
I collect my thoughts for a moment
While gazing from the window of my cell.
The rain-slicked razor wire in front of the house unit
Is being cleaned again by nature.
I never fail to be surprised by the same landscape
Time and time again.
Just as I perceive this,
Suddenly the texture of reality has changed once more.
It’s as if the transition from society
Has been nonstop to this Satan’s cave.
Here is where I dwell.
In a momentary lapse of reason.
[VIDEO] In the Ruins
A man sits on the rubble—
not just in the rubble, but on the pile
of what remains. No people
in the bombed-out houses.
No dogs. No birds. Just ragged hunks
of concrete and loss. And on his perch
he is playing an instrument constructed
of what is left—an olive oil can, a broom handle,
a bowed stick and strings. It sounds
exactly as it is supposed to sound.
The instrument cries, but the man sings.
Because sometimes loss is deeper than tears.
Because sometimes grief is resistance.
Because, somewhere down the very long road,
music is stronger than bombs.
Dedicated to S.K.
VIDEO: “ت ناوازەیە” by Xendan
PHOTO: “Rubble litters the street in the main souk or market area of Maraat al-Numan, Syria” by Freedom House is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Crying Together
Maybe we could just sit down and cry together first. In the presence of Black rage. In the presence of white 
shame. In the presence of grief and despair and the overwhelming knowledge that white men with guns just keep killing people. In the devastating remembrance that this is not the first time that a white man with a gun has chosen a place of worship as the most devastating possible place to exact horrific violence.
We need to say out loud that this was another act of violent white supremacy, not just a disturbed individual. It matters that we point out that, as with almost every instance of mass violence, it was a man who committed this atrocity, with a man’s sense of entitlement to assert his will at whatever cost to those around him. We need to say out loud that once again gun violence has cost innocent people their lives, that while a man bent on doing damage with a knife can certainly hurt people, guns kill people far more rapidly and efficiently than anything else.
And then we need to sit with the fact that this horrific act was committed in a church. That it wasn’t random that the killer chose the AME church that has been such a force for Black empowerment and leadership development. That it wasn’t random that violence was perpetrated in a temple of peace. That this man sat and prayed with his victims for an hour before he attacked, and God did nothing to stop him. That the only way that God will ever stop the violence—not just the brutality of mass shootings, but also the daily violence of racism in all its massive and tiny iterations—is if we are committed, individually and collectively, to being God’s voice, God’s hands, God’s pain and rage, God’s impulse toward love and justice.
There is so much to be done, so many rents in the fabric of our common life that we can only hope are possible to stitch or patch together. There is so much that each of us is called to do. But maybe first we could just sit down together for a little while and cry.
Grief
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Each and every person on this earth has experienced loss. We may think when grief comes over us that we are alone in our mourning, that the smiling chatty folks around us don’t know…but of course they do. Being alive in this mortal world means knowing loss.
And grief—grief is the process by which we heal those holes ripped in our life through relocation, through divorce, through death. We mammals are designed to feel acutely the loss of one we love; it is a survival mechanism that binds parent to child, that binds together family group and tribe. The more we bring people into our hearts, the deeper the hole they leave if they are taken from us.
Grief—One Year Later
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In writing about her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke suggests, “A mother is a story with no beginning.” This is because a mother was always there—from that very first moment of your creation in her body. She’s a given, a part of the fabric of your story from day one.
In my mom’s case, her story having no beginning seems especially true. She was adopted—and never wanted to know anything about her birth parents. So her beginnings were shrouded in mystery. No one knew the story, not even her.
