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.
But my Mom’s story had an ending. It was an ending that we could all see coming a mile away. And yet, as is common with deaths that ought to have been anticipated, it still felt strangely unexpected when it arrived. Denial is a powerful and sometimes beautiful thing. Maybe in this case it allowed us to take in only what we could handle, one little tidbit at a time.
It feels to me like it’s also impossible to anticipate what the journey through grief is going to be like. Even as my mom went into hospice, I didn’t know what to expect about the (now officially deemed inevitable) grief to come. This would be the most significant loss in my life to date. How would I respond? I even wondered to myself, What if I don’t cry? Maybe, because of my work, I’ve been with so many other people in those moments of death that I’ve become somehow jaded and won’t find the tears. Who knows? (For the record, I did cry. I realized this wasn’t anything to worry about when, the morning following Mom’s death, uncontrollable weeping necessitated my pulling the car over on the way to the grocery store.)
The myth that has accompanied me through this year of mourning is that of Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice. Just before their wedding, Eurydice is attacked by a satyr. In the struggle she falls into a nest of vipers and is fatally bitten in the heel. It is Orpheus who discovers her body. An exquisite musician, Orpheus pours out his bottomless grief in beautiful songs of lamentation. He decides to go to the Underworld in hopes of seeing Eurydice again. His mournful music softens Hades’ and Persephone’s hearts. They tell him that he and Eurydice can return to the realm of the living and live there together forevermore.
There’s just one condition: as they walk toward the gates between the Underworld and our world, Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus. He must not turn back to look at her. If he does, the deal is off. For whatever reason, Orpheus does turn, looks at her, and loses her for a second, final time.
How often during this past year have I, like Orpheus, wanted my loved one back! I just want to see Mom once more—that twinkle in her eye, that smile that tells me all is well in the world. If I knew how to get to the Underworld to fetch her, I just might try!
Sometimes I want her back at predictable moments—like when I call home and, after talking with my dad a bit, feel like it’s time for him to hand the phone over to Mom. I wished she were with us when our beloved Detroit Tigers nearly made it to the World Series. I know I’m going to want her back with us soon when my nephew—her first grandchild—gets married.
But sometimes the desire to have Mom back with me bursts into my mind for no particular reason. I’m doing laundry or driving through town or watching the Packers and I wish she were here.
I suppose laundry makes sense because she was a laundry-holic. But the Packers? Baseball was her game, not football.
If I’m honest, I have to admit that there have even been times when I’ve thought that my mom’s story could have a different ending. Maybe we could flash back and find something we missed that would have kept her alive. Maybe we could go back further to that fall on the stone steps of her church that triggered her downward slide. Maybe we could find a way to prevent the fall from happening. “Don’t go to church today, Mom!”
Or maybe I could take a stroll into the Underworld, make a deal with the gods, and fetch her back.
Last summer, I loved and hated reading Joan Didion’s book about the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. She writes, “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.” The story’s ending could somehow be magically rewritten. Of course this doesn’t make any sense, but I understand it now after walking through the netherworld of grief. Grief makes us think such magical, absurd thoughts, and it makes them seem not the least bit outlandish. Grief is a time of magical thinking.
There’s another way that Eurydice’s and Orpheus’ story speaks to me. Meghan O’Rourke, in a New Yorker piece entitled “Story’s End,” writes:
The story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
That’s it! This past year I feel like I have walked in the realm of the dead.
I followed my mom there. I couldn’t let her go. And it’s certainly true that this past year I was so much more viscerally aware of death than before. Grief pierced the veil of denial that had kept me from thinking much about the loss of loved ones or my own death.
I’ve learned some things this year walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I learned how much it mattered to create time and space to absorb the physical reality of death. For instance, when was the last time you visited a friend’s house and they showed you into their parlor? The only parlors these days are in historic houses and, you guessed it, in funeral homes. The problem with parlors is they became associated with death more than anything else. And we’ve tried to banish death as much as possible. So we banished the parlor. Even in some funeral homes the traditional parlor is going the way of the home parlor. I know of one local funeral home that’s gotten rid of the stuffy old furniture of the parlor and has instead created a space which feels more like your comfy family room or a coffee shop. Among Unitarian Universalists, once the freshly deceased person is carted away, that’s usually the last we see of the body. This is a pretty different story from having a dead loved one laid out for a day or two in our family parlor!
Here’s the problem with banishing the dead from our proximity: it sabotages the grief process. I now understand from first-hand experience that dealing directly and intimately with the dead is not an easy thing. My mom died very early on a Saturday morning. One of my brothers wasn’t able to get there before she died. He felt that it was important to see my mother’s body before she was cremated, but the funeral home wasn’t open again until Monday.
I offered to accompany him to see the body, an offer he accepted. My mom didn’t wish to be embalmed, so when my brother was finally able to see her on Monday, she looked like she had been dead a few days. It’s not a favorite moment of mine. And yet, I swear it was a valuable part of my grief journey, especially since she didn’t want a viewing at the memorial service. The fact of her death was pretty hard to deny as I stood by her body that Monday.
Another thing I learned is something I knew in my head but not enough in my gut: I need community. I need family and friends and congregation. Community is my lifeblood. My wife’s and kids’ loving support; friends driving seven hours for my mom’s memorial service; a congregant sending me an email welcoming me to the club of those who have lost their mothers——these things all mattered immensely. Even though at some level it was a solitary journey, I did not feel alone in that trek into the Underworld.
I also learned that as a grieving person I was prone to being tired, distracted and disoriented. I felt like my energy level was chronically lower than usual. All of this makes sense: it’s exhausting to trudge through the Underworld. It takes an enormous amount of energy. I’m sure Orpheus felt exhausted, too. And of course walking in two worlds at the same time can be extremely disorienting. Life goes on and I had to work and shovel the snow and pay the taxes and show love to my wife and kids. I couldn’t take a timeout from this world so I could concentrate on the Underworld.
I learned that self-pity is a pretty easy thing to fall into when you’re walking through grief. It goes with the territory, I think. Joan Didion notes, “When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Suddenly I can imagine my own son and daughter lowering my ashes into the earth. That definitely makes me feel sorry for myself.
And finally, I have learned to treasure more deeply life’s sweetness. Loss teaches us not to take for granted the sweet things in life. We learn in our hearts and not just our heads that nothing lasts forever. Every day a loved one graces our lives is a blessing.
I fear losing touch with this lesson again—as seems inevitable when the grief becomes less intense, less frequent. We forget what we learned. But, for better or for worse, there does come a day when we stop following our loved one in the Underworld. There comes a day when we turn back and rejoin the world of the living. Even then, the remnants of grief can pull us back into the Underworld, but only briefly. The trajectory of our lives is back on top of the earth, not in the realm of the dead below.
Maybe it’s not a particular moment in time when we turn and make our way back to this realm. Maybe it’s a gradually dawning awareness that we’re back. Whatever the case, I suspect that we don’t really know when this moment or season happens, except in hindsight.
Looking back on this year of grief, a particular dream I had was a milestone for me. It was a marker that my time of following my dead mom in the Underworld was coming to an end. In the dream, I was communicating with my mom. She was dead but, as in the magical world of Harry Potter, she was alive in a portrait. Looking at me from the portrait she, like Harry’s deceased mom and dad, could interact with me. She couldn’t talk, so she had to use sign language. And though my mom never knew sign language as far as I know, she signed to me, “I love you.”
That, it turns out, is all I needed to know. I could let her go. I could go and make my way back to the gates leading back to this life, this time, this place.
Roger has been actively involved in community activities.In Appleton, he co-founded Toward Community: Unity in Diversity, Common Ground (an interfaith clergy group dedicated to improving the health of the community), the Fox Cities Rotary Multicultural Center, and the GLBT Partnership (a support program for LGBTQ youth).He also served on many boards including the Community Health Action Team affiliated with a local hospital system, Harbor House (an organization addressing domestic violence), and Voices of Men (an organization focused on encouraging men to take a vocal stand against violence against girls and women).He has also served Unitarian Universalism in many ways including as a Ministerial Settlement Representative, president of his UU Ministers Association (UUMA) chapter, co-chair of the UUMA’s continuing education committee, and member of the UU Partner Church Council Board.Roger is a consultant on church governance with Unity Consultants, a wholly owned subsidiary of Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, MN.
Roger is married to the Rev. Amy Bertschausen a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).They live in St. Louis, MO.Amy is the Executive Director of Care and Counseling, a non-profit counseling center in St. Louis.Roger and Amy have two children.Hattie is preparing for a law career.Hattie and her husband Nic Cable live in Columbus, IN, where Nic was recently called to serve the UU Congregation of Columbus, IN—a congregation which Roger served as its first, quarter-time minister in 1988-89.Ian is in his third year of law school at the University of Miami in Florida.Roger’s hobbies include backpacking, running, owning an NFL team (he along with hundreds of thousands of others owns the Green Bay Packers), avidly following the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals baseball teams, and enjoying the serenity of a little place (technically a garage) on a tiny lake in Wisconsin’s North Woods.
- Sanctuaries of Silence - December 1, 2020
- The Shadow Side of Vulnerability - October 1, 2017
- Grief—One Year Later - October 1, 2014
