Grief and a Pile of Pain...

I'm not sure why grief waited about 6 months until it enveloped me and swallowed me whole, but the last several weeks I've experienced wave after wave of the deepest grief I've ever known.

It has manifested in all sorts of ways, but one takes the cake.  A fixation on death.

I've met with people over the years who are afraid of death or just preoccupied with dying, but that never made sense to me personally.  I've done innumerable funerals, I've sat with people right next to their loved one who just passed in the hospital, I've held a mother in my arms who lost an infant who was suffocated by a pillow, I've sat in several homes with families after their sons had died of drug overdoses...you get the picture.  

I even watched my dad waste away and was right there when he gasped for his last breath.  I remember the feeling of sensing his spirit leaving his body.  Never been closer to someone passing away and yet grief didn't descend on me anywhere close to what I'm feeling now. 

I'm sure you could say, "Well, it's because both of your parents are gone now."  Which could be true.  I just thought I'd experience more loss and pain in the immediate days and weeks and months after mom's somewhat unexpected departure.  But I felt at peace with mom's death and for months walked back into my life with my head held high and my gaze fixed on the future.  I wanted to live my life as a thank you for all my parents poured into me.  

Those feelings that propelled and compelled me fled the scene.  

All at once, so it seems, I felt deflated and unmotivated.  I look at the elderly and imagine that will be me all too soon.  I am painfully aware that if I die at the age my parents did that I am in the last third of my life.  It is all downhill from here.  The aches of my age and the arthritis of old injuries have become more pronounced.  I have begun feeling like nothing I've done actually matters, that I too, will waste away and fade into the cold fog of eternity, a reality that by faith I receive from a distance but that I just can't get my head around for some strange reason.  It alludes me.

Life seems so much harder without them here which is strange because I didn't call them all the time or live near them for the last 25 years of my life.  Just knowing they were there did something in me, like there was a buffer from me and the cold chill of life.  I felt protected from the ugly world as their simplicity and childlikeness inoculated me from the virus of vile humanity.  I now feel exposed on all sides, vexed by the depravity of people and the overall sadness of living in a broken world.  Some days I don't want to get out of bed.  Some days I wish I could just go to heaven.  

I'm more impatient with stupid, for sure.  When petty things come up and require my intervention, I want to scream, "You're going to die!  I'm going to die!  This is so stupid!  What a waste of precious time.  I don't have time for this dumb stuff."  The patience required of me as a pastor is immense, so to lose my long-suffering is no small thing.  I have to enter in with people and sympathize with their pain, and all pain in relative.  But in my mind, when people start bellyaching about something ridiculous, I just have no tolerance for the kvetching.  I just don't.  It's trifling with trivialities that just field dresses me.

In general I'm just more weepy.  I will tear up at random times without notice.  Sometimes I'll just catch myself staring into the distance lost in a daze.  My mind will replay memories, some from my childhood, some from the last days with my parents before they went to be with Jesus.  My mind will mull them over, chew them like cud, processing little details looking for answers to questions I can't quite put into words.  There's obviously no mechanism built into us to deal with death, it was never supposed to be this way.  We weren't created to die.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I'm slogging right now.  I'm trying to do my job with professionalism and to perform my duties at home with presence and peace, but it's a chore on some days. It just isn't coming natural, I have to think through my movements and moments one at a time to push myself forward into the future.  I don't get excited about the days ahead right now.  They seem filled with hurt and loss and death.  I know there's more than those dark realities, but the malaise hovering about me makes it hard to see the diamonds in the ruff, the beauty in the dastardly.  Death bears down on me like a ticking time bomb beeping to let me know it's almost over.  All that I know is almost over.  That's what I feel and hear in my head on many a day.

So I'm going to counseling this week to work through this pile of pain.  I've tried to walk it off.  I've tried to sleep it away.  I've tried to distract myself with meaningful activities.  I've written, prayed, read, talked, withdrawn, worked.  Anything I know to do that usually works to rid myself of pesky feelings of dread, but nothing is working.  Things just keep getting worse.

I know it's a season, but it's brutal just the same.  Looking for the light in this valley of the shadow of death.  It's comforting to know that He is with me in it.