Learning and practicing forgiveness is essential during times of grief. I was pretty lucky, and the things I needed to offer forgiveness for were pretty minor. People will say and do stupid and hurtful things. Usually they are done without the intent to be awful, or sometimes without even knowing that they did it. Those hurtful things usually happen because someone hasn’t really put themselves in your shoes, or by someone who is trying to make this horrific loss make sense in their own head. I have heard of some pretty terrible things that have been said to newly bereaved parents. Whether it’s something minor or something truly awful, quick forgiveness to the people around you for insensitivities or blunders is SO very necessary. Grieving is an excruciating and exhausting experience as it is, it only stands to be made worse by holding onto hate or resentment toward the people around you.
We are all human. We make mistakes. We say things that weren’t taken as we meant them. We get wrapped up in our emotion and say things that we don’t really mean. We want to do better and be better, but we just don’t always know how to do that. We all love and laugh; we all mourn and suffer. Humanity is our beauty, grace, love and victories, our ugliness, cruelty, hate, and defeat all wrapped up into one heart and soul.
In the beginning (like the first 3 years after Lach died), I wanted to defend my loss as being the worst thing that could happen to someone. The death of a child: the ultimate loss. He was at the age where his personality was really starting to blossom, but I never got to see how that would turn out. So much to love and so much to lose. The only thing that could be worse, I thought, is losing more than one child. It took me a lot of time and a lot of reflection to be able to shift that perspective. There was something worthwhile in that idea in helping me come to terms with the depth of my loss and the way it changed everything, but it also created some distance between me and the rest of humanity.
When you’re in the hole of your own grief, it’s impossible to see anything but the walls that make up that hole. It’s not until you can dig yourself out and stand on the surface of humanity again that you can see those holes are everywhere. Different sizes, different shapes, but they appear throughout the landscape. Pain and suffering and loss is a universal experience. All you have to do to experience it is live long enough. Each loss is unique in its own way with some parts that make it harder to bear than other losses and some parts that make it easier. I have not had to struggle through a marriage that is falling apart and wrestle with how to guide my children through adjustments of a broken home. I have never had to watch my child suffer through extensive medical treatments and illness, I have not been betrayed in situations of physical or sexual abuse, or felt the hopelessness of addiction or the helplessness and frustration of infertility, I haven’t had to bury the spouse I plan to grow old with, I haven’t had to suffer from any major physical illness of my own, or had to face a terminal diagnosis...the list goes on and on. Many have to suffer silently, because their struggles are not things that it is acceptable to admit or talk about.
The more I have reflected on my initial feelings of having experienced the “ultimate loss” the more I realize how mistaken I was. I expected to raise my child and then to send him off to spread his wings, with hopes that he’d live close enough that I could see him and his family on a regular basis. I’d celebrate those gatherings with my husband--Hmm, If I had buried my husband instead, I would have said goodbye to the person I expected to come home to every night for the rest of my life, well beyond the next 18 years, the person God gave me to share the joys and sorrows of living with, my security, my primary support, my teammate, my traveling buddy, the father of my children… with a little more readiness to look at a different situation openly, It’s hard to say that one is really worse than the other.
My suffering is something I can talk about. Many people suffer alone and in shame. Twisted and broken relationships; drug, alcohol, or pornography addictions; mental illness; feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, shameful mistakes that were made in the past. We can often live with these things and suffer silently, being unable or unwilling to reach out to other people for help. Upon learning of these kinds of struggles, people don’t generally bring you a casserole and swoop in to offer their support. Rather, the sufferer often finds themselves ostracized and estranged more than loved and supported in their quest for healing and recovery.
Even now, on days that I start to feel sorry for myself, and feel some sort of entitlement to sympathy, I am slapped in the face by another, even more tragic story that puts my perspective back in its proper place. There is no “ultimate” loss. Only suffering from different experiences and circumstances with different battles to be fought and won. You could ask almost any person you meet to tell you the hardest things they have been through, and most of them could break your heart with the story they have to tell. It is part of the human experience. If you are talking to someone who has made it through their crisis and back out of the depths, and if you’re willing to notice it, you will find a startling beauty and grace. You are likely find that they are strong, courageous, compassionate, and gentle. Beautiful people are everywhere and they don’t just happen.
