1,095 Days of Bright Sadness
Dear friend,
Several weeks ago I was sitting at a funeral lunch when a woman walked up to me, introduced herself and told me how meanginful my writings have been about grief. She and her husband lost her son in a tragic accident the same month I lost mom and it helped her to have someone else write out the words she wasn’t finding. It was lovely to hear that my words found a home in an aching heart and helped her.
Today it has been exactly three years since mom died and I took a personal day from work to rest. As much as I’ve healed in three years my body gets heavy around holidays and anniversaries. It is as if I become one with any surface I am on; standing, sitting, or lying down. It was good not to have to work today. I could’ve done it but have learned that capacity does not always equal wisdom or in other words, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Several people remembered this date, and while I don’t expect people to remember it with me it touched my heart that many of the people who reached out to me either in tangible gifts or words, were my coworkers. It’s precious to me that our workplace is about more than business. It was also comforting to realize that between Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Missouri and Pennsylvania, family members were remembering too. My cousin who lost her dad, remembered.
It wasn’t a coincidence that this week I was listening to an audio book about time management and the author talked about a concept theologian-philosophers have called “bright sadness.” In Lent, it is the spiritual mind of the Christian who is spending time thinking and feeling the ending of Jesus’ life on earth and is feeling joy and sorrow mixed.
In the book, Oliver Burkeman of “4,000 weeks” talks about how experiencing death changes one. It is as if those who have been shattered by losing someone who goes on to another place and “time” find they are so much more honest and realistic about life and often find more satisfaction and happiness and gratitude in it. Or something like that. What struck me was that I agreed. As he said, and I think any of us mourners would agree, we would never want to relive that but we are different in good ways.
Obviously there’s always a caveat to those who become consumed by the death; bitter, cynical, and betrayed. Not everyone comes through grief with triumph. I don’t cast shade on this the way I probably would have used to. I have battled long and hard with bitterness and betrayal, those two cousins of death. It is a hard fight. I understand losing to it — I often wanted to lose to it. It would’ve been a sweet relief to sink beneath the surface and admit that death won. To give in to rage and vindictiveness and feel the justice of it in describing those feelings of grief which roar and gnash their teeth.
However when death is overcome and you begin a new life the change is… sweet. Like the iron grip of winter slowly losing its grip and giving way to soft air and twittering songbirds. In pockets of brown and grey death are little bits of green sticking their spears up as they march out of the grave and bloom. Everything does not change at once, only that the trees have a delicate green haze covering them and the sky is different and the tree branches seem like they are standing up again.
Today was a gift of a day. A friend told me about some public hunting lands but said that not much hunting would happen right now and it’s a good time to go walk it. One of the sadnesses of this area is a lack of good walking paths and it was exciting to know that I could go wonder out beyond the telephone poles with no cars whooshing by and no dogs to come out, barking with profound rudeness. Accordingly I donned Bright Clothing in case someone decided to hunt, whatever people hunt for this time of year, and filled a Stanley Thermos (the Dad kind) with honeyed-rooibos tea and packed a book for the back 40.
I have left this photo untouched because it is bright. Bright sadness. A tired, beautiful day. Because I grew up in Missouri I selected the book “Wide Meadows” by Jean Bell Mosley to take with me and sat with the meadows stretching out before me and pine trees singing with the wind behind me. I stretched out with the meadow and simply let the day and the time go by.
Mom worked hard her whole life to learn to cook after serving dad a disaster of a burned cheese sandwich on an early date (he married her anyhow which makes me proud of him) and she eventually grew to be the cook that was so good that her meals were coveted when people had a baby and the community brought meals. Go mom!
To honor her and her teaching ability, because like mother like daughter and I was not naturally a good cook, being too apt to put in a cup of salt instead of a cup of sugar — I stopped to buy steak with some gift money a friend sent me today. Aside: God please bless her forever.
This is the meal I ended up making and of which I’m very proud because I struggle to successfully grill steak:
perfectly grilled ribeye. I mean smashing out-of-this-world good
mango-jalapeno salsa, best I’ve ever made
herbed rice with Irish butter
avocado slices
Cabernet Sauvignon wine
For dessert: a dark chocolate cookies and cream by Tillamook
Didn’t I do good, mom? It’s a long way from 4 tablespoons of cayenne pepper in the chili.
Meantime, a few hours away a wife and children are grieving a sudden death of husband and father several weeks ago and I feel it keenly. I can’t speak to what it’s like to lose someone slowly but I know what it’s like to get a call that someone just slumped over. “The paramedics are working on them.” “They are on their way to the hospital.”
And then, “they didn’t make it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Throughout the world there is a connected community of people who believe in the words “rejoice with those who rejoice and grieve with those who grieve.” There is a group of people who don’t even know each other, yet, but who are all getting ready to participate in Lent and someday to party together in heaven. All reflecting, all remembering “hosanna.”
Lent, Good Friday, and Easter didn’t use to mean that much to me. That’s maybe shocking, I don’t know. Easter was a happy time, a blooming time, and the rest basically didn’t exist for me. Now that I know grief, I am genuinely excited to go into the time of Lent because it’s a time to remember endings and at the end, celebrate new beginnings. It is possible to live in a time of bright sadness and to find it precious indeed.
For all the ways Christians have gotten things wrong, and I’ve gotten things wrong, and the political atmosphere continues to heat up, today has reminded me to pull back and consider what endures and what will endure through all eternity. I can afford to rest today and remember because I have eons of time ahead of me and some bright day I’ll be back with mom, with my uncle, my grandparents, with Kenny, and be able to meet so many more, like C.S. Lewis and King David and Abraham and Sarah. Every week I think about the party in heaven and how I am headed there myself. All those great characters through out history, that’s my story too because this is God’s story and we were all chosen as the cast.
Leaving time doesn’t frighten me the way it used to. It helps to know there are so many people there but it’s also because Jesus. To meet him face-to-face will be the great joy of my life, and I have had many joys.
Meantime, we are here, and I’m glad to be here with you. Let’s make life count, shall we?
Love,
L. Raine
