One Is Always Confronted

The passing on of someone who is precious, confronts us not only with a harsh and surreal yet all-too-real grief and uncompensatable loss, it confronts us just as poignantly with our own mortality.

Perhaps my 9th grade science teacher was on to something, when she told me (I do not recall what occasioned our casual conversation on this) from her perspective that all mourning, all grief, is selfish.  I countered this assertion with the example of when one happens to feel just as moved, even stricken, when hearing of the death of a distant acquaintance or even complete stranger.  "Likewise so," she replied, and likewise matter-of-factly.  I was irritated then, and only in later years grasped that the problem in understanding what she meant may lie in how one necessarily defines "selfish".

I will give her the benefit of the doubt - as this decades-old recollection has remained with me through many a passing and many a grieving or accompanying in grief - that she'd intended it to be understood objectively, and not flippant or unkindly.  It is, after all, one's own loss, one's own trauma, one's own confrontation with our finite personal existence and coming to terms with one's own mortality.  It may be that she was coming from a spiritual perspective or not at all, I would not at that time myself have known nor pursued it that far.  Yet the recollection remains, notwithstanding.

But "selfish" or not, by any definition, mourning and grief are real, and of the most sensitive nature.  And next to birth itself, of the most intensely intimate sharing and urgent sense of being-with, worthy of the most actually unselfish attention.

And time does not "heal" - any more than time "brings back" the departed or causes one to "forget" - ever.  For neither of the latter would be either natural or satisfying, nor is the pain less unbearable.  Rather, it becomes a part of oneself, and a healthy mind relating to that self progresses with time, and with privately-open suffering, toward finding again one's sacred dignity in that very love toward, and in that equally sacred "missing" of, the one who has gone from this life.

In this dignity of remembering, and in this love, is refuge - from the unrelenting pain of that missing, that lack-of, that sense of powerlessness.  In God alone is true refuge - from the confrontation with our own sense of powerlessness in the face of our own finite mortality.  In Him lies our own infinity, here and now - both in joy and in suffering.