About Grief
C.S. Lewis likens the death of a beloved to an amputation, and I never realized how fitting a description it was until now. Like an amputation, you learn to live with the grief and the loss but your whole way of life has changed and can never go back to how it was before. Like an amputation, the most normal things, the things you took for granted before, are the very things that remind you that life isn’t the same anymore, and try as you might, it won’t ever be the same again.
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
Grief over the death of a loved one isn’t just grief over the fact that the loved one is gone. It’s also grief over the the future that should have been. Grief over the loss of naive optimism and the feeling of being untouchable to life’s tragedies. Grief over who you once were as a person before the loss. Grief over the inevitable changes in your relationships. Grief permeates so much more of life than I had thought it would. And that’s what surprises me about grief. I keep thinking that it’ll at some point fade, like a scar, instead, I’m realizing it is indeed more like an amputation. It’ll “fade” in that I’ll learn to live with it, not because I’ve forgotten it is there.
But perhaps it’s a good thing that the grief will always be there in some form. It will forever remind me of the joy of what was and the joy of what is to come.
The joy of what was – The grief can only be so deep because the joy and the love had been so deep to begin with. In the pain of the grief, I’m reminded of how blessed I was to to be Mirari’s mom; to have been gifted his sweet life albeit for a short time; to have loved, parented, and cared for him to the best of my ability with Vinayak; and to have faithfully stewarded our son’s life in a manner obedient and faithful to the unique path God had called us to. The grief I carry with me today is but a reminder of the depths of the joy and the love I carry for Mirari. I liked what another loss mom had written: “Because great pain means I have loved well.”
The joy of what is to come – As much as I’ve grown up singing, reading, or even saying things like “we long for heaven” or “we long for Jesus to come and restore the world”, I honestly have to say that I didn’t really long for it that much. Sure, I believed in my head that the world would be a much better place, a perfect place once that happened, but I was in no rush for it to happen. Yes, sometimes I’d see such terrible things on the news – famine, earthquakes, wars, injustices – or hear of someone else’s tragedy, death, or loss, and for a moment there I’d feel such a desperation and longing that God would come and bring about a world in which all the suffering and pain and evil of the world were eradicated. But the moment would pass, and the feelings of sadness or frustration would be replaced by the thought of some other happy event I wanted to experience before Jesus came back. Growing up, a lot of us would say “yeah, I want to go to heaven/I want Jesus to restore everything, but I’d like to get married before that happens.” The joys of this world always seemed a bit better and sweeter than the joys of a restored world.
But now the grief I carry reminds me so painfully that this world is not as it should be and this is not the home we were made for, and it never will be. That though illness and death are expected and guaranteed realities of our life here, it does not mean it is ‘normal’. We can expect better. We were created for better. And we all feel it in our hearts, my grief just amplifies it a bit more.
The painful part of this grief reminds me that nothing in this world can replace or remove the pain of losing my baby, but the sanctifying part of this grief reminds me that this world was never intended to do that. That the one hope I have, the only One who can satisfy the longing of our hearts for a world redeemed and restored, a world without pain, without the death or suffering of our loved ones, without the daily dissension, violence, and strife we see among people, is God. He alone can fix and restore this broken world, and man does the grief within me yearn for that day, the day when my grief will meet its rightful end, when what we have all lost and suffered will be finally restored and redeemed. When the amputation is no longer an amputation, but a full healing and restoration of what was and always should have been there.
And so this grief has me literally aching and yearning for heaven, for God to restore and redeem everything because the pain and brokenness of this world is now physically felt in my grief and longing for Mirari. And I have confidence that though the pain is deep right now, it’s just a glimpse into the magnitude of the joy I can expect to feel when I meet my baby boy again.
