..."A diverse, spirit-growing, justice-seeking community"   PAST SERMONS "Good Grief" October 10, 2004 Rev. Robert M. Hardies SERMON Not long after her husband, Bob, died of a virulent cancer, Patricia Monaghan lost her keys. One day, on her way out the door to the grocery store, she patted the pocket where she always kept them, only to discover that they were gone. At first she thought that she'd simply misplaced them, like we all do. So she checked all the usual places: the kitchen counter, the bedroom bureau, her purse. But no keys. After an hour or so of looking, she began to panic. Afterall, the set contained her last remaining car key. So she retraced her steps from the previous day, she ransacked the clothes she'd worn, she yanked mattresses off of sofas, clawed through yesterday's garbage, knelt down on the dusty floor and peered under her bed. Still no keys. Then, Patricia picked herself up off the floor, sank into the bed she'd once shared with her husband, and cried, inconsolably, for what seemed like hours. When her tears finally subsided she was overcome with anger, she got up from the bed and stalked the room, screaming at her dead husband. Telling him how cruel and heartless he was to leave her alone in her hour of need. If he still loved her, he would come to her now. "In my furious pain," she writes, "I flung down a challenge [to my husband]... Find my keys, I insisted. Find my damned keys! If there's anyone there, if there's any love left in this universe for me, find my keys!" "After the fury had passed," she continues, "I felt mortified. I had been screaming at a dead man. Standing in my room alone, screaming at a dead man." People often come to their minister in the midst of grief, not knowing quite what to do. They say, "OK. Here I am. It hurts... a lot. So what am I supposed to do? How do I get through this? Tell me. Tell me how to grieve well." I wanted to share Patricia Monaghan's story this morning -- a story she has recounted in an award-winning essay, "Physics and Grief" -- as a way of saying that there is no tidy prescription for how we should grieve. Patricia's desperate search for her lost keys, a story which we'll return to later, reveals grief as it really is: messy. Sometimes, embarrassing. Always unpredictable. You never know when a lost set of keys or a chance encounter with an old photo will trigger your grief. But there are some things that I share with people to try to help them understand what they're going through. To help them cope with their grief. And I want to share some of them with you this morning in the hope that we can all learn to grieve well. One thing we DO know for certain is that grief is our natural human response to loss. Grief is our natural human response to loss. Now, usually we associate grief with death, but death is just one of many losses we experience in our lifetimes. Lots of times, people come to me because they're feeling sad -- they're grieving -- but they can't quite pinpoint why. And so I ask them to begin by telling me about the recent losses that they've experienced in their life. Our lives are full of losses. A young woman gets fired from her job. She'll grieve that loss. A young man finally gives up on his dream of one day singing for the Metropolitan Opera. He will grieve the loss of that hoped-for future, even though it only ever existed as a glimmer in his mind's eye. An elderly person watches as one and then another and then another of his once sharp faculties begins to deteriorate. That's a loss. A woman loses a breast. A soldier loses a leg. These are just SOME of the losses that we human beings might grieve over in our lifetimes. Now the thing you need to know about loss is that its as stubborn as a mule. It hangs around. It outstays its welcome. And long after the initial, acute pain is gone, it lingers somewhere in our subconscious, ready to rear its head again. So what happens is that each new loss we suffer in our lives recalls one or two previous losses. And, each new loss we suffer foreshadows the losses that we fear might loom in our future, including the final loss which is our death. Often times, people can't figure out why they're getting so upset about something that -- on the surface at least -- isn't that big of a deal to them. It's because they're not just grieving the immediate loss, there's a whole history of losses that comes rushing into the present. So for example today's visit to the hospital to treat a minor ailment recalls that visit 10 years ago, when you were there fighting for your life. And you better believe that you'll grieve them both again today . Grief is our multi-layered response to the complex intertwining of the past and future losses of our lives. How, then, do we confront grief and loss? How do we cope so that we can emerge on the other side, able to move forward with our lives. I believe that there are two tasks that are essential to healthy grieving. One is an emotional task. The other is a spiritual task. On the surface of it, the emotional task would appear to be straightforward: its to allow yourself to experience the roller coaster of emotions that often accompany grief. Each person feels something different, but we know that typical responses range anywhere from shock and denial to sadness, fear and anger, to guilt and shame. Lots of us experience all or many of these emotions, some of us dwell on one or two. What I've discovered in working with people who grieve is that they don't want to let themselves feel those emotions. Right? I mean they're painful. And we're also afraid that we might lose control. That our sorrow will be like a bottomless pit from which we'll never extract ourselves. Or we're afraid that we'll do something embarrassing, like shout at our dead husband in an empty room, or, worse, a crowded room. In fact, let me return for just a moment to Patricia Monaghan's story. Because she did something that I think lots of us do when we try to avoid experiencing the emotions associated with grief. She started to clean. Let me just ask: How many of you, when there's something more difficult that you should be doing suddenly develop a tendency for neatness? (Any hands?) How many of you are like me and you eat? Rather than grieve her husband's loss, Patricia couldn't get her mind off her lost keys. They became a kind of obsession for her. She knew they had to be in the house, after all, she had used them to open the door the last time she'd come home. So she devised a strategy. She would clean every inch of the house, from top to bottom, and in doing so, would eventually find the keys. She started in the basement, reorganizing the utility shelves and scrubbing the floors. Then she moved on to the first floor, taking the books off of her bookshelves (she's a writer, mind you, so she had lots of them) and dusting each one individually before replacing them. Eventually, she worked her way up to the second floor, sweeping the dust bunnies out from under the bed and waxing every square inch of her hardwood floors. It took days and days to clean every inch of her house, but still, she didn't find the keys. Finally, she could stave off her despair no longer. Exhausted, her defenses now down, she let the wave of sadness and anger and depression wash over her. Now she was doing the emotional work that she needed to do, which was simply to let herself feel all the complicated and painful emotions that grief sent her way. People think somehow if they get all depressed and down, that somehow they've given in to the enemy that is grief. And I try to remind them that grief isn't the enemy. Loss is the enemy. Grief is the FRIEND. Grief is the FRIEND that helps us recover from loss and become whole again. When we stifle our emotions or refuse to experience them, we are only prolonging our agony. Only postponing the date when we can return to the world as whole human beings again. So the emotional task is to try not to suppress the legitimate feelings that grief induces, and instead to let them out. But there's also another, spiritual, task in grieving. You've often heard me say that my definition of religion is that religion is people telling stories of hope. By stories I don't mean falsehoods, I mean narrative, I mean that in order to make sense of our lives we need to have a narrative of our lives. Human beings make meaning through narrative. We need to be able to tell a story of where we've come from and where we're going and why. That's how we discover meaning and purpose in our lives. It works the same way for grief. The spiritual task of grieving is to be able to tell a story about our loss that helps give it some meaning. That helps give it a place in the larger story of our lives. That helps give it context. Because once it has a place and a context, then it doesn't have to consume ALL of us ALL the time. The loss never goes away, we can never delete it entirely from the story of our lives, but by giving it a context, we can gain perspective and move on as whole people again. What do I mean by being able to tell a story about our loss? Well, a familiar story that people tell about loss is, "It was God's plan." Another story could simply be: "I am a person who has suffered many losses, and those losses have made me stronger and more compassionate and more open to the love that still awaits me." The story doesn't have to supply all the answers. It doesn't have to be a feel-good story, it certainly doesn't have to be a tragic story. But the story we tell about our loss makes a difference. It determines what that loss will mean for our history and where we will move on to from there. Almost one year to the day after Patricia Monaghan had given up looking for her keys, she found them. She was sitting in a chair in her study, reading, when she glanced up and noticed the carved metal end of a key ticking out from behind a poster that hung on the back of her study door. She pulled on the exposed end of the key and the whole set fell out on the floor. Of course, the burning question for Monaghan was: "HOW did the keys get behind the poster?" She was the only one who had touched, them, so SHE must've put them there somehow. So Monaghan conducted a series of experiments to discover how she might've accidentally stuck the keys behind the poster. She walked through the doorway to see if they caught on the poster, but they didn't. She tried dropping the keys on top of the poster, to see if they would slip behind, but they only fell to the floor. She tried throwing the keys at the poster from various angles, but each time the keys bounced off helplessly. The only way she found to get the keys back behind the poster was to pull the poster away from the door with one hand and with the other to place the keys carefully on one of the door's paneled grooves. Instead of becoming exasperated this time, though, Monaghan's puzzled look gave way to a smile, and she said: "You always did have a great sense of humor, Bob Shea." Monaghan concludes her essay by talking about how finding her keys helped her accomplish one of the significant tasks of grief. She writes: "I am comforted by having my keys again. We live in a story, and the story of the keys now has a pleasing symmetry [for me]. But I do not know what that story means. Or, rather: I know that it can mean many things, some contradictory, but perhaps all true at the same time. And I am most deeply comforted by knowing that I cannot every truly know, that the universe is so far beyond our understanding that miracles, even peculiar and rather silly ones like this, are very likely to keep occurring." A good and proper grief allows us to give enough context to our loss, that we can face life once again. In our reading this morning, the Unitarian poet May Sarton takes a lesson from the autumn trees who are shedding their leaves and preparing for a dormant winter so that they might blossom again in the spring. Like the trees, she concludes, "I must lose what I lose, so that I might keep what I can keep." I cant' tell you what story to use to give meaning to your loss. But me and Shana and the Church are here to help you find that story for yourself. And I will say this: I know that the soul is a resilient thing. And I know that no matter how much we've lost, the world continues to offer its beauty and its possibility to us. Love still extends to us its hand. May our grieving give us the solace and courage to take that hand. Amen.