"When we have loved someone enough to consider the world empty once they depart it, we have finally come to life ourselves. Don't be afraid to grieve your losses. They are the signposts of our lives, after which we are never the same again." - Joan Chittister
When renown poet Jane Kenyon died in 1995 at age forty-seven her husband, Donald Hall, was able to write about their life and her death in ways only a poet could accomplish. It's the great writers and speakers and story-tellers who, when they choose to apply themselves to the task, can come the closest to teaching us the richest qualities of our life journey.
By contrast, it doesn't tell us much about a relationship if a surviving spouse simply says, "My wife was an awesome person." If we are to truly honor the departed, we need to work a little harder to find the words, or songs, or paintings, or gestures rather than to default to the trite.
How do we "come to life ourselves" by the way in which we reflect and describe and story-tell to express our experience of the sacredness of a relationship changed by death?
After his wife died, Hall wrote: "...it helped that I had sat so long beside her. Still, it was long before every cell in my body believed in her death."
We read these words and begin to experience Hall's grief, how he valued his marriage, and how he valued the one he loved "enough to consider the world empty" once his wife had departed.
During all of 1977, my wife wrote poetry about the passing of her sister Sonia who had died suddenly at age thirty-six in January of that year. She wore her hair like her sister, wore her clothes and then discovered that her mother and older sister, poet Karen Updike (above, left) had been doing the same thing.
Together, the three put their poetry into a book and did live readings for audiences around the Midwest. Each time they rose to share, their love deepened, and their departed daughter/sister's life became more honored. Her death became a "signpost" after which they were never the same again.
What a gift to be remembered in such a way. What a greater gift to find the courage to turn our hearts into the center of grief to mine there the gold of a life.
Death is among the subjects we fear the most. Yet, each time we brush over the death of someone about whom we cared, our lives are diminished.
Caregivers confront death more often than anyone does. To face the prospect of truly honoring each departing soul can feel too daunting.
The surprise is that to treat departed life with the same respect, awe and celebration as we do an arriving life is to honor all of life. To live Love is to shake off our fear of grief and to embrace life itself.
-Reverend Erie Chapman
