From “Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding healing and hope in sharing our sadness, grief, trauma, and pain” by Jeffrey Munroe
“Sorrow is a large word,” Marilyn said, “larger than sadness. Sadness is an emotion, but sometimes it’s helpful to think of sorrow as a place you go. It’s similar to what Flannery O’Connor said about sickness – that sickness is a place you go and nobody can follow you. Sorrow is also place you go on your own journey, but others are there. It’s a pool you step into that other people are in. Sorrow is a shared space that becomes more familiar as you get older, because if you live long enough you inevitably have losses. Increasingly, I feel as though sorrow is a part of our contract with God: We come here on this assignment, this journey, and part of the territory we’ve agreed to walk through is the vale of tears, the valley of the shadow of death. God will be with us, but we won’t be spared sorrow. I have appreciated the opportunity through hospice to be reflective about what it means to bear witness or to be willing to witness someone’s sorrow. As you do that, the question that naturally arises is, ‘How do you process your own sorrow?’
“Here are a few things I’ve learned processing loss: First, grief takes you by surprise. As much as I appreciate the efforts people have made to name and identify stages of grief, I don’t trust ‘staging’. Things happen the way they happen. An analogy has been made to the stages of labor, but after giving birth to three children I’d say the idea that there are stages of labor is laughable. Obstetrics is full of surprises. So also with grief. Grief doesn’t take a foreordained course. It’s going to be a thread in your life story, not an event. I still miss my mother, even though it’s been years since she died. It’s not as though I can say, ‘That happened, I had a mother, she lived a good long life, she died, now I’m over the loss of her.’ Grief doesn’t go away; sorrow is one measure of the value of what has departed from our lives. I talk with people whose loved one, like my mother, lived a good long life and they wonder if they have a right to grieve because ‘it was time’ for their loved one to die. But we all have a right to grief.”