“What is grief if not love abruptly interrupted?
For the past few nights, I have dreamt about Jenn. If you have known early grief yourself, you also know that it brings a slew of strange, vivid dreams. Last night I was the manager of some massive hotel. I wore an apron, then a business suit. Sometimes I was holding Jenn’s babies. At one point, I was holding all these babies, asking them what I should say at their mom’s funeral. “Don’t mention video games,” the babies said. “She wouldn’t want that.”
In my dream, I kept searching the hotel grounds for her. Jenn would be in one room. I’d go to find her, only to discover she had just left that room. I caught a glimpse of her long blonde hair leaving a room at one point, but I kept getting there too late. I kept missing her.
I keep missing her.
Because I don’t know what to do with all this nothingness and normalcy, with all these disorienting, nonsensical dreams, I just keep keeping myself busy. My errands become a little manic, honestly: I drive from Starbucks and Dunkin to Target and Walgreens to Costco and TJ Maxx. I am frantically running errands to be helpful and, honestly, to avoid my pain. Keep moving. Keep the motor on. Don’t stop. Just keep driving. Just keep running.
When we lose our people, the relationship doesn’t just evaporate. Our twenty-five years of “Jonathan and David” friendship, as someone recently called it, didn’t die just because Jenn did. And all that kinetic momentum doesn’t just dissipate; it demands to go somewhere. Grief, as others have said, is love with nowhere to land.
What is grief if not love abruptly interrupted? What is grief if not love’s collision with an invisible, impervious boundary? What is grief if not looking for Jesus to make Something from the Nothing that is death? What is grief if not frantically running errands, hoping it will bring back your person?
While driving back and forth from one to-do to the next, I’m listening to things in a blur, avoiding pain with noise as much as with tasks. Between podcasts and radio shows and YouTube videos and audio books, everything runs together. In the mess of white noise, I hear someone, or several people maybe, say some version of “It’s important to dig deep wells in your grief. In your heartache, fill yourself up. Soak life in, so that you become a deep-water body of
wisdom.” This voice, or these voices—I don’t really know because grief- brain is soup- brain— suggest the griever fills up his or her days with literature, art, music, study, travel, experiences, rich creativity, and adventures. And I get it, I guess. That’s a good formula for developing a deep-well kind of life, but it’s terribly tone-deaf advice in early grief. Digging deep wells requires the tools and the strength to jab and shovel the earth. And in this frantic, upside-down reality of fresh grief, it’s hard to do much more than lie down next to a puddle.
When you’re falling to the ground in tears every few hours or running around like the proverbial chicken with no head, your only job is to exist. Someday you’ll have capacity for “soaking life in.” But now is not the time to feel any pressure or shame to do more than you can. With every ounce of strength I can muster (which is admittedly not many ounces), I give you permission, in your early days of grief, not to dig any wells.
Recovery is slow work. It takes a long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long time.
I have said this before but it bears repeating: you can feel what you need to for as long as you need. Period. Done.
But, paradoxically, something else is true: Even as we can do nothing but exist—endure—in the absurdity and surreal normalcy, in the intrusive pain and seemingly endless tears, we are somehow becoming a deep well. Whether or not we want to. Whether we do anything creative or meaningful. Whether all we can do is breathe, drink some water, and sit on the couch in a daze. Or whether we stumble through Target like a madwoman on a mission.
What I am trying to say is this: Whatever you are capable of (or incapable of) in your fresh pain, you have permission to just be. You even have permission to change your mind throughout the days—throughout the minutes—about the best way to be. In fact, not knowing what to do is a perfectly reasonable way to survive the initial onslaught of grief.
And maybe that’s how it actually happens: You become a deep well in early loss, not by digging or cultivating, or filling up your days with art and adventure, but by dealing in a whole lot of I don’t knows. By giving yourself permission to simply be, bit by bit, grace by grace—that is how you will develop the depth and fortitude necessary to move through heartache.
For me, I don’t know if I should keep driving from place to place, from one errand to the next, or stop running and try on stillness for a bit. I feel like I’ve become a flotation device, detached from my body, blowing and bouncing around aimlessly. So maybe slowing down, getting still, would allow the voice of loss to speak its pain and help my healing. Maybe it would anchor me. Admittedly, I don’t quite know how to pause my internal engine long enough to tend to my needs. And I don’t really want to, not yet anyway. That’s okay. That can’t be forced either. Those days will come. Today, I permit myself to be. That’s all I can do anyway.
Grief launches us on a strange new orbit, and for now, we’re getting our bearings while the earth reels in an entirely different direction than we were used to. So let’s let grief take us wherever it needs to, and let’s not feel shamed or pressured to do or be anything else. I’ll try if you try. Or I’ll change my mind about trying. That’s okay too.
I will tell you this. One place my early grief eventually takes me is a small, aching, defiant act. It won’t feel important or deep-wellish to anyone. But it’s a tiny, and in my mind, important way to pause and honor my pain and sadness:
Soon, it will be time to pack up the Christmas decorations for the year, hauling them back into their storage space in the attic.
As I do, I will think, Jenn was here, in the world, when we unwrapped these. She’s not here now.
Such a noteworthy demarcation, such a notch in the universe’s timeline. Every Christmas from now on, Jenn will not be in the world. This makes no sense to me, the way death makes no sense.
But I will leave out one winter twig of decorative greenery anyway.
I will wrap it in twinkle lights and set it by a framed photo of Jenn and me.
It’s not literature or theology, or a richly creative notion. It’s not adventure. But it serves as a tiny little breath blowing against the Nothingness. It is Christmas, persevering.
Now more than ever, in the nothing and normalcy of death, I need something small enough not to feel like pressure but possible enough to stand as a vigil.
Adapted from What We Find in the Dark: Loss, Hope, and God’s Presence in Grief by Aubrey Sampson. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.
Photo Credit: © Unsplash/Riccardo Mion
