On those special days it still hurts - badly. And it always will. A wise person once said, "There are some losses you never get over. You simply learn how best you are going to live with them."
Make no mistake, I have grieved as thoroughly, as often, and as well as I know how to do it. It is not because of repressed grief that the wound is yet to fully close -- but because of the magnitude of the loss.
Jacob, the scriptures tell us, came out of his long, dark night of the soul with a limp. It was a wound of which he would be aware for the rest of his life. Mine is different from his, but I always have resonated with that passage -- with that limp.
The scriptures didn't say he would always be in pain with it, only perhaps on certain days, when the weather does its number on aching joints. Nor did they say it slowed him down. It was mostly an awareness of where he had been and what he had been through -- which hurt every so often.
That's the way it seems to be with deep losses and old wounds. A widow of thirty years tears up as she speaks of the day they met and began falling in love. A man pauses in mid-sentence to catch his breath as he talks of his mother he lost as a child.
Did they not grieve enough? Was too much tucked away and repressed? Perhaps. Or maybe the loss was so profound, the wound so deep that they will always walk with a hint of a limp. Those tender moments are such an affirmation of what was and always will be.
Yet, Jacob met the sunrise with more than a bum hip. He also had a new name. He had a new identity. In some important ways Jacob -- Israel, that is -- was a new person. For those who don't run from their dark nights by the river, for those who instead engage the struggle before them, there is a change that takes place. It may be either subtle or apparent. . . but it is true of anyone who is forced by life circumstances to go within themselves, where they had never been before.
They face the morning light with a depth, a grounding, an awareness of so much more that God had placed within them.
Nineteen years ago my wife Karen said to me, "We're going to make it through this and have fun and enjoy ourselves again. Because if we don't, then Eric will not have been the only one who died." We came back. . . no, we moved on to a new place. We moved through it to a place we had never been before. We had to go down and draw on resources heretofore untouched. We discovered more about God and about ourselves than we had ever known.
I may climb the hill at the cemetery with a limp on that afternoon each August. But I climb it, also, with a strength and a spirit I brought with me out of that long, dark night.
Ron Greer is a pastoral counselor with the pastoral counseling serivce at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church. He can be reached at [email protected].
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/10/189447