AS THE leaves curl and the nights attract, the season tilts us towards November — the “month of the dead”, in response to the Orkney author George Mackay Brown. With the taking place of the sun, November brings the dead back to memory: guys and ghouls; saints and souls; all those that have laid down their lives. Remembrancetide reminds us that, within the words of the old burial service, “within the midst of life we’re in death”. As the fields whiten, the season proclaims that loss abounds: it’s woven into our human tapestry.
Yet we hardy need the reminder. Our lives are freighted with loss. We experience it in lots of guises. It involves us, not only within the well-worn cloak of bereavement, but plays in 10,000 places: a wrinkle, a gray hair, a diagnosis, a failure, a break-up. Grief — our natural response to loss — is an almost constant companion. We may not experience overt grief, day-to-day, however it often lurks within the shallows, and rises at a reminder.
The all-pervasive nature of loss and grief places a matter mark over human life. Is life merely one long tale of woe, a vale of tears from which there isn’t a escape? Or might it’s that something as universal as loss and grief could, in a roundabout way, be adaptive for the human species? To put it in another way: can we discover in grief any redemptive possibilities?
THE author and musician Nick Cave lost his teenage son in an accident. In his book Faith, Hope and Carnage (Books, 25 November 2022), he reflects on his grief and its “mutinous energy”. He speaks of “the concept of grief as a present”, and witnesses to his experience that grief brought him closer to “the elemental essence of things”. More remarkable still, he observes that “it actually appears like grief and God are by some means intertwined.”
The experience of many who’ve been racked by grief is that, at times, a surprising invitation might be discerned within the darkness and pain. Grief has been known to enlarge our humanity, change our perspective, and connect us in recent ways to ourselves, to others, and to the divine. Where that is so, it seems appropriate to talk of the “spirituality” of grief.
This might seem to be an outlandish claim. Loss, in spite of everything, asks to be mourned, and mourning has no shortcuts. The strategy of mourning is enabled after we allow ourselves to experience grief in all its rawness — and don’t pretend that grief is by some means OK, or push it underground in an try and “be strong”. If there may be a spirituality to grief, it must begin by acknowledging the painful necessity of grief, while remaining open to hearing a voice within the darkness, an invite to greater connection, insight, and growth.
IN MY book All Is Not Loss, I explore a few of the ways wherein we would hear grief’s invitation. This may emerge within the midst of bereavement; but we may equally encounter the spirituality of grief within the face of many different kinds of loss, including mortality, dependence, parting, nostalgia, failure, shame, and regret. Each chapter of the book takes up a distinct theme.
How can grief give back to us? In bereavement, grieving people can often discern, eventually, an invite to maintain living: to forge recent connections, reframe their lives, and grow through grief. The story goes that the violinist Itzhak Perlman once played a concert on an instrument with one broken string. Afterwards, he said, “Our job is to make music with what stays.” It is an apt metaphor for the duty that many bereaved people face.
OTHER types of loss also hold out promise. As we age, we encounter — with increasing urgency — the actual fact of our mortality. The discovery that our years are finite is a loss. There are only so many summers. Yet the wisdom of the centuries (“memento mori”) invites us to keep in mind that we’re to die. There is a paradox here: remembering death enhances life. The wound of mortality invites us to live life to the total.
Many of us fear the prospect of ageing, illness, progressive disability, and dying. These experiences are laced with loss. They are unlikely places wherein to find the gifts of grief. Yet the experience of some who’ve testified from a spot of painful dependence is that each one will not be loss, even within the midst of their suffering. There continues to be a life to be lived.
Parting is a loss that we experience throughout our lives. The “empty nest” when children leave home can turn into a major loss, whose grief is commonly played down. Recently, I spoke to a lady who had just returned from dropping off her son at university. On the two-hour journey home, she had cried all the way in which. Was this his first 12 months, I wondered? No, she explained: he had been working there for a decade. Such partings might be painful — but they might be crucial losses that allow like to be proved within the act of letting go.
A CURIOUS loss is the experience of nostalgia. At root, the word implies “anguish for home”, and yet there’s something about this loss which we almost enjoy. Sepia-tinted memories tug at our hearts and make us long to return: childhood holidays, rural idylls, vinyl records, old haunts. Yet, whilst we wallow in delicious longing, nostalgia invites us to wonder what it’s that we’re really after. A forgotten a part of ourselves, perhaps? Or a house for our restless hearts — restless, as St Augustine prayed, “until they find their rest in thee”?
The loss felt from failure may speak to us differently. It is simply recently that the English language has spliced human endeavour into the binary categories of success and failure. Still more recently have now we have applied these labels to people. Being confronted with our own failures might be acutely painful. Yet, our acquaintance with failure can result in essential insights, similar to the liberating realisation that failure is an option — the very opposite of our prevailing corporate jargon. Courting failure can open us as much as its nicer alternative: human flourishing.
SHAME is a related loss that may result in disenfranchised grief. This occurs where losses are usually not publicly visible or socially sanctioned. In a culture wherein same-sex couples won’t be comfortable with being “out”, for instance, the grief of a bereaved partner might not be acknowledged. Other losses may simply feel too private to share, similar to deep grief felt from a failed course of IVF. Such losses may invite us, eventually, to forged off so-called shame and permit our grief to turn into the grief that dares to talk its name.
Regret is one other type of loss: a crucial loss if we’re to take risks of the sort that make our lives value living. Regret might be particularly wrenching, because it belongs to a past that we will not get better or change. Yet the invitation of regret could also be to return and keep vigil on the fork within the road and make peace with the people we once were. As we learn to practise compassionate hindsight, we will begin to forgive our quirky, created selves, and the selections that we made back then. We can embrace the transformative insight of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “What I do is me, and for that I got here.”
The Revd Dr Duncan MacLaren has worked with loss and grief in health-care settings for greater than a decade. He is a hospice counsellor in Edinburgh, and was previously head of spiritual care and bereavement in NHS Lothian.
All Is Not Loss: The spirituality of grief is published by Canterbury Press at £14.99 (Church Times Bookshop £11.99); 978-1-78622-613-6.
