Absorbing the fury of grief within the shock of loss

The image of panicked shock, horror, disbelief, and of an overwhelm that has ongoing consequences; this sort of moment, when you have experienced it in its primal form, is not something you can ever forget.

You see it in others and you immediately identify with what they are going through.  And if you’re not careful, it triggers your own grief, as you step back into that land that time forgot.

Loss does something with our perceptions of time.  It completely reconfigures our notions for the length of seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks.  Within loss everything slows down.  It’s like the seconds almost grind to a halt, and the excruciating pain we feel is ever magnified because of this.

As each day exhausts us, we wake to a new day where the scariest information brought to consciousness is the range of emotional experience we may need to traverse, from the lowest of lows, to those cheeky and cruel highs that tease us with how fleeting they are.

For the person who has been blindsided and backwashed into a corner of life we call oblivion, there is nothing we can do in those precociously tormenting moments that make up the first days and weeks.

Every now and then there will be a fury let out, whether by tears that don’t stop, coming in torrents, or whether by numbness where all thought and feeling make way for an everlasting plateau of nothingness, or whether by sheer rage if there’s enough energy for what that takes, and this fury can only be absorbed if we have been called into the external reaches of support.  If support, then we pray their grace is sufficient.  God’s is.

Sitting in the space, absorbing the fury, which is an energy of grief all its own, is ground zero for trauma.  We go there with the person, being carefully detached in order to let it wash over us, even as the overflow must necessarily be absorbed in faith that it won’t harm us.  It’s far too much for any human being to sit in that space without God.

So, we go there having prayed, even as we continue to pray in that space, and even as others are praying for us, giving us cover, for it is perilous to go there without God.

But I am a hypocrite. Those who know me the best, my family, know that I respond far better to a stranger’s pain or a non-family member’s suffering than I do when someone I love is in physical pain — I’m okay with other pain.  I actually find physical pain really hard to accept in my loved ones (as I go into empathy overload which triggers anxiety); I lack patience and grace at times with those I most love when they most need it.  I am thankful I can be there for others though, and perhaps God keeps me humble by the fact my spiritual gifts don’t seem to work as well in family situations.

Whatever happens in life, wherever we go, whatever we do, and whomever we live our lives with, there is always the ever-present potentiality of experiencing the shock of loss that brings such fury of grief we would hardly believe ever before existed.

It’s at these times that God gets our attention most of all, because we were blind all that time not to know the extremities of suffering that exist in this life.  And even as we journey through such bewildering days, with God we get a glimpse of hope because we cannot do this journey without faith.

Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash