What does your grief look like?

I have been an avid reader since the first grade. I have the receipts: my Mom unearthed a note I slid under her door when I was very young, earnestly repenting for whatever sin I’d committed that had prompted her to cancel a trip to the library.

I read in church. I read in the car. I read on my beanbag in the closet under the stairs. I wouldn’t put a book down until I finished it, even if I didn’t care for the story that much. I was in seminary before I failed to finish all the reading for a class. I was driven in leisure and school reading to the point that my self-discipline sometimes (often?) tipped over into isolation and insufferability.

Over the past few years I’ve given myself more license to put a book down if I didn’t like it. Life is short, after all. The occasions when I quit on reading were still rare, though.

That changed a few months ago. In the second half of 2021, I kicked more books to the curb than I read to the end. I wasn’t sure what that was about until I returned a Fredick Backman book - a Fredrik Backman book, for goodness’ sake - with 1/3 of it still to go. It seemed clear that one of the teenage characters was about to die by suicide, and I said, “NOPE.” I opened my Libby app and clicked “return early” without a moment of hesitation. It was suddenly clear to me that my grief had been triggered. A year and a half of Covid fear and malaise, then the death of my father when Covid blew through his memory care unit and his already disease-ridden body couldn’t withstand the virus - it was too much. I was returning books left and right, either because I had no energy for them or they were just more sad than I could bear.

We think of grief as tears or fatigue or withdrawal or even anger. But it doesn’t have to look that way. Sometimes it’s the figurative throwing of a book across the room. How does your individual grief manifest? How does the collective grief of a congregation that has endured so much loss and change show up?

We’ve got to acknowledge and make room for our grief so that we can lament and offer our honest selves up to God. Otherwise, we’ll be mired in despair that keeps us stuck in a reality we no longer recognize, unable to imagine our way forward.

Do you need to throw a book across the room? Yell into the void? Cry so many tears that they carve salty riverbeds in your cheeks? It’s ok. God understands. God welcomes all of our feelings. God sits with us in them. And God invites (sometimes nudges) us into a future that might not be what we hoped or planned but that can be abundant and good and hard in a really holy way.

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash.