Grief

There are folks who endeavor not to feel emotions. We’ve all known people who hide their tears, their sorrow, even their love. We mistakenly call that “being strong”, but it isn’t. Burying emotions is corrosive and ultimately erupts in some way, as anger, as depression, some other way.

I’m no expert but I do know what grief feels like and, of one thing I’m certain, it doesn’t just disappear once and for all. I know folks who do their best to overcome grief by chasing constant distraction. They fill their days with activities so they won’t have time to think, won’t have time to feel. I understand the desire to do so. Unfortunately, busyness is only a bandage. Grief does not have a cure but denying its existence delays the possibility of some healing.

When we pray, we do not, necessarily, believe God is going to alter reality so everything is all better but, putting our deepest feelings into words gives us the capacity to deal with it. Nameless pain or fear gives us no handle with which to grasp what we’re dealing with. By naming it, we put it into a box that remains but doesn’t occupy every moment.

Most Americans don’t recognize the name Tohoku Earthquake. That was the massive earthquake and tsunami which devastated the Japanese island of Honshu. The tsunami produced waves up to 132 feet high, thousands of homes were destroyed and more than 15,500 people died. That’s the disaster that destroyed the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

One man, Itaru Sasaki, dealt with it in an unusual way. In his town, over eight hundred people were washed out to sea in less than a minute. Included in the dead was a beloved cousin. He felt utterly alone and dealt with it by buying an old telephone booth and set it in his garden. He bought an old, black, rotary phone and put it on a small table in the booth. The phone wasn’t connected to anything but Mr. Sasaki would sit and talk over his “wind telephone” to his cousin, telling him about his life and how he was carrying on.

Word spread about this telephone, disconnected though it was, where a person might express their grief. People began to come in droves. NPR did a story about it.

People expressed their grief, their pain. They talked about their lives. It wasn’t that the phone was somehow a portal to the afterworld, but it was a tool enabling people to put into words their deepest feelings. They could, in this odd way, use language to communicate with the universe and, by finding words, they placed their pain in a linguistic box that could be dealt with better than unnamed grief. By speaking their grief they also could envision a path that led to hope, that led to light and promise.

Allowing ourselves to express our grief doesn’t devalue the love we’ve lost but it does give us a glimpse of hope so we may endure.