Grief as Spiritual Formation: Allowing Burden Bearing

by Peggy Haymes, Pinnacle Associate

Editor’s note: The following is the third in a five-part series by Peggy Haymes on grief as spiritual formation.

He called as soon as he learned of my father’s death. “What can we do?” my neighbor asked. “I’m fine,” I said—my stock answer. It didn’t satisfy him, and he asked again. Surely there was something with which I needed help. When I allowed myself to stop being fine, I had a very practical concern. “People will be bringing food by the house before and after the service,” I said. He and his wife took care of it.

Grief makes us needy, which is a tough call for people like me who have navigated life being just fine, not asking for help, and politely refusing it when offered. Maybe you know something about that.

How did you react when you read that part about being needy? Did it make you uncomfortable?

Merriam-Webster tells me the definition of needy is being in want, and for many of us, the needy are those people for whom we bring food or collect clothes. We want to help them. We certainly don’t want to be them.

And yet, in grief, we are in want.

In grief, our wanting can feel like a ravenous lion who takes too much of who we are, or more truthfully, takes too much of who we have been, leaving us with mismatched scraps with which to fashion a new life.

Grief leaves us wanting in disturbingly practical ways. Grief brain is a real thing; the fuzzy-headedness that makes even the most commonplace things a wild dance of remembering and forgetting. 

The simplest of things are suddenly unimaginably hard.

We are in want.

We need help.

We are vulnerable in our neediness, but if you ask us what we need, many of us are quick to reassure you of our just fine-ness. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to admit that we need anything. Perhaps it’s because we feel like we need everything and we haven’t a clue as to where to start.

We are created in the image of God. We are not God.

Because we are not God, we have limits. We are limited by time and space. We are limited by our particular physical bodies. Those whom we love are limited by their particular bodies as well.

When I was a kid, I had a swing set in our backyard. After watching some kind of superhero show, I kept jumping off of the crossbar that stabilized the front and back of the V-shaped side frame, flying through the air in imitation of the superhero. I knew I couldn’t fly, of course. But for those few seconds hurtling through space, I felt as if I were indeed flying.

We cannot flap our arms and fly, even if we feel like we should be able to. We cannot navigate the waters of grief all on our own, no matter how much we feel like we should. We cannot program our grief, no matter how organized we usually are.

Grief interrupts the commonplace preoccupations of our lives to call the questions: What does it mean to have bodies and lives that have limits? What does that mean for how we say yes and how we say no? How do our souls that want to fly live in harmony with these bodies that cannot?

What does it mean to be vulnerable in community, whether that community is the handful of close friends who love you regardless or a church that sees the tears you thought you could control better than this?

What does it mean, in your grief, to have to say, “I can’t,” to things to which you’ve always said, “I will.”?

My friends showed up on Saturday morning with a lawn mower. My particular loss at that time was temporarily losing the ability to walk due to a fractured pelvis when a Buick collided with my bike-riding self.

“David can cut your grass,” Gay said, “and I’ll just do a few things around here. Where’s your broom? I can sweep the porch.” I immediately began listing all the reasons why they could not and would not do such things. It was fine. I was fine. Looking me square in the eyes, she said, with a bit of an edge to her voice, “Peggy, you don’t understand. We need to do this.”

Then I got it. They loved me.

Doing the things that very much needed to be done was an expression of their love. Who was I to refuse them the chance to share that gift?

We are created in the image of God. We are not God.

Our deep need and aching want in grief is an affirmation of both truths. In letting go of our need to be capable and always ready to rise to the occasion, we discover a certain wounded wholeness.

Peggy Haymes is a minister, therapist and coach. She is the creator of the Pinnacle small group curriculum (8 weeks), Navigating GriefLand.