This is a slightly altered and shortened version (in respect to the widow) of a letter I recently wrote to a friend whose husband unexpectedly died. Since all married people will one day face the same inevitability I hope this may give a Latter-day Saint perspective.
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I hope it is
now the time for the reading. I know the
grieving will go on for quite some time, and in fact some of it will never go
away—neither should it, for you have experienced love with _______, and true
love cannot and will not and must not be dismissed; if it were, I believe it
would be a grave sin.
You have
heard many words of sympathy.
Doubtlessly they have been heartfelt and some have helped. In many cases they have been awkwardly or
painfully delivered because the speaker or well-wisher has earnestly wanted to
help you, but felt inadequate in knowing how to give comfort. Many truly have felt a little of your pain
because they have been stunned as you have by _______’s abrupt departure. (I do
not use the word ‘deceased’ because his spirit has not ‘ceased’ to be.) But
because they loved you, as many have your husband, and because you are half of
the equation called _______&_______, they wanted to absorb some of your
grief or bewilderment and they didn’t want to see the flame in you, that has
lightened their own lives, diminish. You
must understand you are a light in many peoples’ lives, and not everyone has
this gifted quality. People are
attracted by light. Keep the light on
for them even as you may feel darkness (temporarily) yourself.
Life, at
times will feel an emptiness—a bleak pervasive void that nothing seems to
fill. The sharing that is so much a part
of a good marriage will be highly missed.
It is a right response to feel immensely sad for a time because you will
not have this sharing and intimacy. But
the sadness will wane, though you will probably not believe this now. Just know that
after a period of approved, appropriate and natural grieving (D&C 42:45-46)
it will become inappropriate to cling to the past out of a false sense of duty;
for as _______ has moved forward so too must you. It is
a Christian duty to be as happy as you can (see D&C 61: 36-37). The waning of this void will eventually be
filled, just as a wound is by scar or new tissue, but it takes time, unless the
Lord speeds it up for you as He did for me, and in the meantime it is very
tender. I believe ________ is sorely
missing you too; he has to because personality is the same on both sides of the
veil between this life and the next.
Something
you have learned is that death is an event that does not stop or end a life, as
so many think who do not have our strong faith, but death rather consummates it. Death is, in fact, not an event but part of
the process of life progress. If you are trying to live right, God
does or allows nothing to happen that is not, or cannot be, for our, or our
loved one’s eventual best good. You must
learn from this sorrow whatever it has to teach. _________’s death was not unforeseen by God,
neither is He indifferent to it or to your prayers. Though it may not seem like your time to have
this happen, or your family’s time, it was ________’s time and it was in God’s
time. Bear your sorrow patiently and
trust that one day you will have the peace that “passeth all
understanding.” I testify that it comes
as promised.
One
coincidental observation that comes to the person left behind is the greater
knowledge you will begin to gain about the wholeness of the man who you only
knew in part. A funeral typically begins
that process. As you reconstruct your
years with ________—through photographs, letters, cards, conversations with
family and friends and others who knew_________—hundreds of forgotten or half-forgotten
memories will be restored to you, even unbidden and will leap into your mind at
the strangest times and places and paradoxically you will come to know your
husband even better and appreciate him even more. You will recover and see the wholeness of
this man of whom you are part and you will thank God for this sharing that, if
you continue faithful, will see what was just a preamble to what lies ahead for
you.
Now I would
like to give to you a few observations from C. S. Lewis, a man from whom I have
learned much, from his book A Grief
Observed, written after his wife
died. Her death plunged him first
into despair but before he died in 1963 he became reconciled to death and to
God and wrote of his journey through the grieving process. He was brilliant—a convert to
Christianity—but he did not have the perspective we have from the fullness of
the gospel of Jesus Christ. His exact
words will be put in italics, mine in
explanation or sentence construction in regular type.
·
Your
awareness of ________’s death will be your companion every hour of every waking
day for some time: [His] absence is like
the sky, spread over everything.
·
It is hard to have patience with
people who say, ‘There is no death,’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is
death. And whatever is matters. You might as well say that birth doesn’t
matter.
·
Not
long, maybe only a few weeks or a month or two after his wife’s death Lewis
wrote of: the slow insidious beginning of
a process that will make [the departed person] I think of into a more and more
imaginary [person]. Founded on fact, no
doubt . . . but the composition inevitably becomes more and more [your] own.
The reality [was] no longer there to check me, to pull me up short. This means, if your experience is like
his, that you will selectively
remember things about ________ that will become your image of him. Lewis wisely warns us to not worship the
image. Just remember what you can in
gratitude and know that when you see him next (for he will still be yours) he
will be ‘added upon,’ and then you will have some great conversations.
·
After
some period of mourning (I don’t know how long—probably months) Lewis said: Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons. . . my heart was lighter
than it had been for many weeks. For one
thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere
exhaustion. After ten days of low-hung
gray skies…the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far,
I mourned [her] least, I remembered her best.
Indeed it was something almost
better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going
too far. Yet there was that in it which
tempts one to use those words. It was as
if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.
[I] remember her better because [I have] partly got over it. Such was the fact. You can’t see anything properly while your
eyes are blurred with tears. [It was]
the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us
feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead. Passionate
grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. [Now] I have gradually been coming to feel
that the door is no longer shut and bolted.
Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? [I may have been]
like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps [my] own reiterated cries deafened me
to the voice I hoped to hear. After all, you must have a capacity to receive,
or even omnipotence can’t give.
·
Sorrow is not a state but a process.
Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss.
I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. As for me, I walked, ran, and exercised a great deal following my wives’
deaths; I found the physical tiredness helped me sleep. I also wrote letters to many people and most
especially to my wives; these I ‘sent’ to them on the wings of my prayers to God
in hopes they would be delivered. I
believe they were.
·
For all pairs of lovers, without
exception, bereavement is a universal
and integral part of our experience of love.
It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as
autumn follows summer. It is not a
truncation of the process, but one of its phases; not the interruption of the
dance, but the next figure.
You are a
seasoned saint, _________. You will make
it and you will yet have joy.
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