How are you doing?

"How are you doing?"

One of the most commonly-voiced questions in our society.  Often someone will ask me that out of plain old social conditioning and then suck in their breath and say, “Oh, that was a dumb thing to say- sorry!”  To me it is not a dumb question.  It’s a convention we use, and it gives me an opening to say how I am really doing right then, or, in the cases where it’s not a great moment for personal sharing (we are in a rush, one of us is busy with something, the tears are too close to the surface for conversation) it allows me to say, “I’m okay today,” and just move on.

The way I have come to think about “how I am doing” is something like, “I am doing as I should be.”  By this I mean that I expect to be sad and lonely and restless; I expect that nothing will feel the same as it used to; I expect that I will actually feel this enormous loss.  I am not afraid of feeling sad.  I think I am a little afraid of feeling flat and dull, but that is part of the deal sometimes.  When I took pre-natal classes 16 years ago, the instructor told us that when the labor pains would come, we should try to relax into the pain, not to fight it.  Easier said than done, in my case anyway.  But although it was really hard to do that with physical pain, I am finding that I am more able to do it with this pain of loss.  I don’t know why- maybe it is a skill that God is giving me just for this time. 

The interesting thing is that many, many of the books/websites/articles on grief that I have come across seem to take the opposite approach.  There is a definite sense that people (whoever is writing these resources, and also a few people that I encounter) want me to feel “better”.  Sometimes I think this is a result of the medium- magazine articles have to wrap it up quickly, for example, and this can cause a bumper-stickerish feeling.  “Let’s learn to move past our grief!  Let’s find the moral of the story!  Let’s think of God as our husband!”  It kind of makes me want to throw up- or else throw something. Sometimes I sense that a person I am talking with is simply not comfortable with my references to loss, for whatever reason.  That’s ok- not everyone can live in that space. 

I have been very thankful to find a couple of books which have not given me the impression that I should rush through this phase as quickly as possible.  One is a picture book called Tear Soup, given to our family by a friend on the day of the funeral.  One is C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed.  Another is A Healing Place by Kate Atwood.  She lost her mother at age 12 and now, as an adult, runs a grief group for kids in Georgia.  One of the most helpful things that I found in her book is her comment that grief is not a project, not a task to be completed; rather, it is something that the kids and I will encounter repeatedly through our lives, meeting our loss in different ways over the years, and we must work on learning to navigate it.

Here’s another interesting thing: much of this grieving process, so far, has not looked the way I expected it would look.  Yes, I am sad, but I am not flattened as I expected I would be.  I get out of bed in the mornings.  I get dressed.  I go out.  I stay home alone and am okay.  I pay the bills and grocery shop (with enormous mental effort, however!) and play the piano and write letters and do all these things I did not think I would be able to do.  It constantly astonishes me.  I find myself in a moment which is difficult- say, my first lunch out alone in a sit-down restaurant- and it is terribly painful; yet in the same moment, I am also observing myself with surprise and saying, “Huh.  This hurts, but here I still am.  I am doing this thing and it is not killing me.  How strange.”  I don’t understand where this ability to navigate comes from, except that it too is a gift from God to me.

And stranger still: alternating with the moments of excruciating loss and of everyday normalcy are moments of great joy and sometimes excitement.  These come, to my surprise (again!), when I think of Ramsy being in the presence of Jesus, more alive, more real, more himself than ever before.  Sometimes the veil between this reality and that one seems very thin indeed, and I am full of awareness that he is solidly real on the other side of the veil.  I like to do what I call “making up stories” about what he is doing in Heaven.  I might imagine him directing the most exquisite choir, or golfing with his dad, or hanging out at Starbucks with Jesus and maybe Beethoven, or casting his golden crown at the feet of The One Who Sits on the Throne.  The joy also shows up when I think of what God is up to on both sides of the veil, when I get to see glimpses of and participate in his work here- the work of building or restoring relationships, showing kindness and compassion, sharing time or money or cookies, allowing him to refine me- and when I think of the end of this chapter of the story, of the day when Jesus will come back to set things right and fully restore his kingdom, and I will get to see him and join Ramsy and other dearly loved people in unending rightness and joy and satisfaction. 

All of these feelings weave in and around each other, usually every day.  Some days are mostly sad, some are mostly “regular”, some are mostly joyful.  I cannot see any pattern to the way I flip-flop between them, or predict what will cause me to switch perspectives.  I just have to live in the “and yet”- I feel the joy, and yet the sorrow waves through me as I am stricken with the remembrance that he was just here a little while ago, solidly real on this side of the veil; I feel so sad, and yet here I unarguably am, living.  And yet…