An Incoherent Grief
"Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone." - Dylan Thomas
All I know — the only thing — is that everything is changed. This is not the sort of change popular voices aspiring to be quoted say that we must just accept and look on the bright side, nor the sort Christians love to metaphorize as merely a season which God is bringing you through. No, this cannot be that sort of change. This is real, irreparable, irredeemable change.
My branches are pruned; my coals are stoked; for the setting sun I weep. I am the shore broken on by a relentless tide, lost beneath the waves. I lay awake and stare up into the dark, the quiet and unmoved dark, which tells me things I cannot comprehend: He is dead.
Dead? The word is void of meaning, a sound that bears no reality. Death is what characters fall into, valiant heroes of my stories, every one of them fictional, impermanent.
He died.
Died? Can that be something that happens? Dying is what distant and unknown persons do, the figures of history. Dying cannot happen in reality, it isn’t real, isn’t something one does the way one drives or eats or sleeps or dreams….
I lay awake and peer into the dark. How can the whole world go on if death has happened? This is what I cannot grasp; I’ve read and heard and been told that this feels like the world is ending — and yet here goes on the world, on and on as usual, as if nothing has happened and tomorrow all will be as it should, and yet it won’t.
This is the contradiction of my senses: If he died, how can everything appear so unbothered? The night came nonetheless; I wish for nothing except for in this moment that the world would simply cease and do justice to what I’m told has happened. I need some kind of evidence. Death. But I cannot see it. All the evidence it provides is that terrible absence, the intangible evidence of lack.
I want to rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light1, for the entire world is betrayal. I want to rage, to fight against the night, turn back the clocks! every one of them, turn them back, turn them back when all was well and death was mythology — turn them back to the morning dew and the singing birds, to the golden hours on which I woke and was a babe caressed by life’s loving touch, when the world itself was newborn and all was right.
Now the world is dark. I was too young before to thank the World for those golden hours, when I knew of no darker shades.
Now the world is dark, and yet it remains. Why? It has all devolved to meaninglessness, and suddenly I understand the atheist’s perspective. What is the point — the world has yet to end but it will end, the sun rises but it will set, I have to wake again tomorrow only to die alone one day.
Lord, we are perishing! Do You yet sleep?2
I wish so desperately that I could rage. To be angry with God, to wrestle with Him like Jacob and malign Him like Job’s wife and curse Him like Jonah, to rage wholeheartedly against Him — and this would be sweet relief to the aching, null sense of unappeasable lack, which is the extent that I can feel, because I do not understand. I am a carnal mind and cannot understand, do not know what it means to die.
But in my very core I know I am not angry with God, and I am saddened. How can I be angry? Am I owed something by Him? Did He Himself not promise that storms would put out the lights in this life, that my heart would ache and I would suffer and I would watch those I so desperately love suffer desperately?
I am not angry; pain and evil and death do not invalidate God, and I know this. If there is anything I know, and I know nothing, it is that God was there, is here, at my side — that the world entire is mine alone, and my God weeps with me.
“I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend…. I was surprised that any other mortals were alive, since he whom I had loved as if he would never die was dead. I was even more surprised that when he was dead I was still alive.” St. Augustine, Confessions
I don’t know what grief is, but I know it is not coherent. Is grief the thing with feathers3, or is that hope?4 I lay in bed and I am dim though I want to rage.
It is a comfort to know that though the world is ending day after day, my God and Lord has vanquished death and is alive. He may have died, but he is alive, and I will see him again when I am called home.
Someone told me not to mourn the dead but the living. I need more mourning than he who has died; he sits up with my Lord and he is free, free, free of all the sin and death while I am yet among the pitiful living.
All these things I hold true and believe, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because I cannot understand. All I understand is that yesterday I saw him alive and now he is dead, that when I hear his voice now it is merely an echo resounding pointlessly through my memories, that when I wait for him he is not coming, that though I sense so strongly as if he is just a drive away and I can call him he is not there. All I comprehend is the absence. It is maddening, maddening, how much like mere, transient absence loss feels, a temporary and fillable lack, and yet an irreparable change.
I don’t believe it and I can’t believe it though I see the lack every waking day; I see every place in which you aren’t, and still I don’t understand because you were the one man in all the world I believed to be invincible. The world could not touch you; it never had, and suddenly I am laying here in the dark wanting to rage, and I cannot. I am merely heartbroken and betrayed.
Oh, how I rage against that awful past tense! Were, could, died — this is the contradiction of everything I’ve ever known, because the world is here and is present and you are past tense.
Just a short while and you’ll return —
This is the sense I cannot shake.
The lantern’s lit, the stove is warm,
I want to wait and wait and wait….
My God weeps with me. Suddenly I know nothing. I want to know, God, let me know where he has gone and what has happened and what You’ve done, and yet I’m told I need not know. He and I are both in the hand of God, a good and loving God who weeps with me and promises to wipe my tears, who says Trust me, daughter, for the world is Mine and I have won, and so where I cannot rage and cannot rejoice, I tear my robe and weep and worship God.5
“But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.”
1 Thessalonians 4:13-14
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Goodnight”
Matthew 8: 23-26
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”
Job 1:20
This was absolutely chilling.
Beautiful writing. As was reading this I started to cry remembering my brother 💔