Cumulative Grief

This week I’ve been remembering the time one of my best friends, and at the time dorm brother, found my grandmother’s leopard print granny panties in our co-ed high school dorm’s laundry pile.

“Oooooh, Mama Jewell! You’ve still got it!” He crowed with a cheeky grin as he waved them around so that all of us could see and admire the plentiful, faux-silk fabric.

“Jonathan Bruckert!” she exclaimed, chasing him around the pingpong table and swatting at him ineffectually. “You give those back right now! You know that’s not polite!”

But she was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes, and all of us knew she was loving the attention.

I told this story last week to a group of homeschool moms (don’t ask me how it came up), and this week, Mama Jewell went to join my friend Jon in heaven.

Their deaths couldn’t have been more different. Jon died when we were still in college, the victim of a car accident, his vibrant life dramatically cut short. Mama Jewell lived past her 90th birthday and drifted out of this world, cradled in her own bed, surrounded by her children. And yet, I find myself remembering Jon, laughing, chased by my giggling grandmother, as he waved her underwear in the air.

I’m thinking about Jon, and I’m thinking about my grandfather, who preceded Mama Jewell to heaven by five years. I’m remembering how he used to play tricks on her just to get a reaction. I’m remembering the mischief in his eyes and his open smile. I’m remembering every family wedding with Buster Daddy where the bride, dressed in all her finery, made sure to get a picture with him making the Buster Daddy face.

I’m remembering how Mama Jewell told me after he died, following sixty-seven years of marriage, her voice breaking, “My lover has left me…and I miss him.”

I’m thinking about the little baby that never was, the one I never even got a chance to tell my grandparents about before we realized that there was no heartbeat and never would be. I’m thinking about that long ago miscarriage because loss is cumulative. Grief is cumulative.

Death piles onto death, each reminding us of the ones before. It is a genealogy of brokenness. Thus all the days of Jewell Jennings were 91 years, and she died. And we recite these lists of loss because they remind us where we come from and they remind us where we are going and because they are variations on a theme we must not, cannot forget.

The weight of grief presses down on those left behind—yes, even when we grieve with hope, even when we grieve knowing that today they are with Him in heaven, even when we imagine the joyful reunion that must be going on without us (for now). This weight presses down on us because it is not just one layer of loss but one after another after another, pressing into us until we feel like sedimentary rock, each added layer compressing the ones that came before.

And here is the beauty: with each new layer, with each variation on a theme, we see more clearly the loveliness of those lives, the joy of getting to live our own. We know that what is now overwhelming grief will mellow with time, though it will never disappear. We know that this new variation has told the old story in a way that brings attention to the ones that came before so that we can celebrate again the wonderful lives that intersected with our own.

We wish that our grief didn’t weigh down on us so much. It’s so heavy at times that we fear that it will crush us. But without its weight, it wouldn’t anchor in place the older griefs. They would drift off, dust caught in a passing breeze, and we would forget.

Sometimes we wish we could. We wish it didn’t hurt so much. We wish it wasn’t all so heart-breakingly hard.

But without that weight: there is no remembering. There are no beautiful layers of lives to teach us and remind us, to give us back our wisdom and our joy, to put before our souls the stories that shaped them.

Today, if you too are in a season of loss, don’t be afraid to look back and remember. The weight will not crush you, but you may find yourself entranced by the layers of glowing sediment that have turned your cumulative griefs into a mountainous rainbow of color.

Remember the crazy faces that got you laughing at inappropriate times, the time they kept you company while you packed your suitcases, the way they fell asleep watching golf in their recliner, the perfect swish of the basketball they’d shot from half-court, the way your stomach curved with hope. The grief is already cumulative; you can’t keep that from happening by trying to forget.

But when we remember, the beauty they gave us becomes cumulative as well. And the wisdom. And the joy. And the laughter. And the strength.

Layer upon layer of glowing, grief-pressed glory.