By Ron Rolheiser
What do you do when a wound or a loss leaves you hopelessly disconsolate and there’s nothing you can do to amend the situation?
As well, what do you do or say when you are trying to console someone who is paralyzed by loss? For example, what do you say to someone who is keeping vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is dying young? What do you say to someone who has just lost a loved one to suicide?
What do you do or say when you are helpless to do anything practical to amend a fractured situation?
The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once received a letter from a man who had just lost a loved one, was fighting despair, and was desperately searching for anything to keep his heart from breaking.
Rilke sent him these words: “Don’t be afraid to suffer, take your heaviness and give it back to the earth’s own weight; the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” (Sonnets to Orpheus) These words echo words from the Book of Lamentations (3,29) where the sacred author tells us that sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait.
Sometimes all we can do is to put our mouths to the dust and wait! Sometimes we must give the heaviness of our grief back to the earth itself.
It’s curious that we can accept those words and the patience they ask for when the pain that afflicts us is physical rather than emotional and psychological. For instance, if we have an accident and suffer a badly broken leg, we simply accept that, no matter the frustration, we will be incapacitated for a number of weeks or months and there’s nothing that can be done about it. We simply must accept the situation and let nature take its course. To our detriment we don’t often accept emotional and psychological fractures in the same way. When our heart is broken, we want a fix in short order. We don’t want our heart on crutches or in a wheelchair for some weeks or months.
Well, not all losses and heartbreaks are the same. There are losses that are less paralyzing, where despite a bitter blow to the heart, there are already elements of consolation and healing present. We experience this, for example, at the funeral of a loved one who lived and died in such a way that, despite losing her to death, at a deeper level we already feel a certain peace, even in her departure.
But there are losses where, for a period afterwards, there is no consolation and there are no words (however true and faith-filled they may be) which take away the bitterness and pain of our loss. For example, I have seen this at times at the funeral of someone who died by suicide. In that raw moment, there is nothing that we can do or say that will lift from the dust the hearts of the loved ones who are left behind and grieving. The words that are needed, words which express our faith and our hope, will be helpful later, but they lose their existential power when the grief is so raw.
I remember a funeral I attended several years ago. The woman to whom we were saying an earthly farewell had died of cancer, still young, in her early fifties. Understandably, her husband was disconsolate. At the reception after the church service, one of his close friends, trying to cheer him up, said to him: “She’s with God; she’s in a better place.” Despite being a man of faith and having just walked out of a church service that publicly celebrated that faith, his response was: “I know you mean well; but that’s the last thing I need to hear today.”
The words of faith we speak to each other in the face of bitter loss and death are true. This woman, no doubt, was in a better place. But in a moment of raw grief, words will not have much emotional or psychological impact.
So, what can we offer others in situations like these? What can others offer us when we are paralyzed by grief?
We can offer our helplessness, our muted selves, our inability to say or do anything that will take the heaviness away. And perhaps nothing is as fruitful in a tragic situation than the empathy that flows out of mutual helplessness. We might still utter the words of faith, but we need to accept that they will bear their full fruit only later.
What our grief-muted selves are saying in moments of helplessness is what both the Book of Lamentations and the poet Rilke are saying: Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait – and by doing that you will be giving your heaviness back to the earth itself. Paradoxically, the acceptance of heaviness can be the one thing that can lift our spirits.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is currently serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
