Further Up and Further In

Grief isn’t something that the church handles very well. Actually, I think our culture at large doesn’t handle grief very well, and the church isn’t any better, although it really should be.

I’ve realized lately that I am very, very hesitant to cry in public about anything. There are varying degrees of ‘public’, of course, and some of them that are less truly ‘public’ are still more difficult environments in which to be overtly emotional. For me, being obviously upset in a mall or a grocery store or a parking lot or crying at a stoplight is embarrassing, yes, and something to be avoided, but not to the degree that I try to avoid crying at church or at work (and I don’t work in a very ‘public’ environment). I’ve tried to figure out why this is, and I’ve come up with a few thoughts.

First, I don’t like crying in an environment where people feel obligated to ask if I’m okay. Even if I didn’t have the insecurities that I’ll mention below, I still wouldn’t be terribly interested in sharing my personal hurts and difficulties with someone with whom I have only a casual friendship. On the other hand, I don’t like making up some pat answer, either – “Oh I’m fine, just had a hard day – nothing to worry about!” I HATE being fake. And I feel like when people who don’t know you very well ask if you’re okay, it’s more…for their own sake, for their peace of mind, than it is out of genuine care for you.

I’m not saying that it’s a BAD thing, because I definitely have the same impulse, but that someone who knows you only by name and random, casual conversation probably doesn’t care about your issues as much as your best friend or your husband or even a good friend might. Not to say they don’t care about your well-being as a person, but they aren’t invested in you, and sharing the exact reasons why you’re so publicly upset would probably lead more to awkwardness than to anything else. (To say nothing of the fact that I work with all of my friends’ HUSBANDS, and it would be highly inappropriate to share most of what I’ve struggled with lately with a man to whom I am not married.)

Second, I am afraid that if I’m crying, or just visibly very upset, the people who DON’T stop to ask if I’m okay, or ask what’s wrong, are going to get the “wrong idea.” Here’s where my insecurities play in. Because of how I perceive our culture to be, I feel like the only acceptable reasons to cry in public are due to a recent death in your immediate family or close circle of friends, divorce, being beaten by your spouse, or some similar monumental tragedy. I feel like the general consensus is that those things are “worth” crying publicly about, but “lesser” things aren’t. I’m afraid that if someone walks by and sees me crying, and assumes that it’s some huge tragedy, that they’ll eventually find out that it wasn’t a big deal and feel sort of hoodwinked or taken in by my “overreaction” and “drama.” (I’m using a lot of quotes because this is all my perception, and I know in my head that my perception is skewed, but it’s still hard to get over.) That they’ll be mad that they “wasted” their worry on me when it really wasn’t anything to worry about.

The thing is, while I know some of this is my skewed perception and strong desire to be fully understood by every possible person (HA! good luck Sarah), I think our culture, and even the Christian culture, really IS like this to some degree. A friend recently wrote very candidly about grieving the loss of her stepfather, and how difficult it is to face the “mixture of pity and surprise that [she’s] not ‘over it’ yet.” I think our culture has the expectation that even for a loss as huge and crippling as the death of a parent, a year (at most) of grief is sufficient, and if you display any signs of still dealing with grief after longer than that, there’s something wrong with you. That you should “move on” (whatever that means), and pull yourself together.

Why is that the expectation? First of all, while the immediate shock and crushing agony of loss may wear off after a time, when you lose someone or something, they don’t come back. That’s why it’s hard. Every time something triggers a memory of that which was lost, you miss it, and it’s painful. That doesn’t mean that eventually you won’t also be able to look back with joy at the good things, but it DOES mean that it’s perfectly valid for the longing for the ‘lost thing’ (or person) to continue to be painful for a very, very long time.

Maybe it’s because we as a culture (even in the church) don’t know what to do with displays of overwhelming emotion. We don’t know how to come alongside someone and just let them cry on our shoulder. We want to make it better, but we don’t know how, and we end up doing more harm than good in the process. (I fully include myself in this – I don’t really know how to react to it in others, either.) Deeper than that, I think that it’s at least partly because seeing grief shows that the grieving person is not anesthetized by the world, at least not at that point. It shows that even the best things the world can give, to say nothing of the mediocre things, do not assuage the sorrow of losing someone you love. And that’s an uncomfortable thought to those of us who aren’t grieving anything right now: we want to believe that our nice little worlds with our nice little idols really ARE satisfying, and to forget that those nice little things won’t do a whit of good when we’re drowning in tears over a loss.

I think, in general, we’re just skeptical about any kind of strong display of emotion. I think even seeing a face full of pure, brilliant joy makes us uncomfortable. It’s as if we think, “Mature people don’t have strong emotions. Or if they do, they hide them. Maturity means constantly downplaying what you’re feeling so that it doesn’t make people uncomfortable or make people ask questions. If you show too much emotion, you’ll look weak.” Do we as Christians really think that? I don’t think we would say that we believe those words, but the way we act (and again, put “I” in place of “we” in this post, because I’m completely describing myself as well) betrays us. We don’t really believe that a “good Christian” feels so strongly one way or the other.

To sort of go back to what I was saying earlier: I think that our culture, in addition to expecting grief to pass much sooner than it should, puts a hierarchy on what things are acceptable to grieve and what things aren’t. Or maybe it’s that we all, as individuals, impose our own standards of what should be grieved and what shouldn’t on everyone else.

I feel like I should put a disclaimer here. We’ve all come across people that make a big deal out of EVERYTHING, and are likely to be found weeping when they can’t find their favorite mascara. (Not to say that I haven’t been that person. Hehe.) I’m not talking about those kinds of situations – I’m talking about things that really are hard and painful, mostly relationally-related things (like the death of someone you love; the ending of a cherished relationship, whether it be romantic, friendship, family, or something else), but not limited to that (like the loss of a much-desired job or the falling-through of some other much-anticipated plan). (I also should say that I think in most of the cases of people weeping over lost mascara there is something bigger going on than missing makeup, and it’s just coming out over something trivial.)

When I went through a really painful breakup, I didn’t mind sharing that I was having a hard time for the first month or so. But after that, as the months dragged on and I was still really sad, I stopped feeling comfortable letting people know that. I didn’t feel that it was acceptable to grieve for eight months over the loss of a romantic relationship. I think I both put that expectation on myself, AND felt that expectation from others. I was afraid to be found crying at church or school or something and have someone ask what it was, and for me to say “I’m still hurting over a breakup from 6 months ago” and for them to say “Oh, that’s all?”

I can hardly imagine someone saying that upon finding out that my friend was grieving the loss of her stepfather. But as she (and I) mentioned, with that comes a similar expectation - that eventually you’ll “get over it.” And, at least to a degree, that’s never going to happen. It’s never going to be “okay” that she lost her stepfather. In one sense, yes, we have to accept that the world that we live in is fallen, and understand that painful things will happen to us, but in another sense, we don’t have to accept it if accepting means agreeing that it’s okay. It’s NOT okay. It is exactly what is wrong with the world, and exactly why we long for heaven where these things will not happen anymore. Grief is, in this way, a more ‘accepting’ attitude of the reality of the world than is one that glosses over the bad things that happens and just says “Well, you’ve gotta move on and just accept that life sucks.”

Even though I haven’t so much been going through really heavy grief recently, I’ve still had some hard things going on, things that really are heartbreaking and incredibly painful. I’ve found that one of the hardest things, other than someone belittling my pain or misunderstanding, is when someone actually is really genuinely sorry for me. That’s almost even harder to take, because it means, somehow, that…what I’m hurting over is WORTH hurting over. And that sort of makes it…real. It means I can’t escape from it.

Which makes me wonder if the reason I’ve beat myself up for hurting in the past and in the present is partly because if I allow myself to hurt, then I’ll have to face up to just how much hurt there is, and that’s…unfaceable.

This is the last reason that I haven’t wanted to cry or be vulnerable at work or at church: if I DO get into all of the things that are hard for me, I have a hard time handling it when someone else validates my pain and tells me that this IS difficult stuff. Then I have to really face it, instead of saying “No no, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about me.”

If we’re talking about what we need to accept and what we don’t, I think what I need to accept is that life IS painful, and really terrible, tragic things DO happen. BUT. They won’t kill me. Feeling them all the way to the hilt won’t even kill me. Because this isn’t all there is. It’s more tragic to try to shield myself from pain by minimalizing my current struggles, because the end result is that I end up shielding myself from joy, too. You can’t shut off your capacity to feel pain without shutting off your heart entirely. Believing that there is more than this, that God is more than just someone who brings pain into my life, that He can bring joy, too, and that there are so many good things in this world to rejoice over…that’s the only thing that gets me through. And I’m hanging onto even that by a fraying thread right now.

“There is more, more than all this pain, more than all the falling down and the getting up again, there is more, more than we can see from our tiny vantage point in this vast eternity…” ~Andrew Peterson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.