Shakespeare had folks say: beware the Ides of March. During
the first full week of March, things were rarely good in our house. My mother
was depressed most of the time, but I started to notice that this was somehow
worse. Later, I put it together with the anniversary of my father’s death in a
tanker accident on the Delaware River on the 7th.
Just this Tuesday, I was downcast and only realized the date when I glanced at
the calendar.
He did not like serving on tankers, but the money was good.
The San Francisco
had emptied its fuel, but the vapors were trapped in its hold. (If you want a
feel for the kind of ship, see the movie Finest Hour). When faced with loss, we
torture ourselves with what if and what if not thoughts.
Many times, Christians like to trot out Romans 8:28 in the
midst of tragedy. Personally, I see no good coming from his death. My mother
made a foolish vow not to marry again if she was able to bring the child she
was carrying to birth. Sometimes, in time, we can glimpse some good out of tragedy.
My interest in grief work probably stems from the loss of a father. At the
public level, the tanker explosion finally brought us to increasing safety
standards on tankers and coming to grips with the fact of the danger of
flammable vapors in their holds. In other words, lives were saved.
Recently, an old friend called to process the loss of an
imagined future with an old friend. Loss changes our construction of the
future. It is no easy task to reconstruct a future in the face of absence. We
wonder about how things would have been with their presence. It’s interesting
how we rarely forecast the future with negative things with them. We do
idealize the future, even in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.
Anniversaries are a way to mark our time together. Whether
public or private, anniversaries chart the scope of the geography of our lives.
When facing the anniversary of loss consider writing a
letter, similar to a Christmas card letter to the love done. In the Christian
doctrine of the communion of saints, we are held by the bands of our loves
(Shades of Grey notwithstanding). Some find meaning in a memorial gift or
action that fits the remembered one. Examine some keepsakes. Recently my cousin
sent me old photographs of my mother and of the three of us on a trip to Washington DC
These types of actions won’t bring closure as in the end of
grief. Merely acknowledging that the loss is freshened releases energy to go on
despite the loss. Marking a loss allows us to see how far we have come and how
far we have yet to go.
“There is a deeper need yet, I think, and that
is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still
room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the
dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to
where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room
where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember
consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner
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