Housekeeping

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

By Marilynn Robinson

March marked the five-year anniversary of Roy’s death. It feels like a stepping stone anniversary. Not quite out of my previous life with him just yet. Not all the way into my new life without him. I find myself still tensing up, anticipating old shock waves of grief. Feeling the relief when, instead, I experience a softer invitation to sadness. Still weighing my response in the balance: should I do something to distract myself? Cheer myself up? Or just sink into the mourning that has now become a companion.

And so, in a recent brief liminal space between novels, I found my inner cheerleader suggesting I find something light and funny to read. Time to cheer up, no? Or. Maybe not. Instead I selected Marilyn Robinson’s iconic book about abandonment and loneliness. It was a conscious choice, this year, to sink into the mourning. To find time to myself to lie on the couch with my hand resting gently on my heart, feeling into the pain which will always signify the love Roy and I shared. I have never heard another person speak about this experience of comfort and mourning, though I’m sure many others have done it. I think we don’t hear about it because of our culture’s discomfort with that level of emotional presence. But I am learning that only by settling into this experience can I also access the sacred comfort which brings healing.

I had read Marilynne Robinson’s other books many years ago, before they hit the mainstream (Gilead was published in 2004.) I remembered engaging only at a surface level with what are now being called stories of deep compassion. But I hadn’t read her earlier book Housekeeping (published in 1980). In this book, the protagonist Ruth reflects on and narrates her childhood story of loss and unconventional connection. Against the backdrop of her father’s death in a train wreck and her mother’s suspicious death, later, when the car she was driving careened off the edge of a cliff, this book is an ode to mourning. Not a type of mourning that most of us would recognize, though. Instead, it is a careful and poetic reflection by a woman looking back on her experiences as a child, thrust into a wandering search for connection in the wake of devastating loss.

Finally, whether by choice or by default, only the reader can decide, Ruthie connects with her mother’s transient sister who has returned to care for her. The unstable nature of their life together illuminated for me an archetype of the rudderless experience of loss, the sense of suspended connection with anything, the desire for grounding in uncharted territory. And perhaps, most ominously, another archetypal character in the story, the massive train bridge which connects Ruthie’s town with the unknown beyond. Robinson painted for me a series of images of small comforts and gentle self care. She painted an honest picture of mourning, and I found great comfort in sharing these truths with her protagonist Ruthie.

In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being, she interviewed theologian Serene Jones. My friend suggested I might be interested in their conversation about mourning. Tippett said of Jones “Since 2008, she’s been president of Union Theological Seminary — the first female leader in its 179-year history. Union was an intellectual and spiritual home to towering figures of the 20th century like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and, for a time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We’re exploring how the human enterprise that is theology might offer a clarifying lens on the present.”

Here’s an excerpt.

Tippett: In your trauma work, you talk about that grief — the terrible things that happen to us, the losses or the things that we have to acknowledge, that this whole American thing of “resolution,” that’s not a theological move, and it’s not actually reality-based. But you say there’s something that can happen when grief becomes mourning — that that is a different move.

Rev. Jones: Yes. In trauma, when one is able to come to grips with what happened — not resolve it, not fix it; most traumas live with us in indelible ways — but to move from grief to mourning is to move from a place of sheer loss to a place of acknowledging the loss. And in mourning the permanence of the loss — it can’t be fixed — but also it creates a space, in mourning, for you to make sacred the pain so that the rest of your life is transformed by it. It allows the possibility of a future, mourning does.

Pure grief just locks you in, in the eternal present.

Well, you can grieve it. You can be ashamed of it. You can be embarrassed by it. You can be horrified by it. But until those things are transformed into what I call mourning — which is the recognition of it in a space that still allows for a future — that grief, that denial, that shame just stops the possibility of actually engaging and transforming the things that created those horrible conditions, and we’re stuck. And until we can get unstuck — and that shame needs to loosen its grip, or that denial about the past. As if somehow — it’s a strange fear that somehow, if we come to grips with those horrors, we’re somehow gonna die from them. And that’s simply not true. You’re set free, actually, by the telling of the truth. That was true for me, even in my own personal family story. And you can move into a place where it is something that you can find a place for in your soul and in your heart, but not in such a way that it immobilizes you, but it actually propels you into the future, through love.

If you would like to listen to the entire episode, you can do so here.

It has been my experience that comfort, in a host of forms I’d have never recognized before, opened the path for me into mourning. That healing energy which has been “propelling me into the future, through love.” I will never again expect to “get over it.” I will be blessed in and by my mourning as it carries me forward.