Grief

My last visit of the day
was with a charming, articulate woman
living in a nursing home not far from here.
She told me the story of her husband's death,
from the time of his illness,
to the last time he played the piano for her,
to his hospitalization and death.
She talked openly about the shifting emotions
over the last few years...
from the time where she could not bear to see his picture
to the bittersweet mixed emotions of the present.

I came home from that visit
and turned on the computer,
only to find out the very youngest member of my church
lacked the lung capacity after only 26 weeks of gestation
to stay with us more than a few hours.

http://esselstyn.blogspot.com/

People ask me how I bear the grief
of working for hospice.
The truth is, while I carry my patients with me
and remember them and miss them,
their deaths usually ride lightly in my heart.

It is the grief of their families,
the ones that remain behind,
that reduces me to wells of tears (and snot)
and leaves me feeling raw.

So often this feels to me like a weakness,
but perhaps our capacity to grieve
and to grieve with others in their time of loss
is our most human strength.

The thing that I most love about
imagining and understanding Jesus
as God in human form,
is not the fact that he was able to raise Lazarus
from the dead,
but the fact that this human expression of the divine
wept with Lazarus's family
in their time of inconsolable grief.

So I have these dual mental pictures
of my Vacation Bible School image of Jesus
laughing and bouncing baby Hoot on his knee up in grassy heaven,
even as I see that same Jesus
sitting silently with Blake and Cindy
with tears pouring down his kind
and broken-hearted face.