How to Move Through Grief
Most of us will experience the death of one we love. From that moment forward our lives will be changed.
We may continue doing the same things we did before, but if we are like most people, when the presence of those who trod with us along the path of everyday living has passed beyond our sight, the path we trod together no longer glows with the same promise and joy. We deal with feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, but the rest of the world goes on quite well around us. Our tradition keeps grief sequestered, getting us through it before anyone knows we’ve had it. And the soul of our loss goes incognito through the public square. …
The Mending Spirit
In every relationship is a spirit of mending. It is one of the great powers of human nurture and of the spirit. We hold our love for another in our hearts and nurture that love in the circle of our relationship. Within this circle of love, what needs fixing, we fix. We repaint the house and repair the broken gutter. When conflict comes, we apologize and bring flowers. Skinned knees get bandages, and our bodies even repair themselves throughout our lives.
But then we come face-to-face with what we cannot fix. The death of the other we cannot fix. And so in death the mending spirit seems helpless. …
A Love Story
The details are simple enough. In 1934 James Dillet Freeman married Lucy Katherine Veronica Gilwee. They lived and worked in Kansas City for Unity. Then in 1947 Katherine became ill and was diagnosed with an advanced malignancy. After 10 months of decline, she passed away.
“When she died,” Jim wrote, “my first thought was to run away. The house was so full of her.”
Yet he did not run away. He put pen to paper and wrote it all down. He wrote it from his heart as he experienced his wife Katherine’s illness and death. And in his writing, the mending spirit returns—throwing off its helplessness, seeking a larger circle of love and discovering death’s own limitation.
In Katherine, Jim saw the faith he knew he wanted. In her response to illness, she became his teacher. His faith, he said, “was fugitive,” in comparison to hers. “My faith,” he wrote, “was no more than an infant’s cry, hoping to whine its way out of the pain; she saw life in a larger frame than I, saw us against eternity.”
And so the mending spirit worked in him to gradually enlarge the circle created by his relationship with Katherine. “We must go forward on faith,” he wrote, “for this I know, that faith is life and prayer is life.”
Love’s Larger Circle
From an experience that would ordinarily narrow our heart’s capacity came vision of Love’s larger circle—a circle that, in the end, reveals death’s weakness. …
In the end it is death’s failure that stands out. It is death’s limitation that stands revealed.
Death may take away the circle that once was our love, but it cannot remove Love’s larger circle into which it must finally be drawn.
Pain may torment this finity of flesh
And death may turn this quick to quiet dust.
Yet death cannot make love’s perfection less;
Pain cannot alter love’s unchanging trust
That there is meaning where no meanings show
And purpose though no purposes shine through,
That life and death are but the ebb and flow
Of being toward the beautiful and true ...
So great is love that but by loving we
Turn death’s defeat into love’s victory.
When loss comes, let Spirit lead you gently into Love’s larger circle.
The acceptance of the death of a loved one changes everything. We will either grow bitter at life’s pain, or we will love. And I suspect that those who have passed on before us would be the first to rejoice at the widening of Love’s circle in us. So that in the end, says the poet:
Love will rise weeping from its knees
And raise a world beyond the reach of room,
That will survive even our unbelief.
Adapted from Love Is Strong As Death by James Dillet Freeman, published by Unity Books.
Enjoy this podcast with Chaz Wesley— From Grief to Growth, With Coach Ann Leach
Find solace in this serene meditation on grief from Unity Prayer Ministry.