There is a lot of mystery and fear around grief and how people cope with loss. And there are so many different kinds of loss, each person experiences loss differently, and even the same person responds to different losses differently. But perhaps if there were more dialogue about the experience of grief, there would be less mystery and fear.

So I decided to share with you something I wrote a couple of years ago shortly after I lost my husband, Bill, to cancer. It captures what I was feeling at that one moment in time, just a few weeks after he died. I have never shared it with anyone before, except my mother, and even that was by email! So here goes:

January 3, 2004

Maybe I avoid people. Maybe I'm not sure I'm feeling what they expect me to feel. Or maybe I just don't expect them to understand what this is like for me.

I feel immeasurable pain and sadness. There is a vast emptiness that has entered my life. I actually have more than I had before I met him, both materially and emotionally. Yet his departure has left a gaping hole.

At the same time, I feel phenomenal joy. I have been so fortunate to have experienced a love that I could not have imagined was out there. And I celebrate his graduation to what I imagine to be spiritual ecstasy. I know he is delighted with the great beyond, whatever that may be. I know that I would not give up my memory of this beautiful love to take away the pain. I have no regrets.

I once told him that raising children is like tending a garden. You don't expect gratitude, you only take delight in watching them grow. Now I see some sort of parallel I can't explain in opening the heart to love. We can't expect a certain pay off in years of marital bliss. We merely appreciate whatever it is that this opening brings.

And I cry every day because I just plain miss him.

Good morning. The topic of the sermon today is grief. Yet today, for me, is all about joy.

This duality reminds me a creation myth Judith told not too long ago as a children’s story. As I remember it, in the beginning God created the earth and the people. God gave the people everything they needed to live forever. But the people were not happy, because they had no children. So they went to God and asked to be given children. “But I have given you everything you need,” said God, “and you are immortal.”

“We cannot be happy without children,” said the people.

“But if I give you the joy of children, I must also give you the grief of mortality,” explained God.

“Please, God, we can accept death if only we may have the joy of children.”

Like most parents, God could not deny his people what they needed to be happy. So, since then, the world’s people have experienced both grief and joy.

Many cultures believe that acceptance of this dichotomy is the key to serenity and wisdom. Maybe that’s why joy and fear, love and grief, sometimes are expressed in the same way. C.S. Lewis wrote, in “A Grief Observed,”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times if feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.”

All of us who have lost a loved one, or been in love, have experienced the same butterflies in the stomach, fullness in the throat, tipsy fogginess. Are these emotions generated or expressed in the same region of the brain? I’d guess there’s a neuroscientist among us who knows.

I light the chalice today in recognition of the chiaroscuro of joy and grief that gives depth to the picture of our lives.