mourn – Aspirational Adventures

Beauty of a dead tree. Isle of Wight. August 2024. Photographed by myself

… suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, …

Romans 5:3-4

Yet in the world we live in we take pills, whether prescribed or self-medicated, whether alcohol or drugs, whether taken in moderation or to excess, or buying stuff, watching TV, to elevate our suffering rather than acknowledging that we suffer.

I wrote a piece a while back about acknowledging grief rather than just trying to make it go away and really grief is a form of suffering, but there are loads of other things that cause us to suffer which lead to anxiety and depression, to various illnesses [Read The Body Keeps The Score and other books by Gabor Mate and others like him]

Who of us does not want to be able to endure, to be of a character people admire, to have hope that we can pass on? Yet too often we don’t want to go through the suffering to get there so we fill our lives with stuff, etc.

The Bible also says “Blessed are those who mourn” [Matthew 5:4] which means those who mourn are comforted by God, if they are willing to acknowledge their need. Suffering and pain teach us things, help us in getting closer to ourselves and to God/something beyond ourselves; help us acknowledge our true selves.

A wise person said “there is no hope without the acknowledgment of suffering” and “a denial of suffering is a denial of hope” and yet too often we try to deny our suffering behind so many things.

I was writing a short piece about an older couple I knew many years ago. They had been through a lot – she had lost a lung through TB and told she couldn’t have children, and also they were very involved in CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] and had been on the original CND marches Aldermaston back in 1958 when fear about the world being destroyed by nuclear war was high. Yet they chose to have children – one of which was my boyfriend for a couple of years – and chose to have hope and to be involved in the lives of others. They very much acknowledged their own suffering and the suffering and pain of the world yet were so full of hope people were drawn to them.

A leprosy doctor [can’t remember the article but do remember what was said] said that from what he see we treat pain as an illness rather than the symptom of the illness. So we treat the pain, the outwards signs, but we do not name and treat the actual problem.

If the above bible verse is true then won’t it happen that the more we treat suffering rather than acknowledge it, surely slowly but surely we will lose endurance, will not gain a depth of character others want to emulate, and so will lose sight of hope?

If we need suffering to have hope then let us be willing to be open about our suffering, name it for what it is, and so grow in endurance and character so we can be a hope to the world!

A Period Of Mourning

The reason for the daffodils is that there were that daffodils were the only flowers on my friend’s coffin yesterday. But these are from my local park. Yes in North Wales we have loads of daffodils blooming already

Funerals in the UK are strange affairs especially now when that painful time of grief isn’t so acute. Five weeks is a long time to hang on to that whereas when someone was buried or cremated within a week or 10 days then it was different.

Most services are great and we know roughly what to do with them whether religious service or not. There are time boundaries, a containment, a space to fill. It works on the whole, but the do after I find the challenge. There are generally a selection of characters for the writer to observe – the one who is holding court and expecting all to come to them, the one who did not really know the person but wept loudly through the service and now stands shyly at the do, the group who stay together because they don’t know anyone else, the locals who have popped in for a party, the family members of the one who is left who have come to support them, the eclectic group of friends who don’t really know each other but know about each other through the deceased. [Note – these are caricatures not real people who were there 🙂 ] There are probably more if I had time to think about it. Feel free to add your own in the comment box. But the truth is we don’t know what to do after the service.

In the UK there is no clear way to mourn; no “period of mourn”, and so much is now “wear bright colours” rather than a nice dark suit. We do the stiff upper lip and move on. Move on to what I don’t yet know. The “let’s celebrate rather than admit there is a space now in our lives”. But even at the do after the service there are a lot of people who open a conversation with “how to you know the deceased?” and the lead into talking about themselves and what they’ve done. But then in a lot of conversations we all open the door to talking about ourselves by asking someone a leading question and following it up with “that is so similar to what happened to me”.

I wonder was there ever an official period of mourning in Western culture? Not just Queen Victoria’s wearing of widow’s weeds for the rest of her life but a place where friends could just say for a week or two, or even at the after service do, confine themselves to talking about the whole this person has left in their lives., maybe where mourning clothes too.

We need a learn how to mourn not just how to deal with grief I think!

Anyway I’ll tell you all about the hole my friend we cremated yesterday leaves in my life – it is these other friends of hers that I know all sorts of details about via her emails. I realised I will never know how they are dealing with their marriages, their children, their illnesses, their futures. Oh yes I could have gathered emails and the like and kept in touch with them, but to be honest it is not the deep details of their lives I want, not their friendships I want, but those snippets that my friend thought I would be interested in what was going on with them. Snapshot snippets!

And I’ve realised too that the only one I could have process the events of both yesterday’s service and after party do with was my friend who knew all the characters that attended.

Holes are strange shaped things