I have been thinking about grief lately as a cumulative
process.
By this I mean that it adds up. I think we can see this if
we think about it. The more things that happen to you, the more stressed you
become, or the sadder you feel.
For some reason this simple bit of wisdom does not register
when we are thinking about our life, or our day to day living, or what our
friends are going through. It is like we get amnesia and can only remember this
one moment, this one tragedy, this one death.
Psychologists have long known that there are life stress
events. Buy or sell a house, have a child, change jobs, move, get a divorce, have
a friend die, start a new relationship, have a death in the family, get a bad
medical diagnosis or turn 40 and you are going to have some major feelings
about it, and a whole lot of stress. Enough stress in fact, from any one of
those that it might cause a period of depression.
Now, in our world, where we all move a lot, where the
economy tanks, where relationships are more fragile, and where our friends are
all aging as the majority of the population gets older… and the truth is, many
of those things happen to us all the time.
And people are more stressed than they ever have been.
If you are at all familiar with Christianity you might remember
that story where Jesus found the woman who was going to be stoned to death
because she was accused of adultery. The crowd had gathered and Jesus casually
knelt down in front of the woman and began drawing in the sand. Then he asked
the crowd a question – do you think any of you are free from guilt? Has anyone
here never done anything wrong? That person should throw the first rock.
No one did.
And we get that, we really do, all of us are guilty of white
lies, or we have at the very least broken a few traffic laws in our day. All of
us understand that we are not perfect and that we should not judge what other
people do too harshly.
But when it comes to feelings, when it comes to emotion, for
some reason we have blinders on. We think that everyone should be able to pull
themselves up by the bootstraps and just carry on. In fact, the British war
time meme “Keep Calm and Carry On” has come back into our lives with such a
vengeance that it is supposedly our whole mantra for the modern way of life.
I think we should start admitting that we all have mental
illness as well. Sure, you might not be ADHD yourself, or suffer from multiple
personality disorder, although having dealt with a variety of people in a
variety of situations, I bet we are all closer to that one than we think… but
we all have depression, and the beginnings of mania. We all have our own
delusions.
Who is going to, seriously, cast the first stone when
someone has a major bout of depression. Or when the situation builds up to the
point where one cannot get out of bed in the morning?
The reason I started thinking about all of this was because
of being a clergy person. I deal with more death and loss and change than most
people will in their entire life. Some days it is hard to want to continue on
in the face of it all.
But then I got thinking about everyone. We do not take grief
and emotional pain seriously enough. We do not make room for it. We do not
accept that it is part of the way we were made, part of our very nature.
Buddha once said that all of life is suffering. And although
I feel moments of joy, I get his point.
I guess this column is a plea to take our mental health as
seriously as we take everything else. There are times when we just need to
recover and there are people out there, who you are walking by every day, who
are having the worst time of their life.
Be compassionate. That is what being faithful is all about.
