How to pay your respects to grief.

Suffering a loss affects each of us differently--some get angry, some hide their feelings, others want to talk to someone--but there are traditional ways to live with the changes grief brings about.

Daddy died when I was 7. He came home from work one day, dragged himself up the stairs of our two-story farmhouse, and crawled into bed in the room he and my mother shared at the end of the hallway.

Over the next two days, he weakened further and had to lean his tall, wiry body heavily on my mothers shoulder just to get to the bathroom at the opposite end of the hallway.

On the third night of his illness, our country doctor ordered an ambulance to rush him to Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, 40 miles away. On the way to the hospital, Daddy died.

I remember the day of the funeral and sitting on the steps that led upstairs, watching as relatives and friends, many of whom came from a great distance (or what seemed so in the 1950s), stood in somber clusters so dense that all I could see from my vantage point were knees and shoulders.

At the tender age of 7, I didn't realize that life as I'd known it was now over. Until that night in September, we were a '50s family with five children, whose Daddy went to work and whose Mom stayed home, sewed, baked bread, and raised the children.

To all appearances, many things stayed the same. Mom continued to bake bread. We children continued our education at the Catholic elementary school, thanks to our parish priest's forgiveness of tuition, which Mom, as a young widow with five children and no insurance, couldn't possibly afford.

But, in truth, nothing would ever be the same again. Each member of the family had been forcibly propelled from his or her place in one constellation and placed unexpectedly on a new and unfamiliar trajectory.

Only much later did I enter fully into grief; allow the physical, emotional, and psychological process to run its course; feel grief's power; and glimpse the spirituality at its core.

Our family didn't grieve well in the '50s. Mom simply said, "Daddy would never have been the same had he lived. Things happen for the best." We didn't talk about Daddy, about our family, our feelings, or our future--not that families do much better today. Recent studies say death is surpassing sex as the subject parents are least comfortable talking about to their children.

Like Anne Tyler's character Ansel says after a funeral in The Tin Can Tree (Berkley Publishing Group, 1987), "They don't seem to realize, no more. Don't think of themselves being dead someday; don't mourn no more. It's hard to say what they do do, when you stop and consider."

"Mourning," says R. Scott Sullender in Grief and Growth (Paulist Press, 1985), is even "treated as if it were a weakness, a self-indulgence, a reprehensible bad habit instead of a psychological necessity."

Generally, we're blind to the grief in our midst.

The journey through bereavement, writes Diane Cole, "has always resembled a restless struggle to find a new place for myself in a world suddenly bereft of all sense of safety or refuge."

You find in bereavement, says C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed (Bantam, 1976), "A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."

Most difficult for many of us is to sit in the silence and let it hurt for however long it takes to stop hurting.

Loss of anything significant forces one to grapple with basic, existential issues, says grief therapist, Ken Moses, director of Resource Networks, Inc., an Evanston, Illinois organization specializing in issues of human growth in the shadow of loss.

Our sense of who we are, the meaning we find in life, our values and our dreams will all be held up to examination when we experience profound loss. And since a vast array of perceptions and experiences mold each person's values, dreams, and sense of meaning, everyone's grief--their style and time frame for grappling with these issues--will be different.

For Lisa Smith, 38, the grief process began with "your worst nightmare come true." On Dec. 19,1991, Smith's father laid out a plan for Christmas shopping and baby-sitting with his grandson, kissed his wife good night, and, a few hours later, committed suicide.

After the funeral, the raw emotion that grief triggers sent each family member on a separate path. Smith's brother ran, abandoning his wife and child for a year; her mother wrapped herself in a cloak of denial; Smith still cries angry tears when she describes going to his grave and kicking the flowers. She finds no "good" in the loss or in her grief.

Nevertheless, two years later, Smith says that she is a different person. "I'm still in the process that began with Dad's death. I began to think about spirituality in a way that I never did before. I used to want--and thought I needed--things: a new car, a new house, more jewelry. My focus has changed. I'm trying to learn what my task is on this earth. Sometimes I even think there is a Master Plan but that we're making too much noise to hear its voice."

Smith calls the process that she's been in for two years "grief work."

From time immemorial 

Grief is a "universal and integral part of the experience of love," C. S. Lewis wrote.

If we love, we will grieve. With this as a given, one would think human beings would get better at it as they progress. But neither the Renaissance nor the Industrial Revolution changed the face of human grief. It remains the same process that it was during the time of Christ, when Christ himself endured an agony that encompassed denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before his crucifixion. His grieving disciples, like the grief stricken today, underwent social isolation, disorientation, and guilt. The human emotional responses to loss, though they may occur in random order, remain the same over the millennia.

Throughout human history rituals have provided a supportive environment where human beings could be safe with the pain, anger, and fear that swept them up when they suffered great loss. In Jesus' time, the women went to the tomb and the apostles gathered in the Upper Room.

In myriad ways according to culture but with profound symbolism ritual formally acknowledged the rupture with the past; provided a safe transition between past and future, and embraced mourners within a continuing community structure.

In obscure African villages, such as the one where Sister of Mercy Kathryn Wrinn ministered until last year, the community still participates in rituals. Infant and childhood mortality rates are high, Wrinn says. "On the day of the funeral, family members and villagers gather at the home of the family whose child has died, pick up their shovels, walk with the body to a burial site, and dig the grave. One mother was so bent over with grief that she couldn't pick up her shovel. Another man, who had lost a child the previous week, walked over to her, touched her on the shoulder, helped her to her feet, and worked at her side."

But in our scientific, secular society rituals speak of religion, and like many things religious, rituals have gone the way of the horse and buggy. Ritual speaks of faith and mystery, and we prefer to see mystery unraveled and our destiny charted on a graph. We fly on planes; we transplant hearts; we extend our life expectancy. And where we apply our resources, we can practically banish childhood mortality--all without religious ritual.

The rituals we do maintain do not have the meaning they once did. We no longer "give brides away" in the sense that we did mere decades ago. It's not unusual, despite liturgical guidelines, to delay Baptism until a toddler can walk to the font.

Death takes place in a neutral site, surrounded by high technology rather than high priests. We pay our respects in rooms designed for the purpose, where the carpet is plush, the flowers artfully arranged, and the lighting mercifully soft.

True, the years may have softened our collective memory of the harshness of earlier rituals. Anne Latham, the eldest child of a family that emigrated from the Ukraine to the Mesabi Range in Minnesota early in the century, remembers that the funerals of both her 40-year-old mother and her 21-year-old sister took place at home, their bodies laid out in the parlor.

"We were poor," Latham, now 82, says. "We had a small house. There were six children who still needed to be taken care of and, with the body in your midst 24 hours a day, you couldn't escape the grief for a moment." Though Latham took no comfort in the rituals of the time, even she acknowledges that we live increasingly without meaningful rituals or social structures that are more than briefly tolerant of one of the most profound human processes.

Go through the motions

In Latin American or Hispanic communities, which represent the fastest-growing minority in the United States, ritual retains its sacred place, says Maria Guarracino, assistant to the cardinal in the Archdiocese of New York's Office for Women, though the form rituals take will vary significantly depending on the origins of any given Latino community.

"Our rituals are very much home based," says Guarracino, who is of Puerto Rican extraction. For nine days after the funeral, we pray the rosary intensely. Mary is very popular in cultures where structures are oppressive, perhaps because in the Catholic tradition, Mary is associated with the Passion rather than the Resurrection.

"We fast," says Guarracino, "especially from pork, which in our tradition is served at celebrations. And we have no television, radio, or music in the house. For us, there needs to be a real expression of grief; we believe that the person is somewhere present in this transition, even if we don't know where. We bring out all the photos that we have of the person who died, and we recount every memory that each photo represents."

Sister Rosa Maria Icaza of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, Texas describes similar rituals that take place in the border region but adds that in Southwest Texas it is traditional to visit the cemetery on anniversaries with a picnic of all the favorite foods of the deceased. "We believe very strongly that they are still with us and that they intercede for us. We talk to them often and ask for help."

The intensity of grieving rituals in her culture, says Guarracino, may seem somewhat at odds with the emphasis that is placed on Resurrection in other Catholic cultures. "On the fifth anniversary of my father-in-law's death, everyone who had been at the funeral gathered for a memorial Mass. The celebrant was the same priest who was at the funeral Mass; tears flowed as though he had died last week. I don't know how you interfere with that or if you can say it's inappropriate. Every Good Friday, we gather in memory of what Christ did for us. In our rituals, we simply do the same thing for the people who nurtured or cared for us."

"The people I work with believe death is a moment of glory and triumph," says Pam Newton, assistant director at the House of Mercy, a hospice-type residence for men and women with AIDS in Belmont, North Carolina sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy. That Christian view did not, however, diminish the grief that Newton felt at the first death on her watch.

"Kevin was an uneducated man whose family rejected him because he had AIDS. No one called or wrote or visited the entire time he was with us. Yet he was graceful and easy to love. For me and everyone on the staff, he epitomized goodness. I still miss him very much."

When a resident dies, Newton says, everyone in the house--staff members, other residents, family, and friends--gather around the body, join hands, and pray. "Each of us speaks about how that person has touched our lives. We share what was good and what was bad. Not everything about every relationship is good, and you feel very guilty about that. To hear that others also experienced a mix of good, and bad affirms and binds us and helps us to heal. To be broken in the presence of other broken people is a beginning to healing."

Newton's AIDS household may have a different ambiance than that of the Guarracino home, but coursing through the rituals of both is the healing process of remembering.

"I went through the seasons with Kevin," Newton says. "Baseball season, basketball season, football and the Super Bowl. This year, when baseball season began, memories of Kevin flooded over us. We talked about how he loved the games, his favorite teams. It might sound very simple, but to remember and to talk about our memory with someone who has some of the same memory is to heal."

Let others support you

This year, for the first time, Ricki Eggers attended the annual memorial Mass in the Diocese of Pittsburgh for families of people who have died tragically or unexpectedly. "I sat in the back of the church and looked at the crowd of about 700, and I knew I was not alone. I felt pain, but I felt love, too. I was so afraid my brother would be forgotten, but that fear was put to rest when I met a woman who had been coming to the Mass for eight years. At the sign of peace, the six or seven of us who were in the back of the church moved, almost as one, out into the aisle to join everyone else. We knew we shared something, and we couldn't just nod our heads. We needed to touch each other."

Rituals encourage people to grieve, says Sullender, and the most effective rituals will encourage full expression of deep feeling. Shakespeare wrote: "To weep is to make less the depth of grief."

Ritual is a vital part of her ministry, says Barbara Elordi, director of grief-care ministry for the San Francisco archdiocese. "I ask people to fill a special container with items that belonged to their loved one and to share the meaning of each item with the group. One person broughts and from the golf course where her dad played; another brought M&Ms because she remembered the way her grandmother had always given her candy."

According to Elordi, "People join support groups about two months after a loss occurs. Your psyche protects you for that long. Then everything comes crashing in at the same time people expect you to be back to normal. This is when people start doing rituals." People start developing ceremonies for themselves, she says, that allow them to acknowledge their loss, begin to separate themselves emotionally from what has been lost, and take a step into their future.

The essence of grief is a striving to restructure life, says Sullender, which often opens floodgates of creativity and growth. In reordering the chaos, works of art are born as well as organizations, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. A recent article in U.S. News & World Report suggests that the social activism that AIDS activists engage in "may be the ultimate communal healing ritual."

Support groups can help facilitate the grieving process. In the absence of established community rituals, support groups allow us to express our dependence while they respond to our human need for continuity, identity, and security, says Sullender.

We can connect with grief support groups at almost any parish or diocesan social ministry office, hospital social-service department, or in the blue pages of the phone book. Within support groups, which often target a specific kind of bereavement, from We Are Remembered in the Pittsburgh diocese to one of the many regional chapters of Compassionate Friends, the newcomer can find small, close-knit communities of people who have been there and can empathize and offer support, time, and presence. Support groups also offer involvement in a program; a sense of normalcy, regardless of the extremes of feeling expressed; and hope.

Nevertheless, support groups don't appeal to everyone. "Some are very good when you need to cry but don't know what to do with you when you're angry," grief therapist Moses says.

Lisa Smith attended only one meeting of her local We Are Remembered chapter. "I needed one friend, and I found one at that meeting."

"Grief widens places inside yourself that you would never touch," says Elordi, who, at 29, was diagnosed as terminally ill with a lymphoma in her chest.

The process that began with her diagnosis and ultimately effected a healing radically changed her view of life and death. She gave up teaching and entered grief ministry, where she tries to guide others to "that part of themselves they wouldn't ever know existed . . . the strength that often goes untapped."

Smith was enrolled in a master's program at the University of Pittsburgh, but following her father's suicide, she changed the focus of her studies.

"I want to establish therapy groups for suicide survivors and help them deal with all the shame and stigma that is still out there," she says.

Neither Elordi nor Smith dismiss the pain of the grief process. To yield to grief is to free-fall to those interior depths where Saint John of the Cross writes that love itself is invisible. Yet it is in this "emptiness and solitude," Thomas Merton writes, that one "comes to full maturity." In this inmost solitude, we meet the universal solitude that each person must meet and which is ultimately the solitude of God.

Grief propels us outside of the linear time that dominates our days and nights into an "abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos," says Merton, especially if our faith has been one of formula and convention and we have not pondered its meaning or its consequences. Like the most profound solitude, grief leaves us stranded in a vast emptiness, "which belongs to no one and to everyone."

"Many are crushed without knowing how to make use of it," wrote Simone Weil, whose spiritual essays are acknowledged to be some of the greatest of our century. And Weil decries the waste that human beings make of the power that is inherent in human suffering and joy.

As adults, says Moses, we need this power on our journey toward authentic wholeness. From childhood, he says, we learn to defend ourselves from large and little pains that are part of human experience. Early on, we socialize ourselves: we react appropriately, we comply, we manipulate.

Moses describes this conditioning as a necessary process, even though it contributes to the formation of an adapted self, whose dreams for success, social status, money, and power often drive the adult.

Loss has the power to shatter that adapted self, and grieving is a process that takes us back to our center. We go inside ourselves and discover what really matters and often shed those parts of ourselves that are not congruent, Moses says. If we embark on a journey toward meaning and reevaluate what has value for us, we may lose some of our baggage--the need to "impress, please, fix, convince, or save."

Moses failed to take his own advice and rather, stifled his feelings and toughed it out when he suffered a loss. Then, his son was born with cerebral palsy and other impairments. His fundamental dreams about his child were shattered, and he was faced with a loss he could not deny. Finally, he says, 'I started to yield to the natural and necessary process of grieving.

"Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord."

What grief gives

There we are in our grief: the child lying face down on the rug in the living room, pretending Daddy will come home again; the young airline attendant going through the motions, clutching to nothing other than the idea that if she hasn't died of the pain of grief, she must be a survivor; the father engulfed in a void where there is no hope that his child will be "normal."

We don't necessarily become better people for it. Through grief, we are simply invited to gaze unflinchingly at our brokenness, to acknowledge our common need for healing, and to grow in compassion toward ourselves and each other.

"Words are garbage," Newton says. "The first time I felt grief was when my aunt died. She was a religious sister and a spiritual force in my life, but she was also my friend, my role model, and my mentor. For ten days before she died, I was with her from 7 in the morning until 10 o'clock at night.

"One night she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, 'I don't know what's going to happen to me.' I'd never seen her cry. I felt a dam burst inside me, and I didn't want her to see me lose control."

Intent on being useful rather than simply being, Newton kissed her aunt, told her everything would be alright, and left the room. "The only thing that mattered--being with her--was the thing I couldn't be."

If grieving encompasses emptiness, impatience, fear, isolation, feelings of uselessness, and suffering, it can also precede the experience of genuine Christian compassion that Henri Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas Morrison describe in their essays compiled in Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (Doubleday, 1983). Though central to the Christian life, they say, the movement toward compassion starts with distance.

Newton has gone the distance. "We're a community of people and within this community I've seen and felt great forgiveness and compassion," he says. "I believe that the way that people love me, support me, desire to be with me and know me is only a shadow of what God extends to me."

Newton continues to wrestle with the ambiguity that a condition of life is death. "Grief has taught me to step into a new skin and have a new awareness that I have the same thing that every human being has: this day. Each of us, those who have AIDS and those who don't, will die. Then, factually, a person is no longer a person. But my faith, on the other hand, says to me that we are transcendent beings. Nouwen calls it being able to live our brokenness in the midst of being blessed. I don't like being both assailed by doubt and transformed by faith, but I'm trying to become more graceful about it."

Today, Newton allows herself to be more vulnerable than she once did. "Diane meant a lot to me. She was alone, so I spent a lot of time with her at health-care facilities and emergency rooms. At the end, I was the only one with her. She was staring at the ceiling. I was holding her hand. She was fighting, trying not to die. I held on. I told her it was okay. She could let go. Suddenly she turned and looked at me. She squeezed my hand, and she died.

"It began again," Newton says. "The stillness, the quiet, the revelation of God between us, the peace. Then the pain and the tears. I still ask why?