What it looks like to actually grieve your wounds

Jessica Smit Mattingly painting*

Andrew Bauman released a film and a book called A Brave Lament. You can watch the movie on YouTube if you click here. Both the book and the movie chronicles the time of losing their son. You can listen to the entire podcast here: The Place We Find Ourselves: What It Looks Like To Actually Grieve Your Wounds. Bauman also has a book that just came out called Stumbling Toward Wholeness.

"Grief always exposes who we are." Andrew Bauman

I used to be terrified of losing JB. He was (and is) so much of ME. I've been with him since I was a teenager. How can I live without him? 

And then, in February of this year, I fell into a deep, deep pit. It was a pit SO deep, I truly thought it might kill me or might send me to the hospital in an attempt to save my life. 

And, somehow, in the. midst of healing FROM that intense depression and the wounds that had caused that depression, I actually found myself understanding that if I lose JB, I will know how to grieve. If I lose a child or a dear person in my life, I don't have to fear it. I will have to grieve it. 

Grief will expose where you are on your healing journey and how prepared you are for that grief. 

Grief is one of the most natural inclinations of the human heart, and yet, in our culture, especially our Christian culture, it's avoided at all costs. People do not want to grieve. Pastors want us to celebrate their life. But we aren't crying because they are in heaven. We are crying because we are going to miss them.

"The wailing of broken hearts is the doorway to God." Rumi

Please don't misunderstand me as I type this piece. I love Jesus. I love my Christian community. I think Church is incredibly important. And I understand that it isn't perfect. But I learned some incredibly damaging thinking accidentally through the church. I say accidentally because I really don't know that anyone meant to teach it to me. I want to believe it wasn't intentional, as I can't come up with any reason people would want to give that thinking over to me. 

But I learned, in general, that my body was bad. That I could not trust my gut. If I was sad, I shouldn't be. God didn't want me sad. He wanted me happy. He wanted only good. He wanted me to only confess good. He didn't want me to be negative. This was coupled with my elite athletics which taught me that my body needed to hurt. That I needed to remember, "No pain, no gain." And so, I avoided pain or I willingly sat in it. I saw crying or sadness as BAD. I thought it meant that I was weak.

And, as I was able to hear in this podcast, this therapist and his wife, when they lost their first child, knew that they could not run from it. And this episode chronicles their attempt at living through their grief. The Bible is full of scriptures that encourage us to grieve. And in fact, we watched Jesus grieve when Lazarus died even though he knew his friend would be coming back to life.

"Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted"

In fact, in Isaiah we find out that Jesus knew there would be broken-hearted here because he has come to bind up their wounds! He knew there would be people who would be broken.

In this movie, there is a scene where the author is on the ground, wailing, and his hand is reaching up for his son's coffin. He didn't want his son to be alone. He wanted to be able to hold him. And he needed to grieve in this way. This film is encouraging others to grieve your losses. To do it bodily, intentionally, persistently, and to allow for rituals for that loss. Small things matter. You are allowed to create a ritual to say "this matters" and "this is important."

We have permission to feel our pain, grieve it, and to grieve it publicly. They don't mean you have to grieve with the general public, but with your community. It is almost a counter-cultural experience to be allowed to grieve with people. They had people who chose to bear with them in their agony. They admit that the community they had around them wasn't usual, but that it should be. We need to lay our masks down and start showing our humanity and blessing our humanity. We have to let our wounds show. Church is not a social club. 

Sometimes, given the severity of our anguish, we are given no choice but to grieve in this matter. I know that that was sort of true for me in the depths of my depression. You get to a point where you don't care how uncomfortable you make people in your grief. We need to have integrity toward what we lost. Someone told Andrew in the course of his grief, "You are going to have another son." That isn't what he wants to hear! Sure, he might have another son, but saying that is saying we don't want to grieve. We want to fix their sadness. We want to get them through it as fast as we can. Grief in super uncomfortable.

A poem from Andrew's book:

Just touch me. 

Will you hold my hand? 

Though its cold and bony

Will you embrace me tightly?

Can you wail as I wail?

Curse as I curse?

Pray as I pray? 

I don't want to be fixed.

I want to be known. 

Once you are in that "suffering club" you have no choice but to be "in the club" and help people suffer. We don't know how to suffer well. And people don't know how to suffer well or they just don't know what it is like. What we actually need in these situations is to be with people where they are. Emmanuel, God with Us. You aren't asking for a lot in that you just need someone to sit with you. But what you are actually asking someone to do is to die with you.

I want your presence kneeling by my bed

Feeling useless

Powerless

Helpless

For then you will understand 

A small part of me

That few have had the courage to know.

I recognize this will cost you greatly. 

But deep down, I will learn my worth

From the measure of your sacrifice.

Do you hear the ripple of the gospel in this? Do you hear Jesus ask his disciples to DIE to themselves and follow him? You must DIE to fix others. You must DIE to fix other people. We must DIE to ourselves so we can suffer alongside someone who is suffering. We have to allow our bodies to be present next to someone who is in that level of anguish. And that is overwhelming. And yet, there is no possibility of resurrection  apart from that. 

Not everyone gets this, but everyone deserves the privilege of having people to grieve alongside them. And, even if you have to go back to work and can't take time off to grieve, will you create space to create a ritual to enter into the pain even if it is only in your bed at night? If you do not give yourself permission to grieve, it will come out sideways.

This is where this discussion crosses over into my personal journey through immense depression and anxiety. I had friends and family members who called me on the phone and listened to me sob. Do you know how uncomfortable that is? Do you know how horrific that is? My Aunt Connie once said to me after I had gotten through a particularly challenging time that she remembered me texting her I was "barely surviving" that day. And she, in turn, had thought about trying to tell me to go outside. But she didn't. She just sent me a virtual hug. And what a gift that is. There was no fixing the depths of my sadness at that point. 

What I needed was to be FELT. I needed to cry. I needed to be heard. I needed to be unavailable sometimes. I needed to grieve. I needed to be encouraged TO grieve. My cousin Cara was probably the most valuable resource I had during the six months of HELL that I endured. I am not a phone talker, and I don't think I had ever had a conversation with my cousin on the phone. But during a particularly hard day she told me she was willing to listen if I needed to call.

I remember immediately thinking, "Well I will never call her. How could I do that?" The thought of calling someone who I was only a little bit close to and simply sobbing while on the phone felt utterly impossible and ridiculous.

And then Cara called me! I remember seeing her name on my phone screen and thinking, "Oh my gosh! She is willing to sit here in this with me? She is willing to listen to my grief in heart-wrenching sobs." And I picked up the phone, and I cried. I cried so hard. I laid on my closet floor and simply allowed my body to convulse with sadness. 

And she just listened. Sometimes she'd offer an encouraging word that, since she had been where I was before, she felt she could offer. But sometimes she didn't say anything. And if she hadn't experienced the level of my sadness, she may not have felt qualified to offer words. 

But the gift she gave me in that time was simply beyond words. 

My Aunt Jan would occasionally pop by my house. I always knew that if I couldn't see her or couldn't talk or could only lay in my bed and cry, she would allow that. Jan was grieving the loss of my presence. We are dear friends and she was fairly new to Tennessee, and yet she willingly allowed me to sit in my sadness and she sat there with me. During the worst, I couldn't eat. So she brought a dessert one time and gave me a spoon and just encouraged me to take one bite. And I did. (I lost 45 pounds in the course of this beast of grief -- but don't despair -- good ol' Wendi gladly put it right back on when the journey got better!) (That sentence implies some humor and sarcasm.)

I had another friend, "Stebbs" that would just get on Marco Polo and encourage me. Some others sent cards. Another waited until I felt the need to call her to be reminded of truth. Some friends would patiently not hear from me for weeks or months but then, willingly, allow me to simply sob on the other end of the line. I remember my friend MaryKay and her husband Richard just praying for me and weeping with me and calling a relative who had battled depression for some advice in how to encourage me. 

"Sadness doesn't sink a person. It is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that." Barbara Brown Taylor

Oh man ... does that not resonate with me? I had  to not hide my sadness. Nothing was harder than going to church and pretending I was okay. Sometimes I would drag myself to church and just go collapse in the cry room and rest during the entire sermon. Sometimes I couldn't go at all. Faking it was simply too unbearable. 

It can feel like, if you go into the pain, you'll never come back. If you start crying, it'll never stop. A terrifying monster comes to our door. If we block the door and hide in the corner, the monster hasn't gone anywhere. It still controls us. What would happen if instead, when grief comes to our door, we have a seat with it on our couch, talk to it for fifteen minutes, and then say good bye to it for the day. What if we said to grief, "Why are you here? How can I help you?" 

The monster does not need to rule you. Can we become intimate with our shame? Our grief? Our self-hatred? Without the judgment? Without the part of us where shame rules us? 

It's the welcome of Jesus. Can you embody the Father in yourself and towards your own self? You need to let the parts of you that you have "shusshed" for so long, speak some words. 

This is another part of my journey that has been incredibly challenging. I had not idea the amount of shame and guilt and hard stuff that I had shoved down within myself. And, because I had refused to look at it, it was bursting out of me. It was coming out sideways. 

That's what I've learned here. The stuff you don't look at, will force itself to be looked at. If you don't allow it to be seen, you will find a way to cope. You drink. You sleep around. You eat. You battle depression. You yell. You lose your cool. You stress. You control. 

That's how it comes out sideways. 

If you want to heal completely, you MUST look at your past. If you refuse to do it, it will not ever fully grieve. You may find ways to cope, and I understand the choice to not look at trauma in the face. But every single person in the world HAS trauma. And by trauma I mean, things that have hurt you and messed with your perceptions of the present. You must look it in the face. You must grieve it. Some people will be able to do that without many issues whatsoever. But some people, like me, will be forced to do this in a really challenging season of sadness and anxiety because I refused to let it come out of me otherwise. 

You may have longing for something in your past. We hate that we long for a relationship that we know we won't ever have. It's still god  in you that you do long for it. So avoiding the longing won't make the longing go away.  Contempt can block your desire. But do not hold your longing in. Contempt may cover up shame. But it will keep desire at arm's length. 

Sometimes we feel, if we can make the need go away, we won't feel so much agony. But as an adult, you need to reclaim the idea that desire is good. 

"If we can give ourselves permission to grieve, then daring, devoted friends will show up. If those people do not show up in your time of need, ask yourself if you are allowing your brokenness to be seen or if you are just breaking in isolation." Andrew Bauman

Sometimes we feel, if we can make the need go away, we won't feel so much agony. But as an adult, you need to reclaim the idea that desire is good. 

And if those friends, can't be there, you might have to kindly let them go. And that's okay. And there may be people that allow their brokenness to be seen, but they don't engage with those trying to help very well at all. But for many of us with trauma, the temptation is to hold the pain close and not let others see it. Can you hold it back from some people and have boundaries AND open yourself up to the right people and risk and be vulnerable as well. Your trauma is a pearl. Do you cast them before swine? 

How do we come to terms with the deep loss and tragedy that marks all of our lives? What do we do with that loss? How do we engage it honestly? How do we engage it in a way that allows for the movement of the spirit of God in the human heart so that we can get back into the stream of life? 

*This is a painting I purchased and is hanging in my bedroom. In this painting, a woman finds the resilience to persevere and overcome the wall creating a barrier between herself and a forgotten place of living and being. In Renaissance art, the peacock was a symbol of immortality, and in this painting, it is a guide to a forgotten garden. I discovered this painting done by a dear friend of my cousin Cara about 2/3 into my depression journey, and it became a symbol for the beauty I would find again.