“Grief is the confusion caused by not knowing how to love someone who is gone. Grief is love’s frustration, bitterness, anger, and resentment at death’s destruction… Grief is love’s unwillingness to give up. It’s stretching bonds and redefining limits in order to create a space where you can love someone in their eternal absence.”
—Eleanor Haley
I met Philip during my chaplain rotation in seminary. It was Philip’s wife, June, who was technically my patient. Progressing through the stages of a terminal illness, June was now unresponsive. Sitting at her bedside, Philip told me the story of falling in love, being married for sixty years, raising their family together, and their strong shared faith. He told me about her illness and how he was determined to exhaust all avenues of treatment. I looked at June in the bed and noticed the signs of her illness. Philip’s voice broke, “I just want more time with her.”
I looked at him and asked, “Would you like to pray?”
My job was not to remind Philip of the sixty good years together. It was not even my job to teach Philip to let June go. In that moment, not knowing if I would see Philip or June again, it was my job to hear his fear and loss; to let him speak his truth, his sadness. Together we held hands and prayed to the God that Philip understood, sharing how much Philip loved June and how much their life together meant. And we asked, humbly, for just a little more time.
As Unitarian Universalists, we make no promises about the afterlife. However, we make some pretty bold statements about the value of our living. As UUs, love calls us to create heaven in this life. So, it’s that in a season when the veil between life and death is thinnest that we honor the dead with love.
I don’t know if June got more time; she was moved to another part of the hospital. What I do know is that Philip’s love for June was the root of his deep grief.
Grief is love. We think of grief as sadness, emptiness, pain, sorrow but we would not grieve death without the presence of love. Grief is so often treated as a finite exercise, as though it ends.
But for grief to end, love would have to end. Your grief may be transformed. It may change. But love and grief, just like living and dying, exist in relationship. Grief does not end, but neither does love. All Souls invites us, the living, to reconcile with death by making meaning together. All Souls is a day to remember the dead, and by remembering, say: this life mattered. All Souls is a day to remember, and by remembering, we love.
Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love, as the veil between the living and the dead grows thin, may we remember our ancestors, forever connected by love in the eternal cycle of life. Amen and Blessed Be.