Filling the Hole

So far in my processes, I have been accused of being very “analytical.”  That’s such an interesting description for me—let me analyze it!  

Of course, I am being analytical.  Why would this be any different from any other time.  It is part of who I am.  However, the word has a subtly pejorative meaning, even though the speakers would never admit to that.  They have bought into the notion that thinking and feeling are two separate realms.  If I am spending time thinking about thinking, or even thinking about feeling, then by definition I must not be feeling.  I must be suppressing my feelings, staying in my head, denying my emotions and therefore not playing the psychoanalytical game.  

What I find is that such an accusation veils a level of discomfort with the complexity of the information I am personally processing here.  So, friends, just because I have studied this and you haven’t, please don’t demean me and my processes by accusing me of “stuffing” my feelings.  Instead, you might want to try to understand some of this for yourself.  If you do, in whatever way works for you, you might feel better.

I imagine that you can see the chip on my shoulder that I carry through parts of this book.  I must apologize for that irritable attitude. I haven’t processed all of my anger just yet.  However, I have tremendous impatience with folks who suggest that everyone must grieve in personally unique ways and then who insist that I do this according to some external notion of how it will all work.  That creates a psychological oxymoron that doesn’t help me or anyone else.  

For some of us, being “analytical” is the road to deeper personal insight and a path to healing and integration that works.  So I do get impatient with folks who suggest that I am somehow “cheating the system” in these reflections.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of speaking a few words at a service for parents who had suffered through the death of an infant.  It was hard for me to separate my own feelings of loss from those of the parents in front of me.  I have not lost a child.  I have come close a few times in twenty-six years of parenting.  But Anne and I had been spared that searing suffering.  I have walked with parents who have been unable to have children, who have lost children to death, and who care for children with debilitating illness.  

Then came the loss of Ben Larson—not my child, but as close to the loss of a child as I ever wish to come.  I find now in my own grief that parents who have lost children come as close as anyone to understanding my grief journey.

The loss of a child unhinges everything.  I find that losing a spouse was similar in that regard.  Suddenly, nothing is nailed down.  I lose track of who I am and where I fit into the larger scheme of things.  It takes all the energy I can muster just to remember what I’m supposed to do next.  I can’t concentrate.  I can’t focus.  I have trouble making plans.  I feel tears welling up, my nose getting full, my chest getting heavy for no particularly good reason.  I want to sleep to escape, and then I spend hours awake in the dark.  It’s just awful.

It is depression and more than depression.  Krista Tippett gives some voice to this experience in a recent book.  “For me,” she writes, “depression was not so much about being without faith or hope or love; it was, rather, not being able to remember knowing those things, not being able to imagine ever experiencing them again” (Einstein’s God, page 224).

The world becomes a foreign location.  I feel like a stranger in a strange land.  I don’t want to talk about normal things.  I can’t develop the energy for small talk.  I feel funny around people I’ve known my whole life.  Familiar places develop sharp and spiky edges and I hurt when I walk through them.  I look in the mirror and I barely recognize myself.  It’s just awful.

Losing someone so dear creates a hole in my life.  How will I ever fill that hole again?  That’s a question I ask myself over and over.  The truth is that I won’t really fill it.  The hole will always be there.  So I ask a different question.  What will gather in that hole in my life?  Will I allow it to fill with bitterness and pain and darkness?  Or will that hole become a place where I can find a deeper sense of life and self and hope?

As you all know, I choose hope.