Re-Mapping

In the face of significant loss, there is a sense in which I as the bereaved also die.  Job speaks such passionate words in Job 3:20-21 in this regard.  “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures…?” 

As described above, it becomes necessary to live into a new identity after the loss.  Barbara Brown Taylor writes of Job’s experience.  “What has happened to him has so assaulted his sense of himself before God that he is no longer sure of who he is.  Job can make no meaning of it.  He is furthermore unable to force God to make meaning of it either” (An Altar in the World, page 164).  

In the face of the loss, all my old identities come into question.  If I lose my spouse, I begin to grapple with what it means for me to be a widower after decades of coupled life.  If I lose my child, I wrestle with what it means to live as a person with that hole in my spirit for the rest of my days.  If I lose my friend, I have to reconfigure my relationships even as I remember over and over the empty space where my friend used to be.  

I think about something as simple as sitting at a worship service.  I think of widows and widowers who have shared the same pew with their beloved for forty, fifty and sixty years.  That has been “their” spot.  They have entered the sanctuary together and never left alone.  Perhaps children occupied spaces at some point, but they have moved on to new adventures.  Wife and husband remain in their shared space.  Then one of them dies.

It is nearly impossible for the remaining spouse to occupy that space again.  It is incomplete.  It is empty.  It is filled with pain.  Sometimes other family members will come for a while to help ease the transition.  Sometimes a friend or other fellow sufferer will fill that empty space and begin to construct a new emotional geography.  In some congregations this will lead to formation of “widows’ row” or the “widower’s bench.”  Many times, however, the bereaved spouse simply cannot return.  That part of the world has changed for a lifetime and cannot be reclaimed.  

So it is for us when we lose someone.  My personal, emotional and spiritual map of myself and my world must be revised—or perhaps even discarded in favor of a new map.  I have to revise all my hopes and dreams, my plans and priorities, my assumptions and expectations, in order to integrate the loss into my life.  Memories of the loved one now dead look strange, fictional, as if from another lifetime.

That’s because they are.