Good Grief
A friend recently posted on social media that she saw a “fog bow” on her morning walk. This was new to me and after doing a quick google search, I was bemused: who knew such a thing existed?
I learned that a fog bow is a white rainbow that, as the name suggests, appears in the water droplets of fog rather than after rain. The fog bow has little to no color. NASA explains that the fogbow's lack of color is caused by smaller water drops ... so small that the wavelength of light becomes important. Diffraction smears out colors that would be created by larger rainwater drops. A misty, cloudy fog is the only environment in which you’ll ever glimpse this beautiful, natural, colorless phenomenon.
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I have been in Houston at MD Anderson for about a month and a half. My surgery was five weeks ago, and I just started twice-a-day radiation treatment this week. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who has walked the breast cancer path ahead of me has told me that radiation was the easiest part.
So why am I having such a hard time?
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We live in a culture that numbs pain through a myriad of methods. We numb our emotions through alcohol, food, shopping, porn, pills, social media, and Netflix binges, just to start. We also discount, stuff, and numb our feelings through comparison.
In her new book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes about growing up with a family mantra of It could be worse. Her father consistently repeated, “I’ve had worse cuts on my lip and kept on a-whistling.” He presented this comparison to any injury his children could present to him: broken bones, accidents, surgeries.
She writes: The dark side of this resistance to grief is that we do not learn to grieve ordinary suffering and loss—the commonplace but nonetheless heavy burdens we each carry. As long as anyone had it worse (which is always), I felt I didn’t have permission to be sad, to weep, to mourn.”
Every day this week, morning and afternoon, I sit in a tiny waiting area for my radiation treatment. There is a larger vestibule just outside the door, but this little room with just ten chairs—five facing five—is a room designated for breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer patients. This small space is becoming a place of holy ground to me.
Sometimes there are just two or three of us; sometimes every seat is full. But no matter what, we talk. Nobody is on their phone. Nobody is reading a magazine or a book. Every woman is sitting in her hospital dressing gown—all of us in the same vulnerable place—telling our stories.
There’s my new friend Cara, also diagnosed with IBC, who lives 12 hours away in El Paso but is currently living in an apartment here in Houston with her four children under six years old and her husband. I asked her if she came to MD Anderson because of the Inflammatory Breast Clinic, like me. No, she said. I came here because I was pregnant. She did chemo while pregnant, paused her treatment to have her baby, finished chemo, underwent a double mastectomy, and now has radiation twice a day. Her youngest is just 6 months old.
There’s Janet, whose grown daughter, a doctor herself, attended with her this week. Janet just had radiation this past January… and then the cancer was back by April, but even bigger and in her lungs. They quietly talked about Thanksgiving plans, because this is likely the last one they’ll have together.
I’ve had a tough year, no doubt about it. But right now, I’m cancer-free. I sit with these women and find myself thinking, It could be worse.
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I’ve been an emotional basket case this week, frankly. I cry easily. I’m not sleeping well. My stomach hurt for two days and I finally pinpointed it as anxiety. There is this subterranean emotion bubbling underneath the treatment that was supposed to be easiest.
About six months ago, I started seeing a counselor. I booked her when I thought I might die, honestly, and I had no idea how to process that grief. How do you live when you think you’re dying?
She has been a Godsend to me, and we sat down for a zoom call a few nights ago. Why am I having such a hard time with this? I mused. I did have several thoughts on what could be going on, and perhaps I’ll flesh those out another time. For now, though, the takeaway I want to share with you is this: you can only hold off your emotions for long enough, and then they are going to come at you like a tidal wave.
She encouraged me: I’ve had my eyes focused on one thing at a time (see my blog on doing the next thing) for a year and a half. There hasn’t been room for emotion. There hasn’t been room for feeling. There is just doing. And I am a doer. But now the doing is almost done, and the responses are coming over me like an avalanche. It’s like a year and a half of pent-up emotion I didn’t even know existed is bubbling to the surface.
Don’t be surprised if it gets even worse once you get home, she said. A freight train of feeling is coming your way.
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Grief is good.
You can only stuff the feelings for so long before the emotions begin to come out sideways. Acknowledging sadness is healthy. Sitting in your sorrow, not minimizing it as it could be worse… is best. We tend to handle our grief with one of two polar opposite approaches: either ignoring it or wallowing in it with a heart of despair.
So, how do we view ourselves and our grief through a healthy and holy light?
I was recently pointed to an interesting distinction Jesus makes when he meets Saul on the road to Damascus. Saul, a powerful religious leader, is tearing up the new Christian church. In Acts 8, we see that he’s traveling around going from house to house to drag off men and women and put them in prison.
Then he gets some official paperwork so that he can head to other cities and do the same thing. He plans to spread the reign of terror and it’s his personal mission to shut this whole Christian church thing down.
He’s traveling on the road to Damascus when a bright light flashes around him. Acts 9:4 says that he fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him:
Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
Who are you, Lord? Saul asked.
I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, he replied.
Jesus did not say:
Why do you persecute my people?
Why do you persecute these Christians?
No. He says, Why do you persecute me?
Because when we suffer, He suffers. When we grieve, He grieves. As a child of God, you are united to him, with him, in him. When the early church was persecuted, he was persecuted. In some mysterious way, when I suffer from anxiety and am overwhelmed with the unknown, he shares in that suffering and in the feelings of being overwhelmed.
Dare I say, when I’m radiated, he is radiated? When I sob, he sobs?
You’ve kept track of all my wandering and weeping. You’ve stored my many tears in your bottle—not one of them will be lost. For they are all recorded in your book of remembrance.
Psalm 56:8
I know God loves me. I know I’m not alone. I know that God is always with me. But this is one step further, and it’s a step we need to grab onto: Our God suffers with us.
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It was my turn. Everyone wished me luck, as they always do. I left the waiting room and was walking down the hall with my radiation tech on the way to the machine. I said I feel like someone could do a documentary about that waiting room. It’s a remarkable place.
She responded: I hate walking into that room. I think you all hear these stories, and you store them up, secretly worrying: will that happen to me?
Maybe she’s right. It’s probably an added heaviness to an already heavy season. But, then again: maybe she’s wrong. We can’t get a glimpse of the remarkable fog bow without sitting in the fog. And it's not going to feel pleasant. Something healthy and good happens when we acknowledge the grief, and perhaps it’s a glimpse into the Father’s heart when we find a safe place to share it.
Is it crazy to suggest that this Thanksgiving, alongside your standard question What are you thankful for? someone might be bold enough to ask: What are you sad about? What do you grieve?
Honest and shared sorrow is the heart of our Lord. He not only meets us in it, he actually is suffering it—let us not shrink away from partaking it with others. It is Good Grief.
PS - Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren is my book of the year. Buy it. Read it. Give it. www.tishharrisonwarren.com
Also, I want to give credit for the sermon I heard about Paul’s journey on the road to Damascus. It was delivered by John Trapp of Christ the King Presbyterian here in Houston. www.christtheking.com