Observations While Walking the Path of Grief



This was their home



The holidays which came in a steady flow this fall repeatedly brought me back to the fall of  2012, the season which marked the beginning of the  end of my parents' lives as they had known them together for 69 years. It is still shocking to think of all that has happened in this last year both in the family of my birth and in the family to which I committed myself 13 years ago. I will leave the list of occasions which brought me to both the heights and the depths of human experience to another reflection.  I will focus on recent    observation of a feature of human grieving.

 



alabaster vase
with carved stone flowers
5 inches high - Italy
 

I am thinking again of my parents and how their lives, as they knew them came to a screeching halt in October of last year when my mother, age 88 and experiencing dementia, was hospitalized for a week. This was followed by a month of recuperation and rehabilitation in a nursing home and then arranging for her to live in an assisted living facility in their town. My father was a devoted husband in every way. The quality of their relationship was recently described by a psychiatrist friend as a 'zipper marriage' - devotion to each other that had a shadow side of shutting others out. It was only my father's realization that he could no longer cope with the day to day reality of my mother's dementia as he experienced his own diminishment in strength and spoke of fully expecting his own death within the year. He died on April 17 at the age of 91 following two and half months of in-home Hospice care and one week in a Hospice residential facility.

 

I am thinking of how their way of life just seemed to explode in a manner of seconds. All of their carefully arranged routines, relationships, obligations, support systems could no longer suffice to maintain things as they had always been. This was crushing to my father.

 



upper frame - my sister and I
ages 7 and five
lower frame my sons and
my parents 1984



In what followed my father's death the beautiful objects, so lovingly, artistically arranged and maintained were propelled from their set order or place; off into the unknown universe; a diaspora of all that was their life. What had been an enduringly cohesive whole atomized, exploded, fractured into shards.

 

Before it all went beyond reach I grabbed at some of the shards, little precious objects that were fixtures in their home and present to me my whole life. A few appear here. There are others: my Dad's slide rules in their leather cases so often seen on his drafting table, the little leather bound boxed chess set no bigger than a small paperback book which he carried with him to the Pacific in WWII and brought back in a duffle crammed with every letter he had received from my mother, a pocket knife, a watercolor painted by my mother. Each item of little value except to me and perhaps, this is my hope, to my children and grandchildren after me.
 



silver sewing kit box from Italy - 3x4 inches

 

However I find that when I look upon them I mourn the loss of the whole. Each object in their home was placed in artful relationship to others, a grand collection in reflection of their lives. These objects, in isolation from the whole, seem to have lost something. It does come to me that the loss represented in these objects seemingly removed from the ground of their being is only a reflection of my sense of loss, of my having been propelled into a new way of being, a new stage of life. No longer in this world is there anyone who came before me. who remembers before me, who can tell the old stories. I am now the elder and that has been a bit of a shock. I feel the burden of holding the stories and the need to keep sharing them, especially with the little ones so that when they receive the gift of these precious objects they will know something of their meaning to those who loved them so dearly.

Helmut Eric Nimke with family
March, 2013

 

A Reflection for All Souls

On Mourning Those Whose Faith was Weak

Reflection offered at the annual

All Souls Concert at St. Joseph's Church,

Kingston , NY - November 10, 2013

Many of us have been consoled in our grief by remembering the deep faith of the person no longer with us. We may have observed firsthand how the one we loved and respected was carried through the dying process by faith in a loving God. Or perhaps the sadness of the day of their departure or the day of their burial was eased by our imagining their joy as they entered into the embrace of the God whom they knew and loved.

But my words now are for those who grieve the loss of someone whose faith was not strong; whose faith was underdeveloped; whose faith was long ago jettisoned in the face of great pain, misfortune or disillusionment. Preparing their funerals and burial rites may have seemed a bit off kilter because we never really knew how they were with God.

It was this way with me when my father died last April. True to his utterly in control character and while he was in Hospice care at home, he planned everything. At his request he met with the funeral director and pastor of the Episcopal Church where he would be buried. He wrote his own obituary, wanted no church service, requested military honors and allowed for only a few words at the burial.

While not a member of Gereration X, he could have declared like some of them, “I am not religious but I am spiritual.” I believe my father was a deeply spiritual man. Were he not, how could he have been such a loving and faithful husband for almost 70 years, such a lover and connoisseur of music and art, such a steady reliable friend, or such a faithful citizen of the country of his adoption? He often asked me to pray for him. But he was a pragmatic man wary of all illusion.

Where did I find my consolation if I could not find it in the sure knowledge of his faith? Where can we find some peace when we lose someone whose faith had not matured, who seemed to have no faith, or who chose a spiritual path unlike our own?  I found my peace in a passage of Scripture frequently read at funerals but little meditated upon:

The souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and no torment shall touch them.
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace.
For if before men, indeed, they be punished,
yet is their hope full of immortality;
chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed,
because God tried them
and found them worthy of himself.
As gold in the furnace, he proved them,
and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.
In the time of their visitation they shall shine,
and shall dart about as sparks through stubble…

I read this passage and no longer wondered about the quality of the grand reunion of my father’s soul with his creator.  In that reunion all has been revealed to him. Now he knows all about God, all those things he missed or questioned or puzzled about all his life. Now he knows utterly unconditional love.
 

Let our consolation be found in the image of God taking such souls to himself and transforming them into brilliant light. Where once their intellect or ignorance, their pride or their lack of self-worth, their self-centeredness or their frenzied busy-ness kept God at a distance or out of their realm altogether; now they have bridged the gap. All distance has been erased by union with God who knew their hearts as only God can know them. With this image before us we can say with comforting certainty, “Now they know.”