In many ways, the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a mixed blessing. She was born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1926. Although her father thought she should be a secretary or maid, she wanted to study medicine – and she did. At medical school, she met an American, married him, and eventually emigrated and taught in the U.S. Kübler-Ross was disturbed that nothing in the medical school curriculum taught doctors about death and dying. One day, filling in for a colleague, she brought into class a 16-year old girl who was dying of leukemia. She told the class to ask the girl any questions they wished. When the students asked only clinical question about her condition, the girl erupted in anger. She wanted them to ask her the questions that mattered, like what it was like not to be able to dream about growing up or going to prom. Kübler-Ross’ research led to her 1969 classic text On Death and Dying, in which she outlined five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
There are three reasons why I said her work was a mixed blessing. 1) It only speaks about grief in relation to death; 2) It makes it appear that grieving is a linear, systematic process; and 3) It lacks the spirit of faith found in Paul’s writing, when he said “We do not want you to be uninformed, friends, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”
We grieve a lot of things because it is possible to love and lose a lot of things. We grieve when others die – yet we also grieve when marriages die, when engagements are broken off, when friends move away, when children go off to college. We grieve when we lose a job, when we fail a test, when the car keys are taken from us and we lose our independence. We grieve when we have a miscarriage, when a pet dies, when our house has been violated by burglary, when our bodies have been violated by abuse, by disease, by amputation. There is much we grieve, yet we live in a culture that worships the pursuit of happiness and thereby wants us to deny the power of aging, the reality of death, and the grief that comes from a wide range of inevitable losses. Kübler-Ross’ book sometimes causes us to forget how grief comes from many things besides death.
We grieve in many ways. Like the fingerprints on our hands, each person’s grief will be unique to her or him. Some people have come to me after the loss of a loved one, worried that they weren’t grieving right. Trusting Kübler-Ross’ categories, they had days when they felt like they were approaching acceptance; but other times they felt depressed or angry or they bargained with God, wondering if they’d only done this or that, maybe their loved one would still be alive. They were wracked with guilt. They felt shame, because some friends suggested they should be getting over their grief by now. They worried that something was wrong with them.
Kübler-Ross’ book may have named typical responses to death, but her text cannot be read as a strict description of orderly stages in grief. We are unique creatures and we mourn in unique, personal ways. After a death, we who are left all ride emotional roller coasters. There will be ups and downs, times when fresh tears are evoked when our guard is down and we see a photograph, we smell a perfume or cologne, we stand somewhere and wish once more we could feel that person’s hand in ours. It’s been said that when a parent dies, you lose your past; when a partner or spouse dies, you lose your present; and when a child dies, you lose your future. Death takes away characters from the active story of our life. So whenever you tell your life’s story or you think about where your life is heading, and you are aware of those who no longer are beside you, grief comes upon us.
To grieve is not to go through a series of emotional stages – it is not a checklist to be completed. It is simply a time when we “re-learn the world.” We re-learn what this chapter in our life will look like, even as we miss a person who is gone, miss a job we used to have, miss the children who are now adults or the dreams that we know now will not come true. Some of the re-learning takes weeks or months; some takes years. In grief, we do not strive “to get over it” because the “it” we grieve is a person and we don’t “get over” those we love – we re-learn how their love can continue to be a part of our life even after they’re gone.
The playwright and author Nora Ephron recently died. Her son Jacob told about sitting beside her bed and wondering whether he would ever feel like writing again once she was gone. She told her son that he would still write, and then she went on to say that whatever happened, she hoped that he and his brother would lead the kind of lives where they did stuff big enough to occasionally say, “Wow, I wish Mom was around for this.”1 We re-learn the world, but that doesn’t mean we erase the other person from our world.
People often comment to me that they are not sure what to say to someone who has lost a loved one or family member. You can always say, “I’m sorry. I’m thinking of you. How can I help?” But the reality is that you don’t need to say much at all. Just being there goes a long way. Listen to the person – let him or her set the agenda. Your goal is not to fix them but to walk beside them.
And don’t be surprised if, when you grieve, God feels absent from you. By definition, grief involves a loss, a tearing away from you of someone or something you’ve held dear. Your body absorbs this loss by going into a type of shock or numbness, and included in that numbness is an inner, spiritual numbness. People may say, “I don’t feel close to God.” But at that moment, it is hard for them to feel close to anyone. It is hard to focus, to remember details, to push through the fog of loss and sadness to concentrate on anything. That is why, if you want to help someone who is grieving, your presence and non-judgmental, patient acts of caring are the best things you can offer at that point.
Soon enough you can begin to share stories and call up memories. There will be things to smile about, to laugh about, to cry about, to forgive and to give thanks for. And it is here that Paul’s words of advice are most appropriate. Paul knows we will grieve, but as he put it, he doesn’t want us to “grieve as others do who have no hope.” So he begins with a simple gift that is wrapped in a big, huge package. The gift is the promise found in vs. 14 of today’s passage: Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring together with [Jesus] those who have died.God has triumphed over death once and for all. The first sign of that victory was Jesus’ resurrection, which was a gift for us and all humanity. That gift (as presented by Paul in I Thessalonians) happened to be wrapped in a huge package of what we call “apocalypticism.” When things are going bad here on earth – like in the time of the early Christians when the Romans were destroying the Jerusalem temple and the followers of Christ were being persecuted from every side – people believed that God would put an end to the present evil age with a massive historical event and then launch a new world according to God’s holy purposes. This “apocalypse” has been described in dramatic language in the gospels, in Paul’s letters, and the book of Revelation. It is a time of Jesus’ reappearance as the Lord of Lords; a time of heavenly trumpet blasts, upheaval on earth, and the raising of the dead.
Here’s the important detail: that package is not the same as the gift. The package of apocalyptic language and imagery is simply the means to an end, the way people have emphasized the importance of the gift. The package for Paul, during that time of oppression and Roman violence, was a big, violent apocalypse. But once that package was unwrapped, Paul’s voice quiets down and he becomes the pastor, not the prophet, anxious to share a wonderful gift. He reassures the nervous Thessalonian church that those who die before Christ returns have not missed out on Christ’s redemption. And that ultimately the great day of the Lord will be marked, not so much by revolution as by reunion, both with Christ and with one another. That’s the gift Paul wants us to give us and to have us encourage one another with those words.
Now, here’s where Paul’s words (the gift, not so much the package) and our experience of grief come together. To be a person of faith means that we believe that death is a transition, not into nothingness, but into some other state of being. Our words fall short when we try to define what this post-death state of being is like. But it is a state of being we associate with God – and God’s state of being is fundamentally loving, healing, and relational. God is active, dynamic, ever striving to make things whole. That is true now – so we speak about a “newness of life in Christ” – and it continues to be true when this physical life is over. How ever we interpret Paul’s big apocalyptic package, it is a description of us with Christ, those who are deceased with Christ, and all of us together. As scripture says, “Then death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) It is a mystery that we are to trust more than try to explain, yet if anything is trustworthy in this life, wouldn’t it be that God’s love is the strongest, truest thing that exists?
Kübler-Ross didn’t want her medical students to be uninformed about death and dying. Paul does not want us either to be uninformed, even though we will at times grieve. Yet we do not grieve as ones who have no hope. Grief does pass. Hope remains. Hold fast to the promise of our faith, as best captured in the opening words of the Brief Statement of Faith: In life and in death, we belong to God. Amen to that.