A Catholic Grief Observed
How the Loss of a Loved One Is an Unexpected Gain
by David Paul Deavel
My mother died in July and I only went back to daily Mass the following February. I went on Sundays because I had to. For many months, I left the practice of reading several chapters of Scripture a day, given up only in the chaos of my mother’s funeral, undone. I gave up praying as I drove over to a nearby suburban elementary school on Saturday mornings to play basketball. I did not go very often, and when I did, the radio didn’t blare (I am too old for that); no, it simply played loudly enough to distract me—as I tried to avoid entering my own thoughts too deeply.
Even my son’s favorite new activity, identifying people in the photo album, was almost too painful for me. Seeing her holding him, so short a time ago, made me think she was there at home, waiting for me to bring him to her. Gus could even recognize “Gaa-maa Dee-full” (Grandma Deavel) when he saw her. I rest in the knowledge that he will know her face all his life, if only from pictures. But then I remember again that he will not rest his head in her lap again. He will not get books or games or cards with her name inscribed in them. He will never be restless in the car as we approach her house.
Some say that what makes grief so difficult is that it makes us aware of our own mortality. She whom I cannot imagine anything but alive died; ergo, I might die. For some people that may be true. Perhaps that is what makes some adolescents who grieve react the way they do. But grief over the death of a loved one is so severe, I suspect, not because of a future death that suddenly seems real to us, but because the death of a loved one is a small death for us here and now.
Exciting Losses
C. S. Lewis, writing of the sudden death of his good friend Charles Williams, described how strange the world was without him, how the very streets looked different. “That sense of strangeness continued with a force which sorrow itself has never quite swallowed up,” he wrote.
This experience of loss (the greatest I have yet known) was wholly unlike what I should have expected. We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere. It is not in the least like a haunting. It is not in the least like the bitter-sweet experiences of memory. It is vital and bracing; it is even, however the word may be misunderstood and derided, exciting.
Lewis understood his friend’s death and seeming presence in the light of our Lord’s word that unless he left them, he could not send his disciples the Comforter.
My mother’s presence is to me no less exciting. But it is perhaps expressed better by some words of the young John Henry Newman some months after the death of his beloved sister Mary.
I wish it were possible for words to put down those indefinite vague and withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and make it sick. Dear Mary seems embodied in every tree and hid behind every hill. What a veil and curtain this world of sense is! Beautiful but still a veil. . . .
David Paul Deavel , a doctoral student at Fordham University, is associate editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and a contributing editor of Gilbert Magazine, a magazine dedicated to the work of G. K. Chesterton.
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