The gentleness of light:

thinking about how to help others grieve well…(sorry, deep times require deep entries-part of the weight of glory these days! Promise my next will be lighter! And since, the last one was so short..)

Talked with a girl today, who told me that her mom killed herself last year, and she simply doesn’t know how to grieve. This friend is not on fb, so I’m not overexposing her journey. Just noticing ways to help us walk through grief so we don’t become depressive, lost beneath the weight of death.

She is an artist, so I asked her how she visualized her un-grieved space. She had a particular image which came to her. Then I asked her if she could grieve it a little bit at a time. Make art about one aspect of her pain each week, so it was less having to behold it all at once. Then maybe do a retrospect for herself at the end of each month, to see where she’d come. Slowly crumbling each aspect of the walls of fear, into grief.

I told her how I painted my black pool of grief and then cried each night, for about eight months, and prayed that light would come in, when I was dealing with depression many years ago. And how I needed a few friends who were aware of what I was going through, and who could take me to the movies when i needed it. And reminded me the grieving would end eventually. And I could be funny again.

She said she was afraid of the amount of grief and overwhelmed at trying to enter there, and yet realized if she didn’t she was going to be paralyzed internally. I told her, that if she can get a healthy external life, eat food, have a few good friends, and then….grieve a little of the black building at a time; some parts are letting yourself feel the fun parts of your lost ones life, and being thankful as well, and then parts which are angry at them for quit-ing. Suicide also brings shame and secrecy, so it is good to share feelings with others. I think this precious girl had only shared it with me and one other person.

Just made me thankful for my Counselor and my counselor, who walked me through breaking up the weight on the surface of that black pond in me, back in the day when i was under depression, so I could be the person of joy I was meant to be. We have to grieve the losses. Denial doesn’t work—stoicism doesn’t work. Our pain has to become a meeting place, it has to become our new spirituality for a season. And each of us have to, in unique ways. For me it was through art, active prayer, and counseling and friends who stood with me through the boring parts.

I started studying counseling, art therapy and healing for this reason. I don’t want some daughter in any cafe to live under the weight of depression unnecessarily, or to die before her time, or not to be born anew into her next season! And there really are ways in which our grief does not have to calcify into depression. If we expose it to the light with wisdom, and an understanding of how to walk it out with others, and as my mentor said, “fully let God in, sometimes slowly.” The incapacitating weight can and does lift if we grieve the pain.

Anger is a door into the room of un-grieved pain. Many of us stay only at the door, without entering the actual room of our pain, which is usually where Jesus is sitting—the Man of Sorrows acquainted with all our grief. Again, suffering becomes a potential place of meeting God (both individually and collectively), and our deeper selves, if we let it.

Grieving tools help. Anyways, I was privileged that she shared that with me today. Made me once again aware of how kind God has been to me over the years, and many others. And that Hope never dies for any of us as we let the Light in, gently!

I’m very interested in healing artist, as I had a great painter friend who killed himself when i was a kid. So i made a ministry called Noah’s Other Boat, which was really about an ark for discarded people rather than animals. I’ve always carried that boat in my heart. My friend’s name who died was Noah. There’s always a Boat, even for us weirdos!