by Linda Guebert

Sermon originally presented August 2, 2009. Revised slightly and presented again February 17, 2013

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It is impossible to go through life without bad things happening to us. Almost all of us will, at some time, suffer the loss of a loved one, health problems, economic set-backs, or any of a number of other unwelcome events. Some of us will have to deal with tragedy.

On May 11, 2000, Ken, my husband of only nine months, was killed in a traffic accident. He was returning home from work in Napa when his truck left the road for no apparent reason and hit a tree.

         This horrible event changed my life and set me off on a long journey – a journey through sorrow, anger, hope, despair, and ultimately, healing. It is a journey that is not over yet.

As part of this journey, I’ve written a memoir called The Hardest Thing I’ll Ever Do. The title comes from a song written by Eugene Williams and sung by Bob Seeger, which goes “Trying to live my life without you / It’s the hardest thing I’ll ever do.” All of the chapter titles in the book are from the lyrics of popular songs: “There Goes My Reason for Living,” “Why Do the Birds Go on Singing?” and so on. I’m pleased to say that I am in the final stages of publishing the book, and it should be out in a couple of months.

I wrote the memoir not only because I knew it would be good for me, but more  because I hoped others would benefit from hearing about my experience and some of the insights I have gained. I don’t in any way see myself as an expert. What I have to offer is my own personal take on things. But I hope that something I have to say will be useful to others – and useful to you today.

What I will be primarily sharing with you are selections from the last chapter of the book, which is a refection on the experience as a whole. The title of the chapter is “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been.” Some of you may recognize these Grateful Dead lyrics:

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me

                                    What a long, strange trip it’s been

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         Many self-help books on grief and grieving give the impression that you progress along a straight path through a series of stages – disbelief to denial to anger to acceptance, or some variation of that – but it certainly hasn’t been like that for me. I may have experienced all the stages at one time or another, but they haven’t stayed in order and they haven’t been predictable.

Feelings don’t just stop and start. They recycle and transform. You think you’re finished with one, and it pops up again months or even years later, with such force it surprises you. Another emotion, content to take the backseat for a while, suddenly wants to be the driver again. Sometimes I felt like I had multiple personalities and never knew which one would be out. Even now I am occasionally taken aback by unexpected tears or a crack in my voice when I speak about my experience, or offer comfort to someone else, and there are still times when I experience deep rage against the unfairness of what happened to me.

I have never liked the term “finishing grief.” When I lost my love, my life, my future in that one tragic act of fate, it caused repercussions that will reverberate as long as I live. I don’t think there’ll ever be a time when I’ll say, “Ah, yes. Now I’m over it. Now it’s finished.” It will recede more and more into the background – it’s already done that to a large degree – but it will never be gone. How could it? It has marked me as surely as a branding iron.

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         Coming to terms with grief and finding a role for it in my life was the major work of bereavement for me. Expressions like “getting over it,” “letting go,” and “moving on,” although I’ve used them at times myself, have never held strong resonance for me. Along with “finishing grief,” they seem to be based on a model that sees grief as something that needs to be overcome, or gotten past, whereas I have always felt that my grief was something that I had to take into myself, that I had to make a part of myself. For a long time I referred to this process as “incorporating grief.”

Now I prefer the term “integration.” From its original presence as an unwelcome guest that had to be accommodated whether I wanted it or not, my grief has gradually become unseparated from the rest of me. It is no longer the dominating, controlling force it once was, but now exerts its influence for the most part in a constructive and helpful way, allowing me to offer heartfelt comfort and consolation, and to feel compassion in ways that were previously unknown to me. It provides me with a link to every grieving person in the world, an empathy with other sufferers so strong that it sometimes takes my breath away. In contrast to the self-centeredness of early grief, my “integrated grief” moves me away from myself, turning me outward instead of inward.

Integrating grief has been hard work. It has taken tremendous effort, much of it below the level of consciousness, to tame this unruly emotion and create a place for it. It’s not really surprising that after Ken’s death my energy level was often low, or that while I made a point of staying involved in activities, I sometimes felt that I was only half there. A part of me was busy elsewhere, struggling to process what was happening to me, trying to “take it in” without letting it destroy me. Integrating grief requires time, and introspection, and suffering – and the support of others, especially those who have been there before.

I believe that the process of integrating grief is ongoing. I expect it to continue for the rest of my life. In a certain sense, it has become my life’s work.

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         Many of us, especially those of us who were young in the sixties, have bought into the idea that our lives are under our control. We’ve operated under the assumption that we are entitled to happiness and self-fulfillment, and that if things are not going right, something can and should be done about it. The idea that suffering must be endured – may even be necessary for personal growth – is almost foreign to a lot of us, associated with the bygone era of our grandparents and great-grandparents, who, unlike most of us, lauded self-sacrifice and self-denial as virtues. I’m not suggesting that there weren’t sorrows or disappointments in my life, but before Ken died my overall approach was that anything could be dealt with somehow. As an “empowered” person, I only needed to figure out how.

Ken’s death was different for me. First of all, there was absolutely no way to opt out of the situation – no way to say, “I’d rather not do this right now.” Nor was there an immediate course of action to take. The accident was his fault – there was no one to bring suit against, no agency to complain to. I couldn’t move to a different place to get away from it, or counter its effects with some proactive plan. Nothing I did or didn’t do could change the fact that Ken had died, I was alone again, and I was going to have to suffer. I wasn’t used to having such meager options.

At a grief therapy group about a month after Ken’s death, I tried to express this realization by saying that I knew I had to accept what had happened to me because I had no choice. The leader, apparently interpreting this as a defeatist attitude, insisted that I did indeed have choices: I could choose to learn from the experience – use it as an opportunity for growth, etc., etc. – or I could choose to live my life in bitterness and anger.

Even though what she said was of value to me later, I remember feeling annoyed and frustrated at the time. These didn’t seem like choices to me. What good were choices when none of them was anything I wanted to do? I didn’t have the choice to have Ken back, to continue the life plan I had finally managed to set in motion. I didn’t have the choice to be married and not a widow. I didn’t even have the choice to avoid what I knew would be at least a year of grieving, and which turned out to be much more.

Admitting that I had no choice but to accept what had happened to me was not a statement of defeat or powerlessness, despite how it may have sounded. I wasn’t giving up the struggle, or the hope for the future, or anything like that, but I was giving up the illusion that my life, at least the circumstances of my life, were under my control – a cherished but untenable notion I had held for a long time and which had at times laden me down with guilt when things didn’t go right and I blamed myself. Ken’s death and the horrible way it happened made me realize what many others before me – including those little-known ancestors whose complacent attitude I’d earlier scoffed at – were well aware: that a lot of things happen in life that are beyond our control, and some of them require us to suffer.

And there’s not really a hell of a lot we can do about it.

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         When it first happened, Ken’s death seemed to me like some giant cosmic mistake. I remember shaking my fist at the heavens, saying, “Somebody up there ought to lose their job!” I couldn’t think of one person who was better off because of his death, couldn’t see anything but misery and heartache for those he was close to. Like everyone else in a similar situation, I made that anguished cry: “Why? Why did this happen?” and especially, “Why did it happen to me?”

It’s only natural to want to find meaning when something tragic happens, to believe that there must be a reason for what we are going through. People do their best to comfort us with explanations. One friend, for example, told me that Ken was taken because he was so good. Nonsense. He was no better or worse than thousands of other people who didn’t die. Another said that Ken’s purpose on earth was to help me through the radiation treatments I’d had the year before. What sense did that make? The grief I was going through was far worse than the radiation treatments. Who was going to help me through that?

Sometimes I had to wonder if people were simply trying to work out their own theories of why bad things happen. In one instance I’d admitted to a close friend that I’d often worried about Ken being in a car accident whenever he was late, and this person – no longer a close friend, incidentally – blithely told me that “thoughts can influence actions, you know.” And in the reverse of this, when I told another person that I wasn’t worried about Ken that particular day because I thought I knew where he was, she said, “Well, I always say that’s when these things happen – when you don’t worry about them.” Either way, according to them, my thoughts were responsible.

Almost worse was the insistence that everything happens for a reason, but unfortunately, you don’t get to know what it is. Maybe you’ll find out sometime in the future, but maybe not. I know that the idea of a overall plan to account for the vagaries of the universe comforts a lot of people, but it never did much for me.

In the early months after Ken’s death (and several times later) I read the classic book on the subject, When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner (in our UUCLC library). It is without a doubt the most useful of all the resources I consulted. “Bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us,” Kushner writes. “They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them meaning. We can redeem those tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.” In effect, he says, “Why did this happen to me?” is the wrong question. What we should be asking is “Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?”

Even when I first read these words, I knew that they were right on target, but acting on them has been a challenge. In the day-to-day survival struggle of early grief, and in the later slog through the mire of despair and depression, I found it difficult to deal with such an abstract concept. What exactly is involved in imposing meaning on an experience? How does one go about it? And perhaps most important – assuming that I could do it – what meaning did I want to impose on my experience?

It took me a long time to realize what Kushner was talking about. To give meaning to the tragedy – that’s why he wrote his book, and that’s why I wrote my memoir. And that’s also why I don’t like the idea of “finishing” grief. This experience has been so powerful, so life-altering, that it is crucial to me that something enduring come out of it, something that can continue as a vibrant and productive force in my life.

But while I have certainly gained personally from what I’ve gone through, I have never been able to foresee a future where I will view what happened to me as a good thing. Or even as an alright thing. I’ve learned a lot, yes, but I’d just as soon have remained ignorant.

Kushner deals with this, too, in the few sentences in his book that have really stuck with me. After saying that he is now a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, and a more sympathetic counselor because of his son’s life and death, he surprises the reader by stating very matter-of-factly, “And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back.”

If I could choose,[he continues], I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy.

Years after his son’s death, after his thoughtful, questioning journey and the completion of his monumental book which has helped countless others – even after all that, he says he’d rather have his son back.

But he knows it’s not possible.

I know that it’s not possible for me to have Ken back, either, even though I would give almost anything if I could. Like Kushner, I would forfeit all I’ve gained through this experience to be planning a future right now with the man I love – who, no matter what else happens in my life, I will always love.

I know that I have grown personally since Ken’s death. I have insights about grief and bereavement that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t suffered through them myself, and I am more sensitive, especially towards those in similar pain. I have developed inner resources and confidence that I would never have needed if I hadn’t had to face a loss of this magnitude.

But Ken did not die so that I could become a better person, however consoling it may be to think that. Such a statement imposes meaning on the tragedy before the fact, so to speak, and is ludicrous as well as egocentric. But what I can say is this: Ken died, and as a result, there is now something valuable in my life, something that would not otherwise exist, that I can share with others.

That is the legacy of Ken’s death for me. That is the meaning I have chosen to give it.

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