The Levitation of Grief

Almost always unwelcome, grief enters most of our lives more than once. It may come blasting through the front door at breakfast or sneaking in a side window at bedtime, inconsistent in its entrance but very sure of its claim to our space. The only way to bar the door from it is to also shut out love, anticipation, beauty and promise; this denial of joy is even more miserable than grief’s capricious presence, so we set our gaze to gratitude and enjoy the unburdened moment, even if we know it will someday be withdrawn.

These recent years have made death and despair headline news, yet each time the bell tolls for thee, it also echoes all the tones of treasured times known intimately only by me, only by you. Each story is a reminder of people and places that vanished too soon, or holidays and birthdays that ceased to be. Grief can be general or particular, but I find it is often both things, looking for a landing spot in much the same way that my dog makes circles in the carpet before finally lying down.  

With freshly felt deep loss, I’ve borne the crushing weight of grief. I am familiar with its habits. I sense its arrival, make space for it, and sometimes even welcome its pressured presence. I know what it is to be down, buried, in a deep hole. Companions share these burdened images, calling them to mind as they offer comfort. Darkness and depth are descriptors of grief’s dwelling place. 

Experts counsel us on these attributes, the stages we must travel and the anticipated duration of the experience. I haven’t heard much though, that acknowledges the more windblown features of grief that sweep in and catch me unawares, strewing my planned focus and attention to the present. This manner of bereavement’s behavior recurs with a frequency that defies careful staging and preparation for its management.

Journeying through the sudden sorrow of a close friend’s death, I stood up to the weightiness. It was the later vaporous lightness that I couldn’t grasp or overcome. Instead of pinning me down, reminders of his death carried me away. While sitting at my desk reading emails, a rising force brought a lump to my throat. I couldn’t gulp it down. My stomach twisted in a knot and soon the sensation coursed upward, flushing my face and blurring my vision. My breath no longer sank in deep inhalation, but sat shallowly at shoulder height, moving in short shudders. 

It is this levitational force of grief that captures and pulls me upward time and again. My desk chair might as well be tethered to cords I cannot see, as I am transported away from my home and across views of past terrain. As if in a hot air balloon, I sail to times and locations I do not choose.  Childhood, vacations, a friend’s home—they all may appear in a strange scene of memory. A whooshing sound, like the balloon’s bellows, fills my ears as I view my mind’s landscape from afar. Glancing images beckon me to greet them as they sweep by. There are ones lost so long ago now sharing the field with my newly departed friend, a reunion held in my honor.

I return to the hard reality of my office with resignation and a sort of jet lag. The interruption disorders my thoughts as surely as a brisk breeze scatters leaves. I do not have time to be carried away. Where was I? I need a ballast.

This levitational grief seems to ask that I embark on a journey toward meaning-making. My gravity-loving grief, the one that pushes me under the covers and makes my chest hurt, doesn’t really seem to care about much except heaviness and disbelief in a good tomorrow. It is happy to just burden me with my own strong reactions to my loss. The gauzy grief that spirits me away though, whispers that there is more to be seen than I can understand.

The end stage of our leaden grief is supposedly acceptance. But our weightless grief abandons such a concrete response and reminds us that all is connected—the past, the now, the yet to be—inseparable in a reality that reaches toward hope rather than settled resignation. Despite its importune presence, this ethereal form of grief calls us to imagine other possible visions and to intertwine all the beloved relationships of our lives into a unifying wholeness. 

But what of the grief tied to broken bonds, ruptured wounds, silenced estrangements? That too, often accompanies levitational grief’s travels. These aches are living deaths, a mourning held for what is not here while yet still here. How do these also become bound up into an integrated life?

I think somehow these latter losses are the ones most in need of grief’s reconciliation if not resolution. They have to have some sort of resting place, a holding space, still accessible for a visit and not completely banished from our senses. The unanticipated reminder of our unhealed sorrow carries us up to where the air is thin and time stretches. Perhaps from such a perspective we will see a side of our loss that stays hidden from below. Perhaps when we return to our everyday tasks we will sense there is more to be revealed.

These winged messengers of grief have been active in my days leading up to this Holy Week. I’ve resented their ill-timed appearances, annoyed with interrupted sleep and flights of longing during workday moments. There is already so much to be done and communicated in this sacred-secular stretch of days.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps Holy Week is just the right time to makes sense of the claims this rising grief demands. The seven days are a strange mix of anticipation, remembrance, fear, avoidance, abandonment, profound pain, confusion and silence. The images we recall together are as fleeting and mysterious as the memories that swirl in my mind. We travel through what looks like a promising entrance into life’s joys only to have our world turned upside down, our understanding to be found deceptive and our hearts broken. Estrangement is complete.

But it is paradox that holds the answer to our yearning. Resurrection is the surprise ending, the meaning that couldn’t be grasped by our linear rational struggles to know. It is in this ultimate Levitation of Grief that meaning can be found in all the journeys of body and spirit that make up  one’s life, transforming us into a Oneness we’d not dared to believe possible, a hope that speaks to the living and through eternity and all memory.