Grief & Loss
It has been four years and I still get flattened out of nowhere. Everyone around me moved on a long time ago. Is something wrong with me?
“And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.”
When Jacob believed his son Joseph was dead, he tore his clothes and mourned for a long stretch of days, and when the whole family gathered to console him he would not be consoled. He told them he expected to carry this to his grave. The narrator does not correct him or hurry him. In the world of the text, grief that outlasts everyone's patience is a portrait of love, not a diagnosis.
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
Paul writes to Corinth as a man who has been beaten, shipwrecked, and by his own account crushed beyond what he could bear. He describes comfort as something God gives and then passes hand to hand between people who have been through it. Notice the timeline he assumes. Comfort arrives inside the long trouble, not politely after it has finished.
A path forward
Stop measuring yourself against other people's timelines. When the wave hits, name it out loud, 'this is grief, four years in,' rather than treating it as a personal failure.
Mark the anniversary deliberately this year instead of bracing for it: a meal, a walk somewhere they loved, an hour with the photographs.
Bring the ongoing ache into your regular prayer rather than saving prayer for the bad days. A long grief needs a long conversation, not a one time plea.
Closing verse
“The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”
- Psalm 34:18
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