Grief & Loss
Years of trying, and every month is another small funeral that nobody else attends. Is there anything in scripture for a loss shaped like this?
“And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore. And she vowed a vow, and said, O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.”
Hannah prays at the tabernacle in such bitterness of soul that the priest watching assumes she is drunk and tells her off for it. She answers that she has been pouring out her soul before the Lord. The narrative sides with her and not with Eli. Scripture opens the story of Israel's next great prophet with a woman weeping over a longing that everyone around her handled badly.
“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
Paul tells the Roman church that the whole world is straining and unfinished, and that we strain along inside it while we wait. He is describing people living honestly in the gap between how things are and how they will be. His word for that is groaning rather than coping. A monthly grief with no funeral and no casseroles is exactly the thing he means.
A path forward
Name it as a bereavement out loud, at least to your partner or one friend. Losses with no body are routinely under-grieved, mostly because nobody ever gives them the word.
Pray Hannah's kind of prayer, unfiltered and specific, rather than a resigned one. She was not rebuked for the intensity of it, and neither will you be.
Give the monthly moment a small ritual of its own: a walk, a candle lit, an evening cleared. A grief that repeats needs somewhere to land each time.
Closing verse
“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?”
- Psalm 56:8
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