By Sherrie Cassel
Dedicated to Kyungsig Samuel Lee, Ph.D.
Last year this time I was planning my sixtieth birthday party, a milestone, for sure. The group of friends from all over the state who went was perfect. The right amount of verve and vitality. I had people buying me shots of Patron all night and I had a ball. In one month, I’ll be sixty-one. Time flies. In August, my beautiful son would have been forty years old; he’s been gone seven years and four months, and it scarcely seems reasonable that the years have flown so devastatingly quickly, but they have. I’m almost finished with my master’s degree in spiritually integrated psychotherapy. I have one class remaining and an internship, and then I’ll apply to the PhD program. So, I haven’t taken the traditional route. I’ve had a few detours along the way, single parenting, working, cancer, life. There were times when I didn’t believe in myself and so I would take time off, sometimes years, and then I’d come to my senses and realize that I deserve to fulfill my dreams just as well as anyone else. I’m plugging along, and I’ve never felt more fulfilled in academia than I do now. I’ve found my niche.
A few years ago, enamored of the God of my understanding (the GOMU), I had seriously entertained the possibility of going into ministry, you know, pastoring a flock, but I’ve spent most of my life in churches, and have seen the enormous responsibility that leading a flock carries, and I quickly said, “No, thank you.” I have great respect for competent and compassionate clergy. I’ve been fortunate to know a few, but somehow, church politics becomes the god to whom they must answer, and everything from bake sales to what brand of toilet paper to order becomes a requisition appealing to the powers that be, and perhaps, all organizations fall prey to bureaucratic red tape, committees, and vetoes, and I’m being a bit Pollyanna in my assumption that wherever I land I will not have to answer to the same corporate gods.
I’ve been reading a book called PROPHETIC LAMENT by Soong-Chan Rah; it may not be your cup of tea, but it is really speaking to my heart. Rah discusses the triumphalist worldview of the Western Christian church. I think of it as an offshoot of the prosperity gospel. Everybody can win; everybody must win, and winning is the best expression of true faith, even though in reality not everyone does. One of my professors this spring gave a lecture on “What if Easter doesn’t come for some people?” I had to think about it. I’ve fallen into the triumphalist mindset. I lost my son, the greatest loss of my life, and I worked tooth and nail to come through the experience with a victory story. If you’d seen me three and a half years after my son’s death and compared that person with who I am today, you’d see the growth. It was hard earned, and there were days when I really didn’t think I’d make it. I prayed for death to come, and I’m not using hyperbole here; I really wanted to fall asleep and never wake up again. I was in a tremendous amount of psychic and spiritual pain. How do you lose a child and rebuild a life without him?
I did just that. I won’t throw out the baby with the bathwater by saying a triumphalist worldview is singularly a bad way to see the world, because finding one’s way out of grief and rejoining the living is a victory; it denotes a resurrection of self, from hopeless to hopeful, from death to life. There is a reason why the stories of rebirth, transformation, and transcendence so speak to the human condition, a condition in which we are frequently disillusioned by life experiences, e.g., the death of a child, a divorce, the loss of one’s home, job, a cherished loved one. I can’t say that my way of healing is the right way; it was the right way for me. Easter came for me after the death of my son; it took three and a half years of complicated grief before the stone was rolled away from the place where I had entombed myself while I waited to not hurt anymore.
What does it mean for Easter to not come for someone? I’ve learned that Easter is not a one-time event. Christians celebrate the resurrection every year, which leads me to believe that Easter comes to each of us as many times as we can summon our rebirth … through the muck and through the mire of life experiences.
Rah talks about how lament is part of the healing process, of individuals, families, communities, and countries. We’ve forgotten how to be still with our grief with a worldview that pumps up winning as the goal of every life challenge, especially those which prove most devastating to us. How do you win after the loss of a child? Do you? I lamented for three and a half years after my son died. I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. I sat and stared into space. I begged God to take me and put me out of my misery. I raised my fist in anger to an image of God that I learned to release back into the realm of myths that no longer serve me, and that served only to make me less compassionate with others.
Easter has come for me a few times in my life, and other times, as I waited for my son to be healed from addiction, Easter has never come. I love the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. We each have times in our lives when we are covered in blisters from life’s assaults. We experience lows that no one can help us sort through. We bemoan our existence, and we pray to the Gods of our understanding, or we lie in our sackcloth and ashes waiting for relief, but that relief does not happen right away, and sometimes, it never does. How do we hold up during those times? How do we hold up others when Easter is far from them? Job’s friends initially had the right idea when they sat in silence for seven days and nights with poor Job. Sometimes silence and commiseration are the kindest things we can offer to someone who is struggling.
I’m a people person. I’m a cheerleader for the downtrodden, the underdog, the Jobs of the world. But what if there is no hope this side of heaven for someone? What if the news is bad? Really bad? How do you hold space for someone for whom the only Easter that will ever come will not come until he or she is released from this physical life? How would I want to be held in the worst-case scenario? There are times in my life when I have been hopeless. When my son was dying from addiction, I lost hope despite the many times I cried out to the God of my disillusionment, begging and bargaining for my son’s life to be spared. I was bereft. I had people tell me I was being catastrophist and to pray harder. I had people tell me that my faith was faltering. I had people tell me that my son was not going to die. How can someone offer that kind of advice? I don’t hold their good intentions against them. I know they were trying to love me through it, to offer me hope despite the reality that they saw with their own eyes, a deathly ill young man who was getting worse and worse, a young man for whom Easter would never come in this lifetime.
We each will suffer through something catastrophic in our lives at some point; no one is exempt from tragedy. As I have worked through my entombment in grief, before and after my son died, I remember the days and nights spent in agony, the nights I told myself that I was going to lose him. The days I could barely function as I watched him stumble through his dark night of the soul, irretrievably lost. I had to learn to sit with him in his darkness, in between bouts of Herculean effort to save him. I wish I could say I helped him find his way to Easter, but I’m only human. I was a mother desperate to save her son using the only tools I had. I lamented in his presence. I showed him how to grieve before I lost him. If I had been effective, would he still be alive to have a victory story? Would Easter have come for him? It’s impossible to say. To speculate about this is an exercise in masochism. I wanted to believe there would come a day when I’m completely healed, but I sometimes delude myself with triumphalist thinking, divide and conquer. I am woman; hear me roar! Sometimes I revert to the incomplete magician/god of my indoctrination, and I’m left unfulfilled and disappointed in the figment of my primitive imagination. There are many things I have not lamented: my childhood, for example. I’ve lamented my son’s death, and while the worst part of the grief process has passed, I know there are times when the loss still takes my breath away, and I march defeated into the tomb, praying for Easter to come again, waiting for transformation from a dirge to a jubilant hymn. If I can just hold on until morning.
Easter will come in fits and starts, or maybe it won’t. I see the current state of our world, hateful politics, disregard for one another at the level of the soul, poverty, war, child abuse, deep seated rage, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, domestic violence, sexual abuses, ad nauseam, and I see people who suffer because hegemonies have their priorities skewed. Absolute power does, in fact, corrupt – absolutely. I love my mother’s faith; it is uncomplicated by infinitely many questions. Her faith is simple and unproblematic. I ride the coattails of her faith as I flounder in my own extremely complicated and conflicted faith – in the GOMU.
Has Easter come for you, a resurrection story? a triumph? a victory? Have you found transcendence through your struggles, and if you have, can you share your experience, strength, and hope with those for whom Easter has yet to come, with those for whom Easter will never come? I’ve had to learn to “tone” down my exuberance. Not everyone loves a morning person, especially those whose eyes have become accustomed to the dark. My professor gave me sage advice about sitting in the dark with someone. We love hero stories in my country (the United States). What if the truth is that heroes do not always come sweeping in to save the day? What if heroes just sit in the shittiness of injustice with a piece of bread and a jug of water to help someone sustain his or her strength while they muddle through?
See, we will each at some point find ourselves navigating an experience where there is no hope of a quick sunrise. The Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE, was the first book I read after my son died. I wanted answers, even if I found myself accountable for my son’s death, even if the answers hurt me. I wanted someone to blame, even if that person was myself. What I found in the Rabbi’s book was the answer I needed: my son’s illness, while there were many reasons he found himself addicted to alcohol and other drugs, it’s the luck of the draw that some will find their way out of addiction’s death clutch, and some will die. Random chance healed me and helped me let go of the horrific self-blame so that Easter could come for me once again.
Having given birth to a child, in pain and in agony, the journey is not easy the first time, and the many times we will have occasion to rebirth ourselves will not be easy; and to be honest, the rebirthing process is often traumatic. I love the story of Jacob and how he wrestled with God. He wrestled with all his might for a blessing. I have done the same in my own life, many times, and like Jacob, I have limped into Easter battle fatigued, but freer with every rebirth. Some believe in the Karmic wheel and the acquisition of nirvana. I believe we are born again many times while we’re here. I’ve metamorphosed a few times in my life thus far, and I imagine I’ll metamorphose a few more times before my journey here is completed, and then I will merge with the Infinite, the GOMU, and Easter will come a final time for me. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
** Bernardo Strozzi, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 17th century
Grief to Gratitude 