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"Have you ever grieved?"

The question caught me by surprise. It was asked by a gentleman in his eighties who had just lost his wife of sixty-three years.

It was hard to answer. Grief is painful. Thinking about it reminds us that we don’t control what happens to us. It reminds us, as well, of many things we have tried to forget. Grief hurts too much to keep it on the front burners of our minds.

Of course I have grieved. My mother died when I was eleven. She had been in the hospital for two years before her death. I had learned to live apart from her, but when she died I had to live without her. I still remember her funeral, the smell of the flowers in the mortuary, and even a fragment of what the preacher talked about that afternoon. I remember my father sobbing. I had never seen him cry before. While I can’t bring to mind much that happened after my mother’s death, I had to cope. For a year or more, especially in the evenings, I felt a lonesome pain that wouldn’t go away. For months my grades took a beating in school.

Years later I grieved when my father passed way. He was eighty-eight; it was time for him to go. When we buried him in Texas, he was far from the few friends he had left in New York City where he had spent his adult life. As I stood by his grave I wanted to shout at the cars rushing past on the highway beyond the iron fence, "Stop! Stop! A good man has died and no one seems to care. Stop and notice!" But the traffic kept whizzing by. For several days after his death, when I was alone in my office or driving in my car, I broke down in sobs to my surprise.

I grieved with a couple whose five-year-old son, Matt, was killed in a freak hunting accident. His father’s rifle discharged as he was maneuvering through a wire fence. The bullet hit the boy, and the lad crumpled to the ground and died in an instant. I served as their pastor. I spent hours with that couple. I conducted Matt’s funeral and stood with the parents at the graveside. It was a bleak winter day, yet I don’t suppose a bright spring day would have made much difference. For weeks I felt the pain, and I could not shake it.

"Have you ever grieved?" Of course I have. So have you.

Everyone experiences grief. "The statistics on death are quite impressive," George Bernard Shaw observed, "One out of one people die." Since death is a part of life, and grief follows death, then grief is universal. No one escapes it.

Grief isn’t limited to death. We experience this emotion, or a complex of emotions, whenever we lose anyone or anything we care about deeply. An amputee after losing an arm or leg goes through grief. When you load all your belongings into a U-Haul van and kiss your family good-bye, grief sometimes makes the trip with you. A young woman grieves when she breaks up with her boyfriend; and in later years, a wife grieves when she divorces her husband. A worker may leave a long-held job with a pink slip or a gold watch, but in either case that employee feels a deep sense of grief. Parents often experience grief when their daughter goes off to college or a son leaves to join the Navy. Whenever we lose any person or possession that has given us emotional security or satisfaction, we will grieve.

All of us, therefore, will go through grief. Perhaps you are grieving now.

An old nursery rhyme reminds us that we live in the company of beggars:

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town;
Some in rags, some in tags,
And some in velvet gowns.

All around us there are men and women, old and young, who are suffering grief. Sometimes their grief is as obvious as a tear. At other times they disguise their grief with activity, or smiles, or beautiful make-up jobs. They are beggars in need of comfort. And at some time, as sure as loss and death, you and I will be beggars ourselves.

How, then, can we cope when grief descends upon us? How can we comfort others who mourn? Not all grief is the same. There is "good grief" and there is "bad grief," constructive or destructive ways of handling our pain.

Strangely enough, although grief lays its hand on all of us, we know relatively little about how people experience it. All grief is intensely personal. No one has walked your exact path before. Many writers have opened up their lives to give us a glimpse of their pain when they have lost someone dear to them. Those books tell us a great deal, but they are always someone else’s journey.

Grief is difficult to study. Sociologists and psychiatrists have been understandably reluctant to break in on mourners to ask questions or make films of how grief works. Grief is a companion of death, and in our culture death has few students. Since social scientists are not immune from the uneasiness of their culture, to some extent, death and therefore grief is for them a forbidden topic.

Although death is a "taboo" subject, some have ventured to study it. One of these attempts took place in the 1940s. Dr. Erich Lindeman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, worked with relatives and close friends of those killed in Boston’s Coconut Grove nightclub fire. From his observations Lindeman concluded that grief suffering cannot be avoided, and the bereaved must enter into it and work through it in order to experience "good grief." He called this process "grief work." Through grief work the sufferers must be set free from "bondage" to all they have lost so that they can live with the memories, the hurts, the joys, and sorrows that remain a part of their lives. Lindeman maintained that mourners never escape the process nor can they break free until they have worked through their grief. While they may never get over the loss, by doing grief work they can get through it.

Jesus in His introduction to the Sermon on the Mount declared, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." To be comforted in the face of grief, we must mourn. If we refuse to deal with our grief, then "good grief" turns into "bad grief."

How "Good Grief" Becomes "Bad Grief." One common way people have dealt with grief is to avoid it. This response is as old as history. Centuries ago the Stoics taught their disciples not to mourn. The best way to respond to grief, they said, was to deny it. Many sincere men and women carry on that stoic tradition.

From their earliest years young men are told, "Big boys don’t cry." A youngster may first be taught that lesson when he falls from a swing, and in fright and pain begins to cry. When his mother consoles him, she may whisper, "There, there, everything’s all right. Don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry." By the time the boy is ten he is convinced that tears and manliness don’t mix. By the time he reaches eighteen, he wouldn’t think of weeping, even though he has been jilted by his girlfriend. At fifty, he may not know how to cry at all.

Women, too, may be taught that weeping is weakness. During their growing-up years and afterward, they may have been put down when they burst into tears. As a result, they are conditioned to feel embarrassed when they weep. To be strong is to be a stoic. After a funeral, friends may remark about a widow whose world has been shattered and whose heart is breaking, "Look at how brave she is—she didn’t shed a tear!" But courage and tears are not opposites. Weeping is a language of the soul.

Doesn’t Faith Dry All Tears? Religious people sometimes mishandle their own grief and the grief of others by thinking that faith and tears don’t mix. A sturdy faith in God and a firm belief in the promise of life eternal, they reason, should keep us from weeping or giving way to grief. But grief is not a denial of faith. The shortest verse in the Bible is found in John 11:35. It states simply: "Jesus wept."

Those two words speak volumes about Jesus’ inner feelings and His willingness to express His grief.

Those two words describe what happened after the funeral of Lazarus, a beloved friend of Jesus. Mary, Lazarus’ sister, fell at Jesus’ feet and out of a broken heart said, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Jesus, deeply moved asked, "Where have you laid him?"

Then Mary and her sister, Martha, and the people in the village made their way to the town cemetery. Jesus stood in front of the tomb of Lazarus, and the biblical writer states simply, "Jesus wept." Seeing the tears trickling down his cheeks, friends of the family remarked, "See how he loved him!"

He who remains history’s greatest and most complete person stood by the graveside of a good friend and wept. In that incident Jesus with His tears destroyed the notion that "big boys don’t cry."

Christians who believe that tears are incompatible with faith may also have misunderstood a sentence Paul wrote to his friends in the city of Thessalonica. To those who had lost their loved ones, he explained, "Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

Unfortunately, some reading those words have struggled under "bad grief" because they have left off the last phrase of Paul’s sentence. The apostle wasn’t telling his readers not to grieve. Grief is as common as being human. After all, grief is an emotion like love, fear, guilt, or anger and is probably a mixture of all of these. Our Christian faith does not provide immunity from emotions, and it is as futile to deny grief as it would be to deny laughter. But rather Paul was telling his Christian friends not to grieve as unbelievers do who possess no hope. Our faith can keep grief from overwhelming us, but God rewards no crowns because we refuse to weep.

Strange and unpredictable things happen to those who do not face their losses and work through their grief. A fourteen-year-old boy has struggled with depression since he was seven. He is the victim of a divorce and feels like a pawn in his parents’ chess game. He has been shuttled between father and mother, both of whom he loves, but he has never felt fully at home in either of their houses. Neither he nor his parents can make sense out of his sudden outbursts of anger, his truancy, and shoplifting. The young man has not dealt with his grief.

A paraplegic talks about riding his motorcycle again. His young wife who has married him "for better or for worse" wants to love him and help him. She doesn’t understand the fury he spews out at her. He simply will not accept the reality of his loss. She is frightened that she has lost him. Both husband and wife struggle with their grief.

It is only as we work through our own grief and help others to do so that grief can become "good grief." Grief is a part of life, and God has given us tear ducts to allow us to express our sorrow.

We need to know how to turn bad grief into good grief for ourselves and for others.

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