Ambiguous grief.

    All grief is grief, yet, there are griefs I have not experienced.  The loss of a child is difficult for me to imagine. It makes sense to me that ambiguous grief, e.g., grief without a body, has a special pain all of its own. Hannah Coulter, the narrator in Wendell Berry's novel, Hannah Coulter, experienced such grief when her husband went 'missing in action' in the Battle Of The Bulge in WW II, never to be found.
    Hannah Coulter is speaking:
    "I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for awhile. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a little girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery....And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.
    "All through that bad time, when Virgil's absence was wearing into us, when 'missing' kept renaming itself more and more insistently as 'dead' and 'lost forever,' I was yet grateful. Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark."  PP 51-52.

     Life is full of losses both large and small, so life is filled with grief but grief is not what we are, it's what we feel. We are called to be loving and grateful. While we live with the presence of absences, note thee plural, in the land of grief we can be loving and grateful. "Grief ...has no power to hold. You only bear it."

Takk for alt,

Al