Hard lessons on grief and death

SOUL FOOD

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

-- Jesus of

Nazareth

The winning numbers for the New York lottery on Sept. 11 were

9-1-1.

It seems just like life, truth sometimes is hard to believe and at

times almost too ironic.

In recent weeks a series of events, the anniversary of Sept. 11

among them, brought both death and grief into sharp focus for me.

But it started with my birthday. Throughout the early morning a

number of people quipped to me, “We aren’t getting any younger are

we?” Then my mother’s dog died. Whitney had belonged to my father

until he died four years ago. It was a good thing in many ways that

she was left in my mother’s care. My mother is good with animals and

Whitney’s sweet disposition as a constant companion was a comfort to

my mother. But Whitney was not a young dog even then. My mother would

say, “I don’t know what I’ll do if anything ever happens to Whitney.”

I’d say, “You know that is when, not if.” I tried to prepare her for

that day. My sister tried, too, but it was easy to tell she didn’t

really hear it.

The day Whitney died my mother was inconsolable. And she still is.

Someone once told me that grief has no watch. I know at times it

seems true. No matter how much time accrues between the loss of a

loved one and now, grief can -- in certain moments the sight of an

empty chair by the window, the loud silence of a voice no longer

heard -- rise up like a tidal wave and make us wail. I also know that

God means for us to go on living.

The day after my birthday my miracle cat Wayne was diagnosed with

two terminal diseases. One is kidney failure, which can take its time

in some old cats and work quickly in others. The other is the

recurrence of a lung tumor. Five years ago he beat all odds against

it and survived surgery. Now, with his age and kidney failure,

surgery is likely to be as deadly as the tumor itself.

That night I dreamed about a married couple from Santa Barbara I’d

met in Italy more than 18 years ago. I was in Florence, traveling

with my friend Julia. We met the couple by chance in the bar of Caffe

Doney as we waited for tables for dinner. We chatted.

The man and woman spoke bravely and candidly of the sorrows they

had endured the past two years. They had lost their 17-year-old

daughter to cancer one year before. Then, before they were called to

dinner, they said something I would remember as much as their sorrow:

“We finally realized that life is for living and that to bury

ourselves with our dead is no way to honor our dead or to honor God.”

On Sept. 4, my friend Lisa asked me to go to a funeral with her.

Matthew Maldonado, a 16-year-old Fountain Valley High School

classmate and football teammate of her son Drew, had been shot and

killed three days before.

As I sat in the church just behind that young man’s family I

thought of the hard, hard task set before them, the same task that

the couple from Santa Barbara had faced two decades ago.

It made me think of the words of Brian Sweeney who died on Sept.

11, 2001, on Flight 175. In an answering machine message to his wife,

Julie, he said, “I want you to do good and go have good times.”

Last week on Sept. 11 my pastor sent out an e-mail to the members

of our parish.

“My dear spiritual sons and daughters,” he wrote, “The Wailing

Wall, the only wall of the Temple left standing since the fall of

Jerusalem in A.D. 70, represents not only the sorrow of a people long

separated from their homeland, but also their long-cherished hope of

national and spiritual renewal.”

Similarly, within each of our hearts there stands a private

wailing wall where sorrow and hope mingle. Sorrow comes in every

life. But hope comes as well if we cling to Jesus. Earth has no

sorrow that heaven cannot heal. It’s a truth sometimes hard to

believe, but truth nonetheless.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.