Grief does not need a lesson attached to it
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 5 min read
The worst thing anyone said to my mother in the year after my father died was that God must have needed him more, and the person who said it was a kind woman who had driven forty minutes with a pie.
I have thought about that sentence for a long time, partly because I have since caught myself about to say its cousins, and I have come to believe that it is not really a sentence about God. It is a sentence about the speaker. It is what a person says when she is standing in a kitchen with a pie and a grief that is not hers and does not know where to put either one.
The lesson is for the teller
There is a habit, in the churches I have belonged to and I suspect in most others, of locating the meaning of a loss quickly and announcing it. He is in a better place. She is not suffering now. Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan. Each of these may be true, and I believe some of them, and none of them is helpful on the Tuesday after the funeral, because none of them was asked for.
What they do is close the subject. They give the speaker a finished sentence to leave on, and they give the grieving person the job of agreeing, which she usually does, out of politeness, and which costs her something she did not have to spare.
I want to be fair to the pie woman. She was not being cruel. She had a theology in which that sentence was a comfort, and she offered it as one, and she was wrong about its effect but not about her intent. The question is whether intent is enough, and in that kitchen it was not.
What sitting still looks like
The person who helped my mother most that year was a man from the church who came by on a Saturday, did not bring anything, and sat with her on the porch for about an hour, during which, by her account, he said perhaps forty words, most of them about my father's tomatoes. He did not say where my father was. He did not say what the loss meant. He had, I think, decided that it was not his to say, and had come anyway, and the coming was the whole message.
That is harder than it sounds. Sitting on a porch for an hour with a woman who is crying intermittently and not filling the silence with a lesson requires you to tolerate the silence yourself, and most of us cannot, and we reach for the sentence the way you reach for a railing.
A word about scripture
I am aware that the Bible has a great deal to say about death and that some of it is the sentence I am objecting to, more or less. I am not objecting to the scripture. I am objecting to its use as a door-closer, by people who are leaving, on people who are staying. The same verse, read by the widow herself at two in the morning, is a different thing entirely; it was not handed to her, she went and got it, and the going is what makes it hers.
"Weep with those who weep" is an instruction with no second clause. It does not say weep with them and then explain.
The sentence I almost said
I said at the start that I have caught myself about to say the pie woman's sentence, and I should say when. It was last spring, at the house of a woman from our church whose husband had died in April after a long illness, and I was standing in her kitchen holding, of all things, a pie, and she said that the last months had been very hard, and what rose in me, fully formed, was: well, at least he isn't suffering now.
I did not say it. I would like to claim that was wisdom, and it was mostly that she looked up before I had finished taking the breath, and I saw her face arrange itself to receive a sentence, politely, the way my mother's had, and I put the pie on the counter instead and asked where he had liked to sit. She told me. We sat there. I do not think I said forty words. I have thought since that the sentence is always there, ready, and that the only thing between it and the widow is a breath, and that the breath is the whole of the work.
What I would say instead, if I had to say something
Very little. The name, if the person wants to hear it, and most do. A story about him, if you have one; the tomatoes did more work than any verse that year. A chair pulled up without asking where to sit. And a date: not "call me if you need anything," which puts the labor on the widow, but "I'll come by Saturday," which puts it on you, where it belongs.
My mother kept the pie plate for eleven years. She said the pie was very good. She never repeated the sentence, and I think she forgave it, and I think forgiving it was one more thing she had to do that spring that nobody had meant to give her.