A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing- Guest Post by Amanda Held Opelt

 

Editor's note:  Amanda wrote the very first blog post for this Sibling Grief Blog. She recently wrote a book about Grief and it comes out soon.  I asked her for an excerpt to share as this month's post. Her words are wise, born out of her own pain and grief. I hope this blesses you as it has blessed me!  -Jessica

In my new book A Hole in the World:  Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing, I explored ancient traditions surrounding loss and bereavement in order to better understand my own grief.  I wanted to try and make sense of all the complex emotions I was experiencing, and find some way to process them.  The passage below is from chapter 10, which is about the ritual of funeral games.  Funeral games, like practical jokes and hide and seek, were often played at Irish wakes.  But the ancient Greeks often engaged in fierce competitions, like chariot races, wrestling, and archery, after a funeral.  It was thought that this would honor the person who had died.  It was also a way for mourners to experience life, diversion, and vigor once more after loss.

 

"Like the ancient Greeks, I long to honor the memory of the person I’ve lost.  And I’ve begun to think that embracing life and living it to the fullest is one of the most important ways I can honor her.  I don’t honor her by ignoring the pain.  But I also don’t honor her by ignoring the joy forever.  My happiness runs parallel to my sadness, and the key is to learn to live with and truly honor both feelings.

In the Odyssey, Homer writes of the person who has endured suffering: “Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.”  I’m not sure I agree fully with Homer on this statement.  I’m not sure you can ever call true grief a joy.  It will always be a grief.  It will always be painful.  Yes, there are good things that will happen after my sister’s death, perhaps even good things that would not have been possible had she not died.  But that does not make her death good.  It just doesn’t.  Her death will never be anything but truly awful.

I don’t think there’s some grand cosmic scale in which all the good we’ve experienced suddenly outweighs the bad.  I don’t think our lives work like a bank account, where catastrophes make withdrawals and blessings make deposits and you sit down at the end of your days hoping somehow that you’ve ended up in the black.  Life always out-grows all our tidy metaphors.  It is never either in the red or in the black.  It’s always both. 

But I can say that I do look back on my griefs with a sense of awe.  It’s an awe that I wouldn’t categorize as happiness or relief or even redemption.  It’s a wonder filled awe, a breath-taking kind of awe.  It’s amazement that we persevered, that God was there, that we rose to that awful occasion, broken though our wings may have been.  It’s a deep sense of reverence for the people who showed up in our lives in powerful ways when we needed them.  It’s an amazement at the hard-fought resilience that was wrought over time with love and tears and terror.  And yes, perhaps it is a joy, in seeing the stubborn persistence of tenderness, and life’s ability to keep handing you beauty even after all feels lost."

 Contact information for Amanda:  http://amandaheldopelt.com/

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