I compare my experience to that of the Blessed Virgin.
Grief is a strange thing. When sad and terrible things happen in this life it is only natural to experience grief. And grief is a sadness that is difficult to put into words.
I used to be very afraid of grief. When my little boy died before he was even born, the very first thing that I thought was that the grief would be too difficult to bear. And as a result I tried all different sorts of tricks that people try so that they do not need to deal with any grief. I tried to keep very busy and not to sit still so that I would not have the time or the opportunity to think about the grief or the experience of loss. Then, when that did not work very well, I tried other things.
I tried to talk about what had happened. I spoke about it with lots and lots of different people. But after a while people stop wanting to hear about sad and miserable things. And it becomes more and more difficult to address the grief and it eats you up a little every single day. And the feeling of unfairness becomes so overwhelming that it becomes almost impossible to think of the terrible loss at all because it becomes the whole entire focus of your whole entire life.
And – through God’s Grace and no merit of my own – God healed my grief and helped me to see that the child that I felt I had lost was not lost at all. Instead, he was saved. And he is my little patron saint – the patron saint of my family. And we can rely on his intercession to the Lord Our God.
But even knowing that I have a patron saint in Heaven, some days it is harder to live without him physically with me on the Earth. On those days, I can see him with me at his current age. I can feel the softness of his hair and the gentleness of his skin. I can smell his little boy smell and hear his little boy voice. And I can understand in an instant all the myriads of possibilities that might have been with that child. In the old days – before my conversion – those waves of grief would have overwhelmed me and I would have been overcome by them. But these days, they cause me to think. Not because time heals all wounds – for time heals nothing, it merely makes us understand how to exist side by side with pain, realising that it cannot kill us. Rather, I think because I compare my experience to that of the Blessed Virgin.
She experienced such terrible loss during her life, and yet she did not grieve. And the reason she did not grieve was because she completely surrendered to the Holy Will of God.
And this means that she bore all sorrows in her heart and trusted in God to make all things new. And today, when the wave of grief hits me, I think of that, and I am well…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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