As time passes after Mom’s death, I have become aware of an unwelcome intangible. Somewhere there is an expectation that at some point in this process, I will “be over it”. Or if not “over it”, at least “past it”, where my grief and loss is something not talked about anymore. A friend and I were talking about this a couple days ago. While she was sharing, I began to think about it more. I’m guessing those of you who have experienced a close loss can relate. Where it comes from I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a combination of ourselves and our culture. Maybe it’s a side effect of us pushing death to the perimeter of our lives instead of how it used to live in the forefront. But whatever the source, this expectation of what healing looks like brings more damage than healing. I’d like to do what I do a lot of lately: take the expectation, look at it and examine it, question whether it is logical and true or not, and if it is not, replacing it with what is true. It’s part of how I keep my sanity in a culture where grieving is foreign.

First let’s look at this expectation more closely. It’s most often heard in the silence after a loss. Often there is an onrush of help and support in the first few months following a death, for example. Then, naturally, as people resume their regular rhythms, the help wanes. And so do the questions and conversations for the bereaved about their loved one and their grieving process. I have yet to find an example where this has not been touted as the norm. This wax and wane of people is a natural one. People will offer what they can, and for most of us, the short-term is most feasible. The trouble comes after the dust settles and the bereaved is left with their new reality, grappling with how to do life now. In this comes a lot of silence. You aren’t asked about how you are coping. They don’t bring up your loved one anymore. While their life went back to normal, yours did not and never will. C.S. Lewis compares bereavement to an amputation. And on top of that loss, you live in a culture that avoids your “amputation” after a certain point. One thing that bereaved people hear in this silence is that the broken part of themselves is not a place others want to go. Or they’ll hear that it’s not where others should go.

My personal experience with this happened most recently after Christmas holidays. I reached the eight month mark, and realized I am just dipping my toes into the extent of the damage done from Mom’s cancer journey, death, and subsequent executor role. One thing piled up on top of another, and the load kept increasing with few breaks, and I haven’t stopped since this whole thing started over a year ago. It’s been insane. Eight months in, I am just realizing this. And when that happened, I felt nervous, and a little guilty. It felt like I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t processing it fast enough, because the one-year marker was coming up and it feels like I should be farther along than I am. One year means it gets easier, right? And while some aspects are indeed getting easier, others are getting harder. Therapy digs up wounds that need to be healed. The body still knows and feels the effects of grief. Often there is trauma that keeps the bereaved trapped. The griever needs to figure out each day, each season, how to live in their new reality.

When I talk to people who have been bravely facing their unwanted reality for longer than I have, they confirm for me that the expectation to “move on” exists for them as well. The ones where it’s been years past their loss or major change. Grief doesn’t wave goodbye to us after a certain time frame: she travels with us the rest of our lives. We grow around our grief, yes. It’s not an always intense force; it ebbs and flows like waves. But it does not leave us. Our loss and our pain is just as much a part of us as our nose. It changes us, and will be part of our lives until our last day. Sadly, we have not done a good job seeing this part of our fellow humans. We know our neighbor lost their spouse a few years ago, but we’ve stopped asking about it. We don’t want to make them sad, we rationalize. Maybe we don’t want to get our hands dirty. Or maybe we just don’t understand deep grief. In the meantime, our neighbor walks with their grief every single day, trying to figure out how to do another day without their person. And while it may bring tears to their eyes, asking “How are you doing with your grief?” gives a chance for that sacred part of themselves to be seen and heard. Being seen for who you are, all of you, is priceless and healing. No matter how many years it’s been. Treating the loss of a loved one, or any other loss (divorce, for example) as old news, is damaging.

So as I examine this expectation, I see a term that needs to be defined. What is “being stuck in your grief”? Both the wounded and the helper can fear that this is happening. “Am I grieving, or am I stuck?” As I and others have wondered, is being stuck experiencing signs of grief years after the tragedy? Is it rough holidays, or grief triggers, or the need to talk of them long after others have stopped asking how you are doing? Also, what does moving forward look like? Is it feeling like you used to? Being more happy than sad? Feeling as if you have “gotten over it”? Arriving at a point where you never speak of your loss?

It’s safe to say that health includes moving forward in life. It does not mean living controlled by your grief for the rest of your days. Continuously reliving it, letting it define you, lack of healing are some of the signs of getting stuck in your loss. GriefShare talks about moving on versus moving forward, which is a vital distinction to understand. Moving on is a false assumption that we will somehow get past our grief. It ignores the fact that our grief travels with us, as an amputee travels without their limb. Moving forward is learning how to live without our loved one, or without our leg. Moving forward means addressing any trauma experienced. Life will never be the same, but we still have a life to live. So we learn how to live with our grief, not controlled by it. We learn how to move forward.

People who expect you to revert to who you were before, and think that you are stuck because you are not the same or because you continue to walk with grief long after, do not understand loss. They most likely have the definition of being stuck = being affected by your loss, post-loss. Often with a certain time limit (3 months, 1 year, 3 years, 10 years). These people are also quite uncomfortable with pain and are quick to give solutions or advice. They believe that faith in Jesus means mainly happy emotions, bows on top of tragedy, what our culture calls “positive thinking”, just with a religious spin in the Christian realm.

In order to help more hurting people, our culture needs a reset on how we handle pain, tragedy, grief and loss. This “toxic positivity” brings more damage than we realize. The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” illustrated this better than I can do with my words. Remember Sadness and Joy trying to find their way back to Headquarters? Remember when they met Bing Bong? How he was devastated at the loss of his rocket he and Riley used to ride. For him this loss was ultimately an ending of his precious time with Riley. Joy tried to cheer him up, to fix him. It didn’t help. Sadness sat with him and listened. There were tears. It was painful. And it was healing. If you continued watching, you saw the same thing happen with Riley. She needed Sadness in order to experience Joy. The two go hand in hand in this life. They just do. Whether we like it or not. We cannot have one without the other. We should not reject the hard, painful parts of our lives, however much we hate them or don’t understand all the reasons why. If we have the courage to lean into all of life, the good and the horrible, it is there we experience the fullness of being human. It is also there where we draw closest to God. It is there where faith grows.

For my Christian siblings: this is near and dear to God’s heart. I didn’t realize how much so until my heart was utterly broken and I began to know Jesus’ presence in my suffering. I started seeing how linked suffering and salvation are. The seemingly contradictory truths that God hates death and suffering while he also uses it to accomplish his purposes, redemption and ultimate restoration. I started seeing lament & suffering all over the Bible.

Unfortunately, we’ve allowed a poisonous positive spin to infiltrate our churches. In our discomfort or ignorance with pain, we shut the door to hurting people who need to know that God invites our groans. I know it sounds crazy, but He is a suffering God! From Genesis 3, He’s known pain beyond what we can claim. And I’m seeing all over Scripture that He not only wants our anger and pain, he shares our anger and pain. He laments with us. He invites our questions as a loving parent invites their child to share what’s wrong. Aching for his broken creation, He comes so near to his brokenhearted. He invites them into this process, which I’m finding leads to depths and riches of God I have never known before. Hurting people need this good news, and instead are met with shallow messages of God’s goodness apart from their pain. The questions devastated people ask are not found in our churches. Their cries are not welcome on Sundays. Their anger is called sinful instead of part of their process of lamenting to God. Their questions are not tolerated. Their doubts are not acknowledged. The picture of God we portray to people is shallow. We try to fast-forward a grieving person to trust in God, skipping the hard parts. All this is flat-out wrong, un-Scriptural, and harmful. This is not who God is, what He says, how He responds to our suffering, or how Jesus suffered. This is a large part of the book I’m writing in my spare time. We need to do an about-face with regard to suffering, Church.

The “positive gospel” does not tell a suffering world many things it needs to hear. The most lamentable miss in my heart lately is about our suffering Savior. I’ve grown up in church, and I knew Jesus died on the cross for my sins, but I had no concept for Jesus as God’s son living a sorrowful, tear-filled, grief-acquainted life. Some of the things I’m learning are astounding and comforting. For example, in a sermon entitled Praying our Tears by Tim Keller, he pointed out that only one perfect human heart walked this broken earth, and that perfect human heart wept. A lot. Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, close friends with grief. And to the degree Christians grow in their resemblance to Jesus, they will grow in their heartbreak. They will hurt more. They will ache more. They will suffer more.

So we now need to ask the hard questions. Take a look in the mirror and be brave. And I mainly address these questions to my Christian friends. How do we respond to the loss in our lives? How do we process the pain in our lives? Do we feel it and face it with God? Are we doing the hard work of looking at it? Are we learning how to lament? Are we studying what God says about pain and suffering and grief? Do we care most about comfort, or Christ? Are we willing to feel the heartbreak of being alive in a beautiful yet busted up world? Why do we so quickly put a positive, religious spin on it? “But God…..” “At least…..” Ill-timed Scripture aimed at reminders of God’s goodness while ignoring their pain. Trying to clean someone up instead of being present in their mess, because perhaps their mess touches on something unhealed in our own hearts. Or perhaps we really want to be comfortable more than we want Jesus’ road.

While there are so many facets at play here, one thing seems obvious. We need to be willing to face the pain of our own life; only then can we begin to bear the pain of another. Hearing about the horrible way someone’s reality changed permanently is very hard. In some cases, heartbreaking. And that discomfort and heartbreak needs to be felt. For us and for others. God does not ask us to put a silver lining on it. He never puts a silver lining on it. Instead, He invites us to share in his pain, into the depths. Not simply for the sake of feeling it. Not because He’s sadistic and enjoys inflicting pain. Because He’s there with us in it. Because there is so much more of Him to know through it. Because He knows suffering on an intimate level. He both weeps with us and works through the pain. Because His suffering brought redemption. Because through the depths come the greatest of heights and hope.

Suffering and loss do what comfort cannot. It has purpose beyond our understanding. That’s easy to say until you’re in severe pain yourself. While I shy away from it, Jesus did not, and does not. His presence gives me the strength to learn how to live with my grief instead of shoving it down. Dare I say that’s the best part about this horrific season: however horrible it gets, I’m never alone. Someone greater and better than me is in it with me, feeling it with me, drawing close to me. Someone who will never leave me or be taken away. Someone who will finally heal it all. And that makes all the difference in the world.