Shortly after Bob's death I met a young minister I know in the local Adventist Book Center. "I'm so sorry," he said as we paused in the aisle. I wondered as I watched his receding back, Does he know Bob is dead, or is he sorry he has cancer?
Later he told a mutual friend, "I was so embarrassed that I didn't know what to say to her." I believe that the knowledge of his discomfort was the seed for this article.
Our lives all touch those who need to be comforted. There is a broad spectrum of people who are hurting: the divorced, jobless, homeless, and many more. So although I am writing for ministers from the viewpoint of my own greatest loss, the principles apply to every person ministering to another in pain.
Before Bob died I did not know that most ministers have to learn how to be with the mourner and that many had not learned. I was naive enough to feel on a deep emotional level that the act of ordination conferred extraordinary comforting powers onto the ordained. I find I am not alone in this expectation. "That's not fair," you may say. It's also unfair to expect more of preachers' kids than others and it's unfair that Bob died.
Notations from my journal
"He's gone. He's cold. His bed is empty ... I am numb, sad, and lonely. . . . I've lost my best friend, and the void is bottomless. Will I ever feel whole again?"
"Sometimes grief hits like lightning that burns through and strikes down. . . . His speaking in terms of we was like a stab wound; it's now I and not we. I feel so hampered.... I am not a whole person anymore. ... I need to grapple with the pain and hurt of being left alone."
"I grope as a blind person who knows something is there but cannot find it.... I feel diminished, cut down, incomplete. I want to experience wholeness. . . .
"Right now my only peace seems to come when I'm denying that he's gone from my life forever . . . my subconscious tells me he's just out delivering a baby."
"The magnitude of my loss is over whelming—oh, the cruelty of fate. . . . Yet my grief is not obvious to most—or if obvious they choose to ignore it. ... After Christmas I will be completely alone for the first time in my life. ... I long for the time I will truly be at peace, when I no longer carry this leaden heart within me."
"She returned my call but was all business. ... To talk to a well-loved person the first time after Bob's death and receive no comfort was like salt in a wound. Is death too hard for her to get close to? I try vainly to focus on the support I am getting and not on what feels like indifference."
"I don't want to eat. I don't want to get dressed. I just want to curl up into a ball and cry and cry.... I have no one to go to with my small joys and sorrows on a daily basis. I'll have to store them until some one is present."
"I need to tell the recent events over and over. I cannot put them casually be hind because the funeral is over and Bob is in the grave."
"I need to go back and cry with those who love us so much. . . . May my tears soften my soul and make me more gentle and caring as Bob was."
"Christ said, 'Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.' Will the comfort come to me, or do I have to go and find it?... I know You're there, God, but it doesn't feel like Your arms are around me; rather, that You're distant and cold, watching to see what I'll do next... or maybe ignoring me."
"Keeping a fire going is symbolic of the warmth I want to feel for life. But it is so hard to hold. There's a part of me that wants to be buried under the snow, covered as completely as Bob in his coffin. ... Some days I don't want the gift of life."
"I find myself using external targets to reduce internal pressure. ... I feel ignored, left out. It's so easy for the church to pray and practically ignore who they're praying for. ... A part of me so badly wanted someone to reach out and acknowledge my presence. Another part wanted to get to the car and not risk a torrent of tears in public. . . . Slowly I'm beginning to realize that people are afraid to approach me. . . . Including me re minds them of their own mortality."
"Most people don't want to hear the dark side. If I share it they start a recital of how much I have going for me. ... Who is there to listen besides a paid therapist and children burdened with their own grief?"
"My children's peers are easing my entry into widowhood. They don't offer words of solace and comfort they are just there with food, presence, and attentive ears."
"I never dreamed it would be so hard to integrate into a new community. It doesn't need me. ... I tell myself, 'None of them want to have their surfaces ruffled by my tears and sorrow. They need to believe I'm doing just fine, hanging onto God's promises and all that that implies.' I think back to times I could have been more sensitive to and supportive of the needs of others."
"He encouraged me to look on the bright side. I wanted to cry out, 'I do, but don't you know I need to cry with somebody? I'm tired of holding a mask up when I'm with people.' Of course he didn't know, and I couldn't tell him. . . . And society usually sees only the clues that indicate an unwillingness to share."
"Old friends came to visit. A minister and his wife. I'd counted on reliving the last few weeks of Bob's life with these friends. I started to talk about it, and they changed the subject. Their aim seemed to be to keep things light. To pull me out of my pain instead of being with me in it. . . . They prayed for those in the mission field, and my need seemed like a post script on the end. . . . Don't they know death is the one event that is sure to be in their experience and mine?"
"Do I have the courage and support to make the tragedy of Bob's death into a triumph?"
Why some ministers find it hard to comfort those in pain
Writing this article and working through my grief go hand in hand. Each of the many ministers I talked to facilitated new insights. I now understand better why it is difficult for many to be supportive of the mourner. The following are direct quotations of what pastors have told me.
"We have trouble facing our own mortality. It depresses us."
"We have never worked through our own past losses."
"I have never experienced a loss."
"We are not comfortable with death and don't know how to act."
"We're trained to be in control and are afraid of losing control."
"We are not motivated enough to make it a priority."
"We want to separate ourselves from pain."
"Grief counseling takes a lot of time I don't have."
"Young ministers are scared of their first funeral. They need to be trained."
I will elaborate on the first two statements and then propose my own overall hypothesis.
"We have trouble facing our own mortality." In Death: The Final Stage of Growth, Mwalimu Imara explains that we must learn to die in order that we may learn to live that although we receive our final opportunity for growth when we are standing at death's doorstep, our growth should not wait for the crises in our life. The qualities that predict our being able to deal comfortably and productively with death are the same qualities that distinguish a growing human being at any stage of his or her life.1
The young minister who said "At funerals I think that this could be my funeral" has worked through his own losses so that he is able to face death with the mourner. There are those who have never worked through their own losses. One minister shared, "My parents died six months apart while I was in the mission field. There was never any question of my returning to the United States. They were buried before I even knew they were dead." Are ministers given the time to work through such losses? Or is loss after loss minimized and not worked through?
The expression of grief is too often silenced in our society. Elisabeth Kiibler- Ross did a lot to legitimize talking about death and dying, but her stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance should not be taken as prescriptive. They can be used as a framework from which to explore grief. John Bowlby's four phases are similarly useful:
1. Numbness from a few hours to days.
2. Yearning and searching may last for years.
3. Disorganization and despair.
4. Greater or lesser degree of reorganization.
These phases are not necessarily successive, but may be simultaneous. While I am largely in the fourth phase, I still despair some days and yearn for Bob.
In Grief Recovery, Larry Yeagley lists the tasks of mourning as:
1. Come to the place where the loss is considered a reality.
2. Experience the pain and suffering caused by a major disruption.
3. Move back into the familiar environment once shared.
4. Say goodbye.
Having grieved effectively over a loss of one's own can make a person particularly well qualified to help the bereaved.
Defending against the feelings of their own losses is one reason why ministers are not effective with mourners. It is important to work through personal losses—past and present.
Yeagley makes four suggestions: think, write, talk, and weep.
1. Think through the events preceding and following your loss. Relive them in memory. Don't be afraid of your thoughts. You may need to go back to a place that was meaningful to you and the lost one. Maybe a grave. Think how you were dressed, what you said to each other.
2. Write down your feelings. Tell your journal, God, or the lost person how life is without him or her. Express your guilt, anger, or loneliness.
3. Find a nonjudgmental person (preferably not recently bereaved) who is willing to listen without feeling the need to respond. Probe the depths of your loss as if it were recent.
4. Weep. Washing the eyes with tears can facilitate growth and understanding. Many agree that though grief ministry is badly needed, few are willing to work through their own losses, face their own mortality, and choose a setting where they can learn to be effective comforters. Some elect to work with a hospice program or a funeral home, or join a clinical pastoral education group. Learning can occur in these environments without the intense emotional involvement of a personal loss.
Integration of mind and feelings
After one interview I felt especially in touch with the grieving process. Why? I wondered. Then came sudden dawning. Larry had modeled almost total integration of mind and feelings during our conversation. He had moved easily and by choice from his intellect to his emotions. They were both at his service, and he was able to use each in the service of the other.
I could hear the tears in his voice when he said, "Every death was a great loss to me. ... I didn't find it hard to mourn with the family." But then he spoke of techniques he used to allow him to carry on his pastoral function during funerals, like weeping in the pastor's study just before the funeral. He modeled what I had been trying to achieve in everyday life for years the ability to move at will between mind and feelings, which is a mark of a we 11-integrated person.
After the interview I went home and read in The Act of Will, by Assagioli: "The polarity between 'mind' and 'heart,' between reason and feeling (Logos and Eros), is regulated, first, by the recognition of their respective functions and of the legitimate field of action belonging to each of the two functions, so that neither dominates the other. This can be followed by a mutual and increasing cooperation and interpenetration be tween the two, finally arriving at the syn thesis so well expressed by Dante in the words' intellectual light full of love.' "2
Ellen White suggests that we analyze our feelings, and points out that struggle is often required to control feelings, but that they can be controlled by control ling the will, which when yielded to Christ is allied to His power.3
Christ was "touched with the feeling of our infirmities" (Heb. 4:15), and Paul admonished, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5).
Mind or emotions
You may be a "mind person" who does not cry easily. Maybe you were told that "boys don't cry." You think things through rationally and encourage the bereaved to look on the bright side, to start helping others. Sometimes too soon.
Mind people are likely to describe themselves with intellectual constructs, even when asked how they feel. I listened as one minister described the hardest funeral he ever conducted. "How did you feel?" I asked. He sighed then told me how well the young couple did afterward. Does he consider feelings and sensations as peripheral? Or is he largely unaware of them because he has needed to distance himself from them so often?
Because they do not let grief affect them emotionally, mind people may have little trouble conducting funeral services. Funerals become rituals, a professional service to members of the congregation. Being in control is no problem because mind people don't know how to get out of control. Maybe they don't even recognize tears when they are imminent, but switch them off before they're conscious of the fact that they are near the surface. Mind people need to remind themselves, "I have a mind, but I am not my mind. My mind is a valuable tool of discovery and expression, but it is not the essence of my being."4
Similarly, the person who operates predominantly on an emotional basis may need to say, "I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. My emotions are diversified, changing, sometimes contradictory. They may swing from love to hatred, from calm to anger, from joy to sorrow, and yet—my essence my true nature—does not change."5
A funeral may be especially difficult for those who are easily touched and don't find mental control of their emotions easy. They may become over-controlled, unable to be spontaneous or authentic. They may come across as cold, distant, and uncaring, when in reality they are deeply moved.
So these tenderhearted ones either avoid the mourner or devote their energies to pulling the mourner out of his grief—often prematurely. "Every painful emotion and feeling arouses the desire and urge to eliminate its cause."6
How few there are like Larry who are able to feel with the mourner and then, at the appropriate time, gently point the mourner to the pathway out of grief.
Many I spoke to expressed a need to distance or disassociate from the mourner in order to stay in control. It is when this distancing occurs automatically—outside of free choice—and is then maintained that comforters are in effective with mourners.
We need to learn first to become aware of our identifications, and then to choose, consciously, which identification we believe to be most in line with our purpose.
Choosing our identification is an act of will. If you say "I'm a mind person—that's the way I am," you may be disassociating yourself from emotions and not be incorporating both mind and heart in your response to the sufferer.
Suggestions for comforters
There are many things that any comforter can do for the bereaved. I've made a list of things that have helped, based on my own experience and that of others. No matter how hard you try, you won't give just the right response every time, but keep trying what is offensive at one point may be comforting at another.
1. Those who really comforted me treated me as a unique individual and did not presume to know how I felt. They understood that a grieving person is affected by a number of factors:
a. The quality and type of relationship with the deceased.
b. The type of death.
c. The support, availability, and response of friends and others.
d. Previous unresolved losses.
e. Other concurrent severe stresses or traumas.
f. Sociodemographic factors.
g. Personality characteristics.7
2. They avoided the use of cliches. "Speak from the heart or not at all," ad vises Colin Parkes in Bereavement. "This is not a situation where there is a proper thing to say: trite formulae serve only to widen the gap between bereaved and nonbereaved."8
3. They came knowing that it was important for me to talk about my feelings if I felt like it. It didn't matter whether those feelings were unrealistic or unhelpful. They realized that if I could explore them in sympathetic company, my own sense of reality would be sufficient. They also knew that sharing memories of Bob with friends was important for me.
4. They took their cues from me during the conversation. They listened if I wanted to talk. They didn't probe when I was silent. They didn't urge me to get out and do something for someone else be fore I was ready. They were able to get a feel for what my behavior meant. One minister said, "I watch their eyes to get at their feelings."
5. They intuitively knew, or had learned along the way, that talk doesn't have to fill the air all the time. Light, irrelevant talk may be painful for the newly bereaved. They didn't tell in length and detail about their own losses. Their empathy on an unspoken level let me know that they had gone through suffering. They realized that the bereaved need silence to pull it all together. Their presence at a time when I was miserable company was the important thing.
6. They were able to use touch appropriately. They knew the balance be tween a bear hug that left me gasping for breath and a distant posture that accentuated my new isolation. They sat close enough to be able to reach out and reassure me by touch. It is significant that most of Christ's miracles involved touching the person He healed. The laying on of hands has real therapeutic value.
7. They realized that when I questioned Why? after Bob's death, I was not asking for a Bible study. It was a cry of anguish and did not require an intellectual response. It is possible, for ministers especially, to get so bogged down talking about God that they almost forget the mourner. God does not need us to defend Him.
8. They cried with me. "It is often seen as reassuring by the bereaved person when those who are nearest show that they are not afraid to allow feelings of sadness to emerge. Such communal expressions of sorrow make the bereaved person feel understood and reduce the sense of isolation he or she is likely to experience."9 Helpers should show, by their willingness to reveal their own feelings, that they are neither ashamed of nor rendered useless by them. This reassures the newly bereaved that it is safe to grieve. "There must be a willingness to engage in spite of emotional cost."
9. They asked me what I would like to do accepting my need of a fallow time during the transition in my life. They knew that resolving grief takes energy and that being too busy would delay the process. There was a time when I needed to be helped in order that I might later help others.
10. "Caring must be from the inside out to be authentic." They shared in sights from the depth of their experience. They didn't have to look up texts. It didn't matter where the quotation was from if it was a part of them they were sharing. The twenty-third Psalm was never so meaningful to me as at the time of Bob's death. But it was shared with me by somebody who was walking in the shadow of death with me, not from some body advising from the sidelines. It is in the face of death that you can reveal whether you have been comforted with Christ's comfort.
Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son asks: "What do you say to someone who is suffering? Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That's OK too. Your words don't have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken. And if you can't think of anything at all to say, just say, 'I can't think of anything to say. But I want you to know that we are with you in your grief.'
"Or even, just embrace. Not even the best of words can take away the pain. What words can do is testify that there is more than pain in our journey on earth to a new day. Of those things that are more, the greatest is love. Express your love. .. .
"But please: Don't say it's not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it's not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is.
I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench." 10
1. Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, ed., Death: The Final Stage of Growth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Spectrum/Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 147.
2. Roberta Assagioli, The Act of Will (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 124.
3. See Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1948), vol. 2, p. 564, and vol. 5, pp. 606, 514-
4. Assagioli, p. 215.
5. Ibid.,p. 214.
6. Ibid., p. 193.
7. Carol Staudacher, Beyond Grief (Oakland: New Harbinger Pubns., 1987), p. 238.
8. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1987.
9. Ibid., p. 180.
10. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1987), p. 34.
