I wrote this six years ago and it is worth sharing today.
(May 2021)
Still grieving
It was a very sunny morning this morning when I went out for a walk. Nearly three years since Margaret died and I am feeling sad. My sadness does not seem to want to leave me. The sky was blue and the sun bright and warm, and I am grateful for this, even as I am grateful for the place where I live – beautiful Stirling in Scotland – and grateful too for my health and for my faith in God and for so much that is fine about my life. Yet I am sad.
Coming back to my house I picked up the Scripture for today, Monday of the 22nd Week, and found Saint Paul talking to me about grief, and about how to think about those who have died, and about not grieving as if we had no hope. Then I remembered C S Lewis and his book A Grief Observed and I ‘googled’ it to remind myself again about things he said and felt. I found a connection to an article by Hilary Mantel, written in the Guardian on 27th December 2014, an excellent article about Lewis’ book and about grief itself.
Lewis’s book was later made into a play and a film, Shadowlands, which I found powerfully speaking to my own story of repressed life and the wonderful joy of finding love when I found Margaret. The actor, Anthony Hopkins has had a profound effect on me by his portrayal of repression in two films, Shadowlands and The Remains of the Day.
As I browsed through all these articles a phrase jumped out at me today and I think it is the phrase I need to hear. It is ‘the acceptance of suffering’. This is where I am in the process of my grieving, struggling to understand and to accept my suffering into the story of my life, and to live with the marks of the wounds I have felt.
In one sense I do not want my sadness to go away as it is the mark of my loss. But the trouble is that sadness is also crippling my daily experience of life, and for that reason, I do want my sadness to go away. How are these two opposites to be reconciled?
I think I see the beginning of an answer in my need now to accept suffering as an integral part of my journey of life. Like any wound to the body, the marks will always be there, the scars, and the slight limp may well be evident, but recovering strength allows the body to continue in life. So it is with my soul. What happened to me has happened, and the journey through my sorrows can make me wiser, and gentler, and more understanding of others in their pain and loss. Everyone in this world is battle scarred. There is a great deal of suffering around.
I have never been angry with God over my loss of Margaret. I have just been down and depressed and sorrowful and sad. I have lost energy and purpose and inspiration to go on. But gradually I have worked my way through all these things and many bright lights have come back on.
Only sadness remains and it has the power to cripple me and today I have found an inkling of the way forward. Suffering in my life is something I now wish to accept as part of the human condition. I would like to be able to use this suffering as some kind of good energy for others in days to come.
Most of all I am grateful to God for the gift of Margaret and Michael that came my way. I would like to live in that gratitude and to journey on in that spirit. My sadness can stay but I want it to settle in some quiet corner of my soul and be there to remind me of how much I loved my Margaret.
But I ask the Lord to give me the grace to grow in the acceptance of suffering and learn how to carry the cross that came to me.
Brian Fahy
31 August 2015
Erris Poetry 