‘Are you sick of talking about this?’
What a great question! I caught up with my old mate Scott V a few days ago and as we were having a coffee together he asked me that. I liked that he was perceptive enough to know that maybe I was repeating myself for the 78th time, and maybe it was emotionally draining, but my answer was ‘no – not yet… I guess I may do in time, but for now I’m still coming to grips with it.’
CS Lewis reckons grief feels like ‘fear’. So he says in A Grief Observed – such a Lewis style title! I don’t think fear has been among the emotions I have experienced. Certainly disorientation, confusion and overwhelm have been among the words I would use. Maybe they consolidate into fear? Hmmm… nah… I don’t know that you can describe grief to another person easily and assume that they will have a similar experience.
To be honest I feel like I’m punching out of my weight division trying to make any sense of grief. I am inclined to ‘think’ my way thru situations (INTJ style) and find solutions, remedies and fixes… whereas grief is really more of a ‘feeling’ zone where no one gets to fix anything. So being immersed in a wash of unusual and unfamiliar emotions is quite disorienting and disconcerting. That said, I do have a fairly well developed ‘don’t panic’, response, so I have been able to ride out, endure, or just cop a beating from the various moments that have transpired over the last 40 or so days since Sam died.
I must admit that this has helped me realise that in moments of deep grief for others I have really not been able to empathise much at all. In some ways we have lived a pretty fortunate life, free of any major personal traumas, so grief has always been a very foreign experience to me. I feel like a bit like a visitor to a new city, hearing the sounds, smelling the smells and encountering the newness for the first time. i remember when I first went to the Philippines, the year after the revolution and we arrived for new years eve…I was in sensory overload. I had no idea quite what I had encountered! And it has felt a bit like that these last few weeks.
When I describe what is going on, its like Sam has taken up residence in one of the back rooms of my mind and just wanders into the forefront any time i am not focused on a specific task. So when I’m at the gym or cycling and I have ‘think time’ he seems to push his way to the forefront – even if I am listening to a podcast and reasonably intent on tuning in closely. And it’s usually just a flash of a memory that pierces the focus, then explodes on impact into a thousand other thoughts and associated feelings. Mostly they culminate in one dominant motif – he’s not coming back… And that evokes some very strong emotions as i wonder why…
Honestly – you know ‘why‘ I think Sam died? I think it was simply because he didn’t come up for air at the right time. That’s spectacularly unimpressive by way of any greater meaning or purpose in his death – but I’m not sure that there is any greater meaning or purpose other than what comes from how we allow the situation to shape and form us. I have no problems believing God can work all things together for good – if we will work with him – but I certainly can’t swallow any theology that calls this ‘God’s will / God’s timing’ or some other form of divinely ordained execution.
And while we feel for ourselves I can’t help but feel for Sam who lost his own life in this tragic event. He lost the joy of living in this world and all that would have brought – marriage, family, travel, vocation… his life was just kicking off and then snap… it was over. If he had his time over again – if we were able to bring him back – I doubt he would ever take a risk like that again. Unfortunately this isn’t a mistake you ‘learn’ from.
A bit of my own sadness comes from realising that i was really looking forward to our adult-male relationship and what it would become. I have enjoyed all stages of our relationship, but this one I was really anticipating, as I knew we would have some great conversations, and he would not be afraid to challenge my thinking with a mind far sharper than my own. I was hoping he would find his way into church life and offer his left field insights to a leadership team who were willing to hear some different ways of thinking. I know he wasn’t a ‘settler’ in the status quo so he would have ruffled some feathers along the way, but in a very likeable way. I’m also sad he won’t be around in 20 years time to take back his blog post critiquing my apparently very boring life – a life where I need to make a steady income so I am committed to a job etc (partly because it costs a lot of money to raise two kids 🙂 ) I remember being utterly disappointed with my own father’s unambitious, stay in the same job your whole life approach – but then i have benefitted greatly from his stability. Stuff you learn… if you are around to do the learning…
At this distance of 40 days most of the raw shock seems to have worn off and we are now just left with daily living minus Sam – which is sometimes uneventful and other times quite difficult. Over the weekend we caught up with some of our closest friends, going right back to the late 90’s during our time at Lesmurdie and then the Upstream venture in 2003. Our kids grew up together and were best of mates (see pic above) for the first 5-10 years of their lives before jobs and circumstances took us all in different directions. The gathering was planned several months back – a grand reunion of oldest of friends (see pic below 15 years later) – and it was a great time being with those guys again for a couple of days. But the absence of that one person was painful to us all. It was beautiful to be with people who just ‘got it’ and were able to roll with wherever we were at, acknowledging Sam’s absence, but at the same time celebrating the kind of friendships that are so valuable in these times.
I have read 3 books in the last month all around this same theme, and the pick of them has been Lament For a Son, a short collection of reflections and literal laments. I read this first, within a few days of Sam dying and it felt like he was reading my mind. It is quite beautiful, poetic and piercing in its simplicity.
On a more amusing note I downloaded a collection of Sam’s playlists to my phone so I could tune into some of what he was listening to. I discovered the song ‘All the Pretty Girls’ by Kaleo at the front of a ‘Going North’ collection of songs. I started listening to this song but had to re-listen to the first line a couple of times to make sure i had heard correctly… And yeah I did hear correctly. It opens with ‘All the pretty girls like Samuel…’ I believe it was one of his favourites 🙂