Her husband died not too long ago. I met her recently and we chatted briefly. “How are things going?” I asked. “Some days good and some bad”, she replied. “Which type today?” She looked at me and said “Death is a monkey.”
I knew what she meant. Over the weekend we had three Cemetery Masses in the parish. It never ceases to encourage and move me when I see how people respond to these Masses. Travelling from near and far, word shared by word of mouth, text, email – whatever – with friend and family members away, brings people in their hundreds to stand on the ground where their loved ones are buried so that a prayer may be offered and remembrance be assured.. It is a very special gathering in any parish and, as I say, our parish had three of them this weekend and one more next weekend. Death is a monkey.
It leaves us bruised and saddened and the journey of grief is unique and personal. What is common however, is the sense of helplessness we face in making the journey – the often unwelcome and uninvited journey through grief.
Maybe I might include some of the thoughts shared at the weekend.
Shortly after my mother died, nearly ten years ago now, I had a phonecall from a classmate and friend in Belfast. He had been unable to attend the funeral and called me to sympathise. His own mother died many years ago and he told me, during our conversation, that for months after her death, he woke up every morning thinking about her. No matter how well he slept, or how good things were going or what the day had to bring, she was the first thing on his mind. He grew accustomed to this, accepted it but above all, noticed it. Then, he told me, one morning he woke up and, without realising it until much later in the day, he hadn’t thought of her. Initially he felt guilty but later came to realise that this day was part of the grieving process. Needless to say, he had not forgotten about his mother but somehow he was able to wake from sleep and face the day, without her being the first thing thought of. He saw this as an important day and, without saying any more to me, he was offering me some re-assurance. Later, I came to realise more fully what he meant and why he had shared this with me.
The day we can begin the day without feeling burdened by grief is a day to look forward to and welcome. It is not a day of moving on or forgetting but more a day of acceptance. It is a necessary day and one that, in many ways, our loved ones would want. Those who loved us in life, would not wish to see us forever trapped in grief or uncertainty. Just as they rejoiced in our happiness during their lives, surely they would rejoice from their place in eternity.
Yes, death is a monkey – but we have what it takes to find peace of mind and contentment. There is no saying for sure when and how that comes but, I believe it is the gift of those gone before us and they rejoice in our being able to accept and open that gift.
Wherever you are on the journey …. God bless and guide you.
It’s a week now since we received the cross of ashes. Its shape most likely disappeared by bedtime and most certainly washed away in the cleansing waters of Thursday morning. You’d like to think its memory has lingered a while and grounded us a little.
Today’s photo is from our November Prayers in Culmore Cemetery. As the prayers concluded, the sun came out and rose to a point in the sky where it cast a long shadow over the people as they walked and talked following our prayers. I thought of the shadow the cross casts over so many people and, unlike the one in the photo, the cross with all its weight and pain doesn’t fade quickly or pass from sight in the twinkle of an eye or shifting of the clouds.
A thought today for those so burdened. Parents grieving the loss of a child – maybe a child they never got to say hello to or one who lived and loved and left. Husbands, wives, parents, children, friends, neighbours trying to come to terms with their grief and loss. We think of those meeting doctors today who may not have a good story to hear. We remember all battling addiction and pray strength and guidance for them. We pray for healing and forgiveness for those who have been hurt by life’s experiences. We pray and, with Simon and Veronica, allow ourselves to step from or be taken from the crowd to bring healing, a soothing hand and a caring word.
The shadow cast by the cross runs long and deep but let us pray that it be a shadow that will in time – sooner rather than later – give way to hope.
Leonard Cohen put it well in his prayer for healing:
“The splinters that we carry – the cross we left behind – come healing of the body – come healing of the mind.”
Reek Sunday, they call it – the last Sunday in July when tens of thousands of people climb Croagh Patrick. It’s a tradition deeply rooted in the Irish Soul but not one I’ve ever been part of. If you know me and know the Reek, chances are you can connect the dots!! If you don’t, well that’s another story!
The “Reek” is quite a climb. I’ve been there ………….
Once! I climbed it back in the early 90s with a few people from Collooney parish. I’ve been sort of there twice since then. I’ll have another go, in time but setting no deadline. Why mention it today? The answer is found in yesterday.
We had our Annual Cemetery Mass in Naomh Mobhí Cemetery. It was incredible to see so many people there. I thought to take a photograph at some stage of the congregation but that didn’t happen. I did manage to get a photograph of their cars though!
I had a few words on the Parish Bulletin this week about Cemetery Masses and why they are so important to people:
By Sunday we will have celebrated Mass in four of the Cemeteries in the parish (St Celsus’ Cemetery, Kilkelly, St Patrick’s, St Celsus’ Culmore and Naomh Mobhí). During the week we will celebrate Mass at Urlaur Abbey with a special remembrance there for all who are buried in its hallowed grounds and later in the year we will celebrate Mass in St Brigid’s Cemetery, Urlaur. All these Masses are very well attended and important to all who come along to say a prayer and remember the dead.
It raises the question, “WHY?” Why are these so important? Why do we place such emphasis on remembering the dead? It is not because of death but because of life. We don’t remember people because they died, we remember (and love) them because they lived.
Love is the reason we celebrate these Masses. Love for those who have gone before us and a deep belief in God’s love for us all, a love that goes beyond the grave. The love made real when Jesus called Lazurus from the grave and invited his friends to “unbind him” and “let him go free”. We too pray for the happy release of all who have died, confident that our love for them and our prayers for them continue to matter deeply.
The morning was lovely but we had a brief fall of rain during the Mass. It happened just at the time I was going to share a few words by way of homily. I hadn’t intended it to be long but just to be sure, God sent a little rainfall to hurry me up! This is where the “Reek” came into play. There were at least two people at the Cemetery Mass who had earlier that same morning climbed the Reek. I never cease to be amazed by the dedication of people. We buried a man in the parish last year who, from his childhood days, never missed a “Reek Sunday”. He told me one time he used cycle there (75KM), climb the mountain and cycle home again.
On Saturday I was driving into Westport for a Wedding Reception and Croagh Patrick was ahead of me, unmoved and ever present, tall and strong but its summit was not visible. There was a mist down on the summit that made it impossible to make make out the towering point of the mountain. I knew it was there but it could not be seen. My inability to see it, the mist’s covering of it, could not take away the truth that the summit was still there.
That’s the point I wanted to take to our Cemetery Mass yesterday. Grief, like that mist, envelops our view. Our loved ones, once clearly visible to us may no longer be within our range of vision but the reality of their presence and the depth of our love for them remains as certain as the Croagh Patrick summit.
Saturday’s mist gave way on Sunday morning to Pilgrims’ steps and the summit was reached. I believe we can work through grief, not always quickly or easily but step by step, bit by bit the climb can be made and the summit reached.
Sometime ago, I asked for suggestions around what might be helpful on this blog. The other day I got one such suggestion. It was short and to the point, asking that I might write something on grief ….
The day I received that message was the day after I came home from holidays. While I was away, I received word that a young man from the parish had died in Adelaide. He was 28 years old, a hard worker and died doing what he liked to do, as someone put it at his Funeral Mass; “earning a day’s wage for a day’s work”. May he rest in peace.
For nearly two weeks I’d known that I was coming home the day before his Funeral Mass so, for much longer than usual, I had the chance to prepare a few words. That said, no words came to me, much as I tried to find them. I called to his home the evening I arrived and noticed the field beside his family home filled with cars and many young men from the parish, together with some of our older parishioners directing traffic, helping to park cars and being, what they needed to be, “supportive”. Saddened though I was, there was something in this display of solidarity that was wrapped in reassurance. People are not left alone when help is needed. It struck me that many of these young men were grieving the loss of their former team-mate on Kilmovee Shamrocks, mourning the loss of one who emigrated about five years ago but kept in touch with friends and family. Their grief expressed itself in “high-vis” jackets, in standing at the end of the road and directing those who wished to visit the home, say a prayer and offer condolences. Their grief may or may not have included tears but their grief was real. Thankfully it found a way to express itself – in “hands-on” help at a difficult moment.
Likewise the neighbour, whose field was being used, filling in soft spots with chippings so that cars could enter and leave the field without getting stranded. His opening the gap in a much cherished field was his way of grieving the “neighbour’s son” who was a daily visitor to his own family home during his childhood years. This man’s sister told me afterwards that it was “the hardest week of our lives”. She too knew grief as she remembered the boy, now a man sleeping in death’s arms, and the joy he brought to their kitchen with his childish stories and impish ways. The elderly neighbour down the road who seldom leaves his house had made the journey to pay his respects “Did you know him well?” I asked “There was scarcely a day he wasn’t here when he was a boy. He was a mighty worker”. Grief that took a man who seldom travels to see again the neighbours and tell them he was sorry for their loss. “I didn’t think I’d be able for the Funeral he told me”. Maybe he meant able to be in the church with so many people for so long but maybe too, he just wasn’t able to take in the fact a twenty-eight year old had died. Grief takes many forms and expresses itself in a myriad of ways.
I took my place in the home. I looked at the coffin and the young man within. I looked at his parents, brothers and sisters and wondered what I could ever say that could even go close to being a comfort. They weren’t sobbing or bent over in visible heartbreak but they were devastated. Happy perhaps, to have him home for the few hours. It had been a long wait and a long journey but there was a hard reality in that room. One of the children had died. Grief was present. Grief is real.
I searched for something there – something I could use as a landmark, a pointer that might in time, lead to a better place and a happier moment. Nothing came to me, much and all as I wanted it to. I looked at photos, football jersey and faces but none of them uttered a word. Grief sometimes doesn’t allow much to be said and, even if it is said, seems to dull the hearing. “I’m truly sorry” I told them in turn or “sorry for your trouble” or “I wish you hadn’t to be here ….” I tried to vary my words a little but the core truth was the same, it was a difficult and heart breaking moment for this family.
Without finding a landmark, I left the house and walked back to my car, past lines of people waiting to do what I had just done. Lines of silent people. Yes, they were talking but nothing much was being said. Grief envelops a crowd and brings the crowd to a stilled silence. I’m sure there were hundreds there but very little was being said. Grief does that, it stills the crowd in us and quietens the voice in us. I thanked the lads in the field and noticed how attentive they were to their tasks. There were no mobiles or walkie-talkies but they were all in communication with each other, even in the large field that, I’m told, parked over the hours around a thousand cars. Grief brought a singleness of purpose to those young people. They wanted to do the right thing by their friend and his family. Maybe grief has its good points too. It brings out, on occasion, the best in us.
Later that evening I returned to the home for a little while. I sat at the kitchen table and remembered sitting there a few weeks ago when there had been a baptism in the family. I thought how different the atmosphere had been, how much more joyful the conversation but it struck me we were at the same table – sharing food. That much was the same. I’d found my landmark. The table! Something solid around which people gather and from which they’re fed. Altar and Eucharist.
Maybe that’s what we search for in grief. That “landmark” that reminds us of what remains the same rather than what has changed. It may well be the love we had for a person, the need we felt for them the intention we had to be good to and for him or her. It might be a shared memory, a story, a journey – togetherness that remains as was, in spite of all that has happened. Grief has the ability to devastate us, to curl us up in a ball of uncertainty but I think too, it can take us to a place of recognition of the ultimate truth, what this person was in my life, all that he or she meant to me, remains constant.
I mentioned grief at the Funeral Mass. I said that I felt certain the family, member by member, the friends too, would be visited by grief. It might be a month or six; a year or more but someday tears will roll down the cheek and the stomach will tighten as if recoiling from a blow. The timing of its visit is not in our hands. Neither the duration of its stay. Grief sets out its own agenda and makes its own travel plans. Someone once said that they only way to ensure you never cry at a funeral is to never love anyone. The price we pay for love is grief. Grief at moving away, at separation and, of course, at death. There’s little, indeed nothing, that can be done to avoid it but maybe there’s a way to live with and through it.
A friend once told me that before a football game. the team manager was giving the warm up talk in the changing room. I’ve no doubt it was impassioned and colourful but the piece of advice my friend remembers, long after he hung up his boots for the final time, was around coping when the game wasn’t going your way. The manager told them if they found themselves going through a dry spell, when nothing seemed to work for them, that they shouldn’t try to be fancy. “Don’t try to solo the length of the pitch”, he told them, “you’ll not make it”. “Neither”, he said “try an elaborate pass” His advice was rooted in the simple. “Take a short pass from a team mate, move the ball to another, do something simple with the ball”. It makes such sense. It’s about getting confidence back, finding direction and knowing what you’re about. The manager concluded, according to my friend’s telling with these words; “If the game is going bad for you, do something simple with the ball. Play yourself back into the game”.
“Play yourself back into the game”. Grief? Connection? I think it’s something about finding something that gives you strength and confidence on the darkest days. It’s about knowing you are not on the pitch alone, that there are team mates there who will pass support to you and receive it from you. It’s about “doing something simple” to find peace for the moment and direction for the moments to follow. It’s about playing yourself back into the game because the bad patches pass and what’s important, the landmarks remain. Maybe it’s about reading a piece through which you’ve been consoled or spending some time with old photographs, it might be listening to a song, going for a walk or anything that connects you with the source of your grief, the one you miss. It’s not about doing anything dramatic. Just “something simple” … with the ball, with grief.
Is this enough about grief? Quite doubtful, I honestly don’t know but maybe it’s a start.
Our website uses cookies to provide you the best experience. However, by continuing to use our website, you agree to our use of cookies. For more information, read our Cookie Policy.
