Fairhaven Blog

When I set out to find a guest blogger to discuss Catholicism, Googling grief and Catholicism brought up the name David P. Deavel. I clicked the links and read some posts and realized that I'd found a gem, a writer who could combine personal experiences with theological information in a post that touched the emotions of readers. When Dave agreed to write for us, I was very excited and today, reading the post, I'm amazed. It's a perfect fit for this series and even if you are not Catholic, if you have lost a loved one, you will feel as if Dave knows just what you've gone through. ~ Charity Gallardo, Blog Coordinator

Disclaimer: The religious information contained in these guest blog posts are the beliefs of the guest blogger and in no way reflect Fairhaven's endorsement of any particular religion.

Catholic Grief: A Circle Unbroken by David Paul Deavel

When I became a Catholic at the age of 23 the topic of grief was not particularly on my mind.  At 23 you still half-believe in your own personal physical immortality (particularly if you are a male).  My conversion came as a result of falling in love with the “symphony” of truth found in the Catholic Church—the paradoxical way in which Catholicism incorporated all the disparate elements of truth found in the rituals and theologies of other forms of Christianity and indeed other religions.  One of my mottos was the great English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton’s observation, “Catholicism is the trysting place of all truths.”

But when my mother developed cancer a year later I was forced to learn that nowhere is this paradoxical character more evident than in the Catholic approach to death and grief.

This paradoxical nature, Catholics claim, comes directly from the very foundations of Christianity.  Jesus of Nazareth, building upon the preaching of the Hebrew prophecies, proclaims to his audience that the Kingdom of God is both here and now and . . . is coming soon.  His resurrection from the dead is the definitive sign that for human beings, death is no longer the last word.  Various cultures and religions have claimed that the soul survives death, but the Christian claim is startlingly new.  It’s not just that you will exist as a lonely soul floating around in a dark, dank land of the dead, as so many of the ancient civilizations believed.  It’s that you will be given a new and imperishable body.  Your dead body, says St. Paul, echoing Jesus himself, is like a kernel of wheat “buried” in the ground.  The transformation that takes place from seed to plant is like that from an earthly body to a heavenly resurrected body.  In view of this reality, St. Paul writes to the infant Church gathered at the Greek city of Corinth, quoting the Hebrew Prophets Isaiah and Hosea: “’Death is swallowed up in victory.’  ‘O death, where is they victory? O death where is thy sting?’”(I Corinthians 15: 54-5).

And even before that marvelous day of the final Resurrection, it is still true, says St. Paul, that to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8)—and is thus a good thing.  Thus, one side of the argument, and a strong one at that, echoing down through the centuries, is that death is indeed a good thing, something to be celebrated and not grieved.  The Mass is itself a memorial not just of Christ’s death but also his resurrection.  “We are a resurrection people,” said St. Augustine (354-430) in one of his homilies. The significance of death is that one has entered into the presence of God and is now preparing for the resurrection.

From this side of the picture grief could be seen as something somewhat suspicious, a sign that perhaps one loved the present life more than the heavenly one to come, or perhaps that one loved the deceased more than God himself.  Better to take the attitude of the thirteenth-century saint Francis of Assisi and refer fondly to “Sister Death.”  Yet there was always another side.

St. Paul’s words about death swallowed up in victory were themselves in the context of his own preaching about the completion of the Kingdom of God which Jesus said was both here and coming.  “The last enemy to be destroyed,” St. Paul writes, “is death” (I Cor. 15: 26).  Death is to be destroyed, but unfortunately it isn’t dead yet.  And as it isn’t swallowed up in victory yet, it is still particularly difficult to swallow.  If Catholics profess to experience the reality of Jesus’ resurrection here in this life, we also experience the reality of his death in the deaths of our loved ones.  So grief has a place.  Even if those loved ones “have gone to a better place,” we who are left have not.  And our love for them must enter into the same mysterious sphere as faith—something that we do without the comfort of sight.  Grief is not a sign of superficiality or weakness of faith.  Instead, we mourn in faith because we recognize that the loss is real and deep.

This was no simple theoretical matter, either.  Medieval people were especially attached to the necessity of the imitation of Christ the Lord.  Upon finding his friend Lazarus dead, St. John’s Gospel tells us, “He wept” (John 15:35).  He wept despite the fact that he preached the final resurrection of the dead.  He wept despite the fact that he knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead that day if only to temporarily extend his earthly life.  If Jesus the Lord of Life could grieve, his followers reasoned, then so could they.

Yet if grief was a legitimate reaction to death, it had to be a particular kind of grief.  Writing of the resurrection in another place, St. Paul writes that this reality should affect our reactions to our beloved dead, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (2 Thessalonians 4:13).  Catholic grief must be shot through with hope of the resurrection of our beloved.

Of course everything I’ve said thus far could probably describe most Christians and their attitudes.   But what I learned when my mother died of cancer at the, by today’s standards, comparatively young age of 63 was that there were several elements of the Catholic approach to grief that were particularly helpful and that made my experience of grieving my mother slightly different from the grief I endured when losing my two grandmothers and a beloved aunt in the few years before Mom died.

First, the distinctive teachings of the Catholic Church, purgatory and the continuing connection of the dead to the living, made a world of difference.  My Protestant friends complain that purgatory denigrates the work of Christ in saving us, making salvation something Christ doesn’t really accomplish, but simply makes possible.  This theological error, they say, results in a psychological block to our grief:  we can’t say that our loved ones’ suffering is over and thus we cannot really grieve properly since they aren’t really in a better place.  But my friends mistake the theological nature of purgatory.  It is simply the continuing work of Christ in sanctifying (making holy) people whom he has saved, not those people making up for Christ’s shoddy work.   My friends also mistake what it means for grieving loved ones.

What Catholic teaching about purgatory gives the mourner is something to say and something to do.  No one ever knows quite what to say to mourners.  “She’s in a better place” can seem hollow, as C. S. Lewis commented in his marvelous A Grief Observed.   “I’m sorry” is always good.  But what a number of my non-Catholic relatives and friends observed to me was that they appreciated how my Catholic friends could say “I’m sorry” but also, “I’ll be praying for her” or “I’ve had a Mass said for her” or “We’ll pray the Rosary for you.”  It is, my relatives said, a wonderful testimony to the Catholic belief that our beloved dead are beyond our sight, but not beyond our reach.  Purgatory means for grief that when we believe in hope that our loved ones have joined Christ we are also capable, in our union with Christ in prayer, of still helping them along as they are made finally and fully their truest and best selves in Christ.

It’s not just a one-way street.  What many friends often say and half-believe, that our loved ones still “look down” and “take care of us” is something that Catholics believe is literally true.  Saints (those who’ve made it all the way into heaven) and those still being cleansed in purgatory do not pray for themselves: they pray for us.  What details they know of our lives is a mystery nobody can know, but the fact that they still look down on us and pray for us is a comfort.  This strong belief and the help it gave to me was another thing friends and relatives commented on.

Finally, the beliefs about the two-way connection between us and our beloved dead meant something for me as I dealt with my own grief.  They helped me realize the truth that mourning and grief are not something that end with the funeral.  And the practices associated with those beliefs both reinforced this truth and provided a means for living out those beliefs.  Early Christians celebrated the funeral Mass as a memorial and a plea to God to fulfill his promises and “complete the good work that he began” generally on the third day after death.  This was symbolic of the identification of the Christian with Christ who was raised on the third day.  But this tradition was complemented in various other Churches by Memorial Masses variously on the 7^th, 9^th, 30^th, and 40^th days after death, as well as on the anniversaries of death.

My kids, even the ones who didn’t know her, still have her as part of daily life. We remember her death every July 25^th but also daily at mealtimes when we add to our blessing, “God bless Grandma Deavel. . .and may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.”  She still loves us, we still love her.  And I don’t have to “get over” my grief any time soon.  I can let it blossom in its complicated way ever further into deeper love and hope.

David Paul Deavel is associate editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and contributing editor for Gilbert Magazine.

Heidi Telpner has blogged for us before on the topic of grief. As a hospice nurse and author, Heidi has a lot of information to impart on this subject. However, today she's coming at the topic from a different angle as she shares information on grief and Judaism.

Disclaimer: The religious information contained in these guest blog posts are the beliefs of the guest blogger and in no way reflect Fairhaven's endorsement of any particular religion.

If you’re looking for certainty, you’ve come to the wrong religion. At least when it comes to death – Judaism offers you no guarantee. In Judaism, comfort is to be found in ancient ritual and community, not faith and salvation. We don’t spend much time discussing heaven. As my father says, he can be a Jew and an atheist at the same time. I think what he means is this – Judaism is focused on life, not death. It’s less a religion than a way of life.

I’d like to say we don’t worry about what we can’t know – heaven - and what we can’t control – death - but that would be a lie. Of course we worry. We’ve wondered about the meaning of life and death since ancient times. In the book of Job, one of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, when Job bewails all the many evils that have befallen him, he raises the question – how can a God who is good and just allow evil? Of course God never answers Job’s question, instead he poses his own questions (King James Version) – “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee? … Or hast thou seen the gates of the shadow of death?” In other words, things of God are beyond our human understanding.

So how do we deal with death? We surround ourselves with ritual, family and friends. For instance, a Jew must be buried before the next sunset. This is why as a Jew, Jesus’ body had to be removed from the cross and hurriedly placed in a makeshift tomb.

Generally, Jewish people are not embalmed and most Jews are buried in a simple pine box, for from dust we were formed and unto dust we return. We sit ‘shiva’ or seven. For seven days, the family of the deceased does not work or go about a normal routine. Instead, the family receives visitors and guests who come to express condolences, provide comfort and honor the deceased. Many families cover all the mirrors in their house during this period. The modern reason given is that family members should avoid vanity and keep their thoughts focused on God. The more ancient reason is that it was once thought mirrors could confuse the soul on his way to heaven, so they were kept covered.

Ehow.com has an easy guide to the ritual of sitting shiva. (Click HERE to read it.)

Jews follow other ancient customs, such as the tearing of a garment, and Jewish funeral homes usually provide the mourners with a ribbon or piece of cloth that can be torn instead of clothing. A parent is mourned for thirty days, a child for an entire Hebrew year, and a memorial prayer is recited for the deceased every year on the anniversary of his or her death.

We have a specific prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, which is recited not only by the family, but by any member of the Jewish community who wishes to participate. This helps the family feel less isolated and alone in their grief. Interestingly enough, this prayer isn’t for the soul of the deceased; rather it’s for the glorification of God, the giver of life and death.

If you ever visit a Jewish cemetery, you’ll find small, inconspicuous headstones over the graves. And chances are you’ll find tiny piles of pebbles left on the headstones. This is a custom leftover from Roman times. We leave the pebbles as a mark of respect for the deceased, and to let them know they are not forgotten. Life is very important to us; we cherish the memories of our ancestors.

If you have a Jewish friend or co-worker who passes away, visiting with the family in those first seven days will mean the world to them.

Heidi Telpner is author of One Foot in Heaven, available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. Heidi accidentally stumbled into nursing twenty-seven years ago and she never stumbled out. She's been a hospice nurse for the last nine of those twenty-seven years. Her initial training was as a midwife. She now midwifes her patients out the other end of life. Ms. Telpner and her husband live on the West Coast. They have three children, a dog, three cats, two birds and one lucky koi.

About One Foot in Heaven:

People die everyday. While most people in America die in a hospital, many families choose hospice for end of life care. Death, as experienced by hospice nurses, can be beautiful, peaceful, humorous, touching, tragic, disturbing, and even otherworldly. Hospice nurses act as midwives to dying people every day. Death transforms not just the patient and family, but the hospice nurse as well. The stories in this book are presented with the hope that their transformation extends to you, too.

Today, we continue our series on grief, faith and culture with a guest post from Fairhaven Family Service Counselor and Christian pastor, Jim Bogosian. Jim talks about a personal loss he suffered and how, as a Christian, his faith sustained him. As you will see, Jim's faith is very important to him and he used it to supply answers when his family suffered a tragedy.  Every day, the promises and teachings of his faith help him live with his loss and give him hope.

Disclaimer: The religious information contained in these guest blog posts are the beliefs of the guest blogger and in no way reflect Fairhaven's endorsement of any particular religion.

I will never forget April 17^th, 1990.  What started out as just another ordinary day turned out to be an extraordinary life-altering day.  Having not fully recovered from strep throat, that morning my wife and I took our first child, our daughter Elisabeth, who was 8 years old at the time, to our pediatrician.  Later that day, we entered a new world as together we stepped onto the oncology floor at Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles.

After waiting for what seemed an eternity to hear the results of a bone marrow test, we sat with an oncologist who told us that our daughter had a kind of leukemia that without treatment would take her life in two to three months!  So began our ten-month journey with our beautiful daughter who until then had been perfectly healthy...down a road we certainly hadn’t anticipated when we held her in our arms as a newborn.  Ten months later, we stood over her grave at a committal service at Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills.

We had experienced what many have called the most traumatic, most profound, most overwhelming,  most inconsolable of losses.  For us—unprecedented pain, loss, sorrow, and grief.  What we had believed to be true, as part of our Christian faith—the Biblical truths that we had grown up learning and that as a pastor I had taught to my church week after week—were put to the test.  Through it all, and day-by-day for twenty years since our Elisabeth’s death, we have been enabled by God to live in and be enlarged by loss...to find healing, comfort, and recovery...and to experience new beginnings.  God’s promise, we have found, is true:  “No test that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face.  All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; he’ll always be there to help you come through it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).  We have run for our very lives to God, grabbed the promised hope with both hands and found an unbreakable spiritual lifeline.

This lifeline is what the Bible calls “grace,” the “Amazing Grace” we sing about and that God freely gives to those who relinquish their self confidence and self will and put their trust in Jesus Christ, choosing to pursue his way of living and submit to his leadership.  God’s full provision, his supply, his mercy—that which we can never earn and do not deserve—is gifted to us who believe to meet our every need.

At the times when we were without our own resources and ability to cope, we took hold of God’s “grace resources” that are promised to all Christians.  Here are some:

Biblical understanding—the awareness that we live in a fallen world order (so that we could accept life in a broken world rather than challenge what is);  the knowledge that God is perfectly good, loving, faithful, kind (so that, we could reflect on what God is like—instead of focusing on the pain of our loss and feeling confused and angry at God);  the understanding that God rules over all (so that when it looks and feels like things are out of control, we can choose to submit our lives and circumstances to God);  the knowledge that God is the only one who can bring good out of what is bad gave us hope for the future.

Encouraging examples—Stories from the Bible and from history of those who endured losses—people who trusted God in their afflictions, loved him with their whole being, and obeyed him. Their examples have kept us going, their songs have encouraged us, their poetry has given us language to express our complaints, pain, hope (Psalms), their stories have provided perspective.

God’s presence and promises—The Christian can be confident of God’s presence and can draw on his promises in the Bible.  Countless times when we felt fearful and vulnerable, we held on to the promise of his presence with us (e.g. “God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’  So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.’” Hebrews 13:5,6;  “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” Psalm 23:4).

Supportive relationships—In our darkest days we came to value more than ever the care and support of the Christian community.  Many hundreds prayed for us, wrote to us, called us, visited us, took care of our two other kids (a 5 year old and a 2 year old); provided meals for us.  And almost every day people of faith came to the hospital or to our home and cried with us, prayed with us, encouraged us, held us, played with us...

Hope for the future—There is no more sad place on earth than a grave site.  As a pastor, I’ve stood over many open graves watching families say their last goodbyes to their loved ones, tears streaming down their faces...  The most heartbreaking was when my wife and I had to bury our daughter.  But it is against the black backdrop of death that the light of the Christian message shines most radiantly and means the most.  Because Jesus Christ offered his life for us on the cross and came out of the grave alive, the person who trusts in him is forgiven and assured of eternal life in heaven.  So when a follower of Jesus dies, the part of us we cannot see—the spirit/soul—immediately goes to be with the Lord in heaven.

In the middle of our grief, we were able to rejoice knowing that when our Elisabeth took her final breath here on earth, she stepped into the presence of God in heaven!  And someday when Jesus returns to the earth, the bodies of those who have died in Christ will be raised / transformed, and a new world order will be established.  That day every wrong will be made right, sorrow will be turned into joy, darkness into light, brokenness into wholeness, loss into gain.   This “good news” is promised by God himself in the Bible, verified by Christ’s empty grave!

My wife and I would have no comfort if we had no hope of ever seeing our precious daughter, Elisabeth, again.  But because of Christ we’re going to heaven and we will see her again.  We’ll be able to hug her, kiss her, talk with her, laugh with her, and together enjoy the life that God has planned for us in the world to come!  Each day that passes, we’re one day closer to that great day!  In the meantime, every day as we walk with Jesus we can live in his peace, joy, and purpose!