Mutual Sorrow

The day my mother-in-law died, my world folded in on itself. The sky seemed darker, the ground underneath me felt paper thin. I thought, “if I lose my balance for just a moment, I’ll completely disappear.” My heart felt small, I felt it ripping at the seams. This was my wife’s mother. It was my wife’s best friend. She was a friend. She was kind, generous and loving. And though for many this was truth, it was more truthful because I knew her—I spent time with her. Frequent weekly meals, holidays, random Fridays and Saturdays, spent the night just to be around. And then this day happened. There couldn’t have been a moment any further from those moments than that one. The moment where everything changed. The moment light went dark, the moment laughter collapsed into tears so heavy that I felt them dragging me to the ground. 

And then something happened that confused me, infuriated me and disgusted me. Someone leaned down and said to me, “Take comfort in knowing that God still has a plan.” 

Take comfort? In what? A plan? Take comfort in a set of details that I have no insight into? Put my grief to the side to sort out the facts? The fact, the only one that really mattered in the moment was that yesterday she was here—in fact just days before laughing, smiling, celebrating her birthday—and now, today, she was gone. Her light extinguished, her spirit fully faded and torn from the seams—the things that held things together—from our lives. 

These are the things that matter—the things that are easy to overlook. We are quick to forget that a life lost here is more than just a single life that’s vanished. There is a gap in the tapestry, there is a break in the story, what is lost are the threads that hold things together. I am a thread and so are you. We are like a patchwork quilt—on our own rough around the edges, flawed—and its only when we are knitted together with the threads of love, compassion, understanding, civility, honor, respect and equality that we become something useful, something diverse and beautiful. 

And like a quilt, when we are cold, when we feel lost, when we feel the pains of sickness in our bodies, we cover ourselves underneath the weight of all of us. I sit quietly and find comfort, I feel the warmth of every single person. But it’s not as shallow or as distant as “us and them or those people,” but instead, “WE.” They are my family. 

Ephesians comes along and says something interesting in the second chapter: 

That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.

We are all heirs to belonging. We are all the inheritors of equality. Christ is the cornerstone and we are all being fashioned into not just brick and stone, but the very things that hold things together. So when a life is lost, the structure suffers—the whole structure, not just the part, and everything above and around it is in jeopardy. The response then is not, “Let’s wait on the facts or see what the whole story entails,” but instead, it is, “What are we all going to do? All of us. How can we fix what is broken, because it’s not just what is broken for they or them, but what is broken for us all?” 

That day. That very life-altering, history shifting day my mother-in-law died, what I didn’t want to hear is the how or why this happened, but I wanted tears. I wanted people to get around me and say, “This is completely unfair and I am so sorry for your loss.” I wanted them to help carry the burden of the weight that was on my shoulders. I wanted to not feel like everything was vanishing. I wanted people to pull me back from my stare down with death. I needed them to cover me with the weight of their compassionate sorrow—not their platitudes of the whys and hows just yet. Sure, there would be a time for that; a very important and crucial time for that, but I needed to know that I was not alone, that I was not being asked to walk this journey alone, and that someone understood my sorrow. That they acknowledged my loss. That they understood one single thing in that moment: that the seams had been torn and for now, here on this earth, we would be separated. I needed to see and feel their weighty, sorrowful and sincere tears fall on my face. 

Tears. Real tears. Sincere tears. Holy tears. Tears that have the possibility to heal. 

Romans 12 jumps in the mix with these two thoughts:

…so we, who are many, are [nevertheless just] one body in Christ, and individually [we are] parts one of another [mutually dependent on each other]. (AMP)

And then later in the chapter says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn…”

When I cry with, when I weep over something or someone, I am identifying the mutual dependence I have on them. They don’t just matter to someone else, they matter to me. They mean something to me. When they weep, I too must weep because something in my life has been taken away as well. This display is the place in which we meet, where we understand best when Malcom X said, “I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment.” Weeping with someone in honesty and without explanation or reason is the whole-hearted dive into the brotherhood of man.

And I won’t even attempt to explain the mystery of it, but when that happens, something stirs underneath the surface, the healing starts to rise up from the ground itself. I feel it in my toes and as it travels up my body, I feel the warmth of it like a blanket being pulled over my body, covering my pain and soothing my sorrow. 

I think this is why tears are so needed and why it angered me so much when that person said to me “God has a plan.” What I got from them is that they needed me to have a reason to be angry outside or above the sheer fact that she had died. Really? I needed a reason to mourn? I needed a reason to be devastated? No, what I needed were their tears, and by them not giving them, with their alluding to the possible facts of some sort of plan or meaning only separated us the more. They jumped over the healing aspect and went straight to the meaning. But you see, without the healing tears, without the presence of mutual dependence and mutual equality, it is nearly impossible to move on. Before we have the mutual gain of equality, we must come together on the leveled ground of mutual loss. Again, their loss is my loss. We are no longer strangers, no longer outsides. 

But as with most things, there is discomfort before there is comfort, there is sickness before health, confusion before clarity, injustice before justice, there is at times night before the break of day. The prayer is that we would fight for the healing process of mutual sorrow. It’s not that we won’t get to the point of fixing what is ultimately broken, but the part we must understand is that because of sin, we are all broken. We are all, each one of us, a frayed and worn out patch, and are only beautiful when we are stitched together. We have not been called to be on the outside looking in, not commenting and assuming this or that from far away, but deeply connected, arms locked together in sorrow, tears wetting the face of the ones we are so close that the tears become intertwined—one tear, one common sorrow.

The fact of the matter of the day we lost that beautiful woman, is that only the people most closely connected, or the ones actually going through it could fully comprehend the weightiness of the moment. When those came on the scene as a covering, it played a part in the healing. And the reverse is also true: when those came on the scene as a commentator on the condition of the situation, they became a part of the sickness; apart of the death itself. 

Mother Teresa said it quite simply, powerfully and beautifully: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” What we belong to, is each other. And when we forget it or don’t remember it every single day, we forget what it means to belong. Are their obstacles in understanding it? Sure. Are there reasons why things are as jacked up as they are? Absolutely. But if my first move—my first response is to respond like family would—like I so desperately needed that day, I think it would set the stage for something truly amazing to happen. You’re crazy you might say. You don’t get it. You’ll never be able to fully understand the vastness of historical implications that have led us to this moment, and you would be 100% correct. 

I can’t. I want to, desperately, but what you say is true: I cannot fully understand. But what I can do is not burry my head in the ground, what I can do is hold you up when you are weak, when your world is crashing around you, I can weep and connect with you on the things I can understand: that loss is loss and sorrow is deep, dark and universal. I can fight for you like I’d fight for someone that belongs to me because at the end of the day, you do belong to me. I am yours and you are mine. Things can change. These are not platitudes, they aren’t wishful thinking, they are truth, and best yet, they are the truth not because I say they are but because God Himself says they are. 

Lastly, 2 Peter 3:9…

“Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change.”

My prayer, as honestly and sincerely as I can possibly muster is this: that we will be changed by our mutual sorrow, that we will be transformed by trials, that we will remove the daily bias of ignorance and bigotry and that the dreams of some will become the reality for all. Amen, let it be so.