Prayers of Grief

 

We will all be asked to carry a certain amount of grief in our lives.  The heartbreak of grief can feel overwhelming and far too much to bear.  But the grief we carry is the price of love. And when we give it space, soften into it, and allow it to soften us, this grief can help us to find purpose and meaning in life.

 

I am grieving the loss of my mother’s comprehension of things.  Her confusion which became apparent to me about five years ago is slowly gathering steam.  She is less able to cover it up but she keeps trying.  This week she failed her driving test.  I need to help her sell the car, get a new ID, find other ways to get around.  Because her brain decline includes an erasure of emotions, she hasn’t expressed much of anything about the loss of driving.  This loss of emotions is something that is most painful to me because it cuts me off from a deeper connection with her.    

 

I am grieving her aging and increasing frailty and most painfully the loss of motherlove, that groundnote of holding when I fall. I am grieving for the time when she will no longer be here, for the last time I will hear her voice, squeeze her hand in mine, feel the softness of her cheek. I grieve for how empty the world will be without my mother, for when I am a refugee in the foreign land of motherloss.

 

Like all grief, this grief is complicated. Sometime my mother’s decline makes me angry although there really isn’t anything or anyone to be angry at.  It is like being angry at an overflowing river or the tree that has fallen onto the car.  The anger comes when I don’t want to be in the position of having to protect her from herself, from being her parent, setting up the guardrails she needs but resents. I am angry for how hard she is making things even as she has no control of what is happening and no comprehension of the confusion.  The anger protects me from overwhelm about what is happening to her and to me, from the ungroundedness and pain of this unraveling. 

 

When I am able to get underneath the anger, I feel myself surrendering to the grief.  Which is to say to I let go of trying to save my mother from her confusion which is not in my power to change.  I try to do the next small thing that needs to be done, signing her up for Meals on Wheels, setting up oversight of her finances, scheduling doctor’s visits. This grief open me up into a prayer for her comfort, for my sorrow.  My lullaby that she might find some ease in this part of the journey, that she will not feel abandoned, that she will know the love that accompanies her into the tangle of thought and confusion.  Through this prayer I find a way back into the connection with her that I long for. 

 

When we don’t shy away from the fact of our and our loved ones frailty, vulnerability, and mortality, we have a chance to see more clearly how life really is and to make choices to live with more fullness, purpose, and meaning with the time we have.