It was well past midnight four years ago when my dreamy July slumber was shattered by the sound of my mother’s urgent voice outside my bedroom door. Ripped out of sleep, I sat up, heart thudding loudly against my chest. “She’s gone,” my mother repeated dreadfully, phone clutched tightly, her voice cold from shock. My only sibling, my sweet sister, Lori, only 18 months older than me, was dead. Dead by way of alcoholism. Dead by way of a kind of slow-motion suicide capped by a sudden, violent conclusion. Two years before, my father had also died of alcoholism, but this seemed impossible to happen to one still so young and full of life. Among the horrors of the disease is something called esophageal varices, caused by cirrhosis, which can cause a person to bleed to death as fast as if they’d been shot on a battlefield. And it was . . . a battlefield. My LoLo died chaotically and harshly far away from me, safe and uncomprehending as I was, nestled in my privileged world of order and health and wholeness.
The tragedy of my sister came just a couple of weeks after double milestones: I had turned 50 and I had reluctantly resigned my post as minister at a beloved Brookline church, ostensibly to follow a new call to study the great cultural shifts facing 21st century Christianity. Little did I know that the transformation I felt so called to explore/champion would not be merely academic, but rather, a context I would be wrenchingly forced to personally inhabit. I felt like I knew who I was and where I was going before that summer of loss. But all that I envisioned was wiped out. I had been on my way somewhere, and then I wasn’t – it was like I was pushed off the train of my happy and certain life, to land painfully upon the stones of a desert wilderness, with the train of my destiny never stopping as it roared into the horizon, unconcerned that I was gone, even taking its tracks up behind itself as it went. I felt like I couldn’t breathe in those early days, like the wind was knocked out of me and both legs were broken in the fall. Worse, it seemed as though I had no bars or signals on my spiritual cell, rendering my divine GPS useless. Where was God? When was the next train? Why did this happen? I cried out to God, and only silence answered.
Grief can feel like a wasteland, as barren and alienating as outer space. A hauntingly beautiful scene from the Academy-award winning movie, “Gravity,” captures the desolation. In the following 4 minute clip, George Clooney tries to distract Sandra Bullock from the danger they are in by drawing her into conversation. The spare, simple portrait of grief that Bullock reveals resonates deeply. I have felt the same aimless drifting, the slow twisting, the dull waiting for rescue. Have you? http://youtu.be/3LOFX87yLYM