Reflections on Grief and Compassion Overload

Exhausted. Spent. So weary of words.

There are those who seem able to contain it, the grief I mean. But there’s something wrong with me. I’m a spider’s web. Touch one part, and the whole shivers.

There are shootings and retaliations. And there are answers. God deliver us from the people with answers. Life is suffocating. And they use up air with their arguments.

Helplessness is a bitter thing. People have answers and they look at me as though I might affirm or disapprove and I blink because they’re talking about things I don’t understand. I’m just barely trying to survive life and would you like to start again and explain to me these things I could be expected to take for granted if I were a normal person, I want to tell them. But I’m not a normal person – still, I feel pain.

I feel the world in pain and it works itself into other pains and griefs and I see it all mixed up in the grief of friends and family I shut out and fail on account of anxiety and my own grief that is probably mostly selfish but grief nonetheless and I find myself wanting to translate my own version of Ecclesiastes with WTF in place of every instance of the assertion that “all is vanity.” Of course, I know better than to do this. I also know it is precisely what Ecclesiastes means.

Whatever hermetic seals others have between the cells that hold separate their loves and griefs and joys and pains is broken for me. And so my response is broken, never quite right. I set my writing beside the grief and it crumbles. I try to console, to help. But I have known too often the places where words turn to wind.

Two visions.

One is of a highway. And they are lying there beside the road, the people – wounded people, and dying. And beside every one I want to stop and set up a tent and wail in the hope that even if I can’t help maybe others will notice if I am loud enough – not that their noticing could do much, I think to myself.

And then there is Christ and he bids me follow him. Which means the unthinkable. It means walking away, again and again and again. There are times and places and people for whom it would mean staying. But Christ calls me because he knows where I would set up my shrines and high places, where I would be willingly paralyzed for all of eternity. If anyone would come after me, he must take up his cross…Lord, this is a hard saying; who can follow it?

The other vision.

My ongoing prayer to be able to feel and enact the tenderness of Christ as he dies on the cross. I suddenly realize the terrifying truth: he has answered my prayer. I do feel, and crushingly. And so, I think, I need to pray I’ll be able to survive the tenderness I’ve foolishly requested. No, he says – you need to pray that, when you die of it, you will have acquitted yourself with love.