"What Is Grief, If Not Love Persevering?"

 "What Is Grief, If Not Love Persevering?"

      I am an unapologetic nerd.  I have embraced who I am.  Ironically when I was young the kids that loved comic books and superheroes were considered 'geeks' but today it's cool to love superheroes.  I think I was a child born outside of time or that I was really cool back then but no one else knew it....or maybe I'm super cool now and no one is telling me.  I am a devout follower of Marvel and DC movies.  I have watched every movie and have meticulously followed each television series.  I literally mark my calendar with anticipation as a new series prepares to launch.  The latest Marvel series is "VisionQuest."  The show continues the storyline of the AI machine Vision.  Vision is a bit of an enigma in the current Marvel Universe.  There have been multiple different versions of him, each slightly different and unique from the one prior.  Vision is a creation of Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.  He is a combination of advanced tech, the mind stone, and other forces.  What makes Vision so unique is that, despite being AI is his seemingly human like personality.  He is one of the most thoughtful and compassionate of all the Avengers.  What makes Vision interesting is his journey toward understanding humanity.  He can thoroughly analyze information, processes logic, and can reason the most complex problems.  But his relationships with other people teach him things that mere logic and technology alone cannot explain.  One of those odd juxtapositions is his love for fellow avenger Wanda Maximoff, aka, the Scarlet Witch.  His love for Wanda changes him. He begins to understand sacrifice, belonging, connection, and eventually loss.  I won't bore you with all the details but this odd couple has one of the most beautiful and complex relationships in cinema history.  

      But Vision and Wanda experience a horrific human reality, death.  Wanda dies.  Death is almost impossible for humans to try to reason.  Fathom how an AI machine that relies on logic and reasoning trying to grasp the complexities of grief.  She's gone and Vision is left with what I consider to be one of the most unbearable and yet beautiful human emotions....grief.  In the first episode Vision says "What is grief, if not love persevering?"  That quote caught me off guard.  I had to pause the show for a minute and take a deep breath.  It hit me right in the chest.  I stared at the tv looking as an Ai machine was trying to reason out the deepest feeling of grief and yet someone, this machine's quote was saturated in tender human emotion.  What does the quote, 'what is grief, if not love persevering me?"  I want to take a few moments and unpack that quote.

      I want to start with a quote that most grieving people have heard before.  Not just a quote that we've heard, but one that we have felt and carry in the depths of our souls.  Grief is the price of loving someone.  It's a high price to pay, but it's a worthwhile price.  When my first wife, Tiffanie died, my world changed in ways I could never have anticipated.  I knew from the moment she received her stage four cancer diagnosis that the world was going to change, but I had no idea how it would.  There was a particular pain that I felt when she died.  It was an unnatural pain.  It was a pain that only the soul itself can feel.  When your person died you loss the one who you shared everyday life with.  Your person knew your routines, your quirks, your history, your body, the things you were ashamed of, your failures, and the things that no single human being will ever notice.  You lose conversations, plans, and ordinary moments that you never knew would be precious moments.  Grief can be overwhelmingly.  Ok, let's be honest, scratch out the phrase can be and realize that it will be overwhelming.  Yes grief can be quiet and more then likely over time it will be quieter BUT there are times when it will yell at you.  There are times when, years later, grief will abmush you and remind you that it exists.  On days that are beautiful and sunny the storm clouds of grief will form and wage war against your soul afresh.  It leaves you with little to no preparation. 

      It's in those moments when we ask God, why does it hurt so much or why does it still hurt.  We can be tempted to rush through grief, to move on.  But that's not the right answer either.  Why does grief hurt so much?  I think that's where Vision's quote comes into play.  We grieve because we loved.  Not just loved, but loved deeply.  The love that we shared doesn't become meaningless simply because the person we were married to is no longer there physically.  The pain is real.  But don't forget, the love that we still feel for them is very real too.  We don't grieve what we don't love, and what we love we love at the risk of one day grieving.

      Recently I've been teaching my kids how to cook.  It's been a great experiment, especially for my oldest.  He's fourteen, almost fifteen, and will need those skills sooner versus later.  The other day we went to the grocery store and we bought a few items, one of which was expired.  We didn't find out it was expired until after we cooked it.  It was disgusting needless to say.  Dairy products can go south real quick.  A lot of things have expiration dates on them.  It has a 'shelf life' and once it passes that shelf life it's no longer deemed as good.  But let me share a beautiful truth with you, love has no expiration date.  One of the difficult expectations society places on grieving people is that eventually, we should be okay.  That we should move forward.  The finding happiness will be easy.  That we shouldn't be talking about our loss so much.  That there is some sort of mystical finish line where we complete our grief and the pain magically disappears.  Guess what.  That is fiction.  There is as much truth in that as there is in unicorns.

      Those that are unfamiliar with the language of grief almost pretend like there is a day on the calendar when we stop grieving or when healing is complete.  But what if healing isn't about reaching a point where we no longer miss the person we lost?  What is the goal is different?  What if it's not completing grief, but learning how to carry our love for that person but in a different way?  Should a grieving person press forward?  Yes.  But I think that phrase 'press forward' needs an explanation.  It doesn't mean leaving someone behind. I don't believe finding happiness again means that the person we lost has become less important. And I don't believe that a new chapter in life erases the chapters that came before it.  I am currently walking that beautiful tight rope right now.  I love Tiffanie still.  It's been two years since she passed away.  I am also married to a woman named Leslie, who I love with all my heart too.  Those two chapters do not contradict one another nor are they contrary to one another, nor are they identical to one another.  My wife Les recently wrote that 'life can hold both sorrow and joy.'  That to me is love persevering.  Les and I still love our first spouses while loving each other.  Death did not nullify our love for Sam or Tiffanie. We still miss them terribly, but we also still laugh and love. We can cherish what we had while embracing what we have today. We can acknowledge that something precious is missing without believing that everything good is gone.

      I do want to acknowledge a big truth in the midst of all of this, grief changes.  But why does grief change us?  Because grief is rooted in love, and friends love changes us.  Our late spouse helped shape us into the person we are today.  Their influence remains in our memories.  The lesson that they taught us are still being lived out.  They are seen, felt, and heard in the lives of our children and experienced in the choices we make long after they are gone.  Death changes the relationship.  When Tiff died I complete my covenant as her husband, but I can't, nor would I ever want to rewrite the fact that it existed.  Tiff's death date was November 25th 2024, but our love didn't end on that day.  It lives on.  It is grief persevering.  

      Our worldview affects how we view and examine grief.  It also affects how we grieve.  As a Christian, I find myself thinking about grief through the lens of faith.  The Bible never suggests that loving God means we will never experience profound sorrow.  That might sound like a quandry to some or like a conflict to others.  How can a loving God allow sorrow?  My heart automatically goes to Jesus Himself who wept at the tomb of Lazarus, even knowing what He was about to do. In John 11:35, we find those two simple words: “Jesus wept.”  As a pastor I had preached on that passage multiple times.  I think I even wrote a paper about in Bible College, but that passage is one that I have clung to for nearly three years.  That passage and the truth behind it matters deeply to me.  The reason why is because Jesus did not stand at the tomb and tell everyone to stop crying because there was a greater plan. He entered into the sorrow of people He loved. He acknowledged the pain of their loss.  The Holy Spirit continues to use that passage to teach me some really deep and beautiful truths about Jesus.

      Our faith does not require us to pretend that death doesn't hurt.  The world might require it, but God doesn't.  1st  Thessalonians 4:13 speaks about grieving with hope. Scripture doesn't tell us that we won't grieve.  A matter of fact you will be hard pressed to find a single person in the Bible who wasn't beset by grief.  Instead the Bible points us toward a hope that exists even in the middle of grief.  For Christians, that hope includes the promise of resurrection and eternal life through Jesus Christ.  But hope doesn't mean that we never struggle today. It doesn't mean that every difficult morning suddenly becomes easy or that every unanswered question finds an immediate resolution.  Faith doesn't eliminate grief, but sometimes it does provide it a safe space to stay.  Sometimes faith means bringing our broken hearts to God without having the words to explain them.  Raise your hand if that's you?  It also sometimes means that you trust Him while you are still asking 'why God?'  Raise your hand if that applies to you too.  And sometimes it means allowing ourselves to acknowledge that we miss someone because they mattered enormously to us.  And beloved friend, there is no shame in that, no shame at all.

      If you are a widower reading this, I want you to know something.  You don't have to measure your healing by how little you think about your wife.  You don't have to prove that you are moving forward by pretending that the past no longer matters.  And you don't have to feel guilty when grief catches you off guard.  Those are truths that you have probably wrestled with....maybe truths you are wrestling with right now.  You feel a pull in your person because the world's definition of masculinity is very different than what God says.  The world feels like a man's grief should be done quickly, quietly, and out of sight.  If that's what the world is saying then you need to crumble that up and throw it away.  

      Men, there will be days when you feel stronger than you expected. There will also be days when the smallest reminder brings tears to your eyes. There may even be days when you feel guilty for enjoying life again.  None of those experiences automatically means you are doing grief wrong.  Instead you are learning how to live in a world that has changed dramatically. And if you eventually find love again, that doesn't mean the love you shared with your first wife has been erased. Your heart is capable of honoring the past while making room for the future. future.  Your grief is not evidence that you have failed to move.  It is evidence that something deeply meaningful happened in your life.

      I don't know exactly what the future of grief looks like for any of us. I do know that the people we love leave an imprint on our lives that cannot be undone.  So perhaps Vision was right. What is grief, if not love persevering?  Maybe grief is love learning to live in a world where the person we love is no longer physically beside us.  Maybe healing is learning that we can carry that love forward without requiring ourselves to carry the same intensity of pain every day.  And maybe hope is trusting that our story is not finished, even when a chapter we desperately wanted to continue has come to an end.  The goal of grief isn't to stop loving the person that we lost.  Instead it's learning how to live with that love, even in their absence.  For those of us who believe in Christ, we hold onto the hope that death will not have the final word.  Until then, we keep loving.  We keep remembering.  We keep living.  Love perseveres.