Finding Grace in Grief

It was a tough week. My husband was out of town, and I was left dealing with my kids, not to mention myself, in the midst of a community tragedy. On Easter night, a local father killed his four children and his wife, before taking his own life. The crime was unthinkable and, as I quickly discovered when I tried to answer questions from my first grade daughter, who went to the same school as the man’s children, it was entirely inexplicable.

When I got some free time to myself after the stress of the week, I’d planned to take a hot bath or go to a movie, the new silly looking one with Frances McDormand. Escape surely sounded good. Instead, I holed up in a local café and spent three hours writing about the week’s events, forcing myself to imagine the final hours of the unhinged man and his family. I can’t say I felt better afterward. That implies a lightness that I certainly did not experience. But I did know that I’d sat with the pain of these people’s deaths in a meditative way. It had helped. Writing nearly always helps.

When my father was dying of cancer, I wrote regular entries in an online journal that eventually spanned forty, single-spaced pages. I’d come home from helping to take care of him, switch on my computer, and spend a few minutes or an hour putting down everything I could remember of our evening together. Sometimes when I was with him and it was difficult—watching him unable to remember a colleague’s name or that Jell-O comes in a box and not in a peel, as he once insisted—I’d begin writing in my head. Physically I was with him, but my mind was busy coming up with the right words to capture the color of his skin, the smells of the room, or the incongruity of the CNN newscast. The practice helped me to float a little above the present moment and get through it calmly, while also keeping me grounded in it, aware of the minutiae of dying.

“There are moments of grace all over the damned place, but we forget to be attentive to them and then we don’t notice,” says Joy Conrad. I called Joy today, reminded that she’d started dancing a few years ago around the same time that her son was diagnosed with anorexia. She seemed to be a good person to connect with as I tried to sort out why some of us have this tendency to head further into grief while others are looking for the exit. Since the news of the murders, I had been having a hard time concentrating on work and the daily stuff that keeps us all ticking—laundry, groceries, bills, music lessons. It’s so hard to focus on these mundane details when you are reminded of the enormity of life: illness, birth, death, growth. Joy’s mention of grace helped me understand my afternoon spent writing about the violent deaths. Being attentive is a form of work, good and satisfying work.

Joy had written for years, but like so many women, she’d allowed her creativity to get tapped out by motherhood. Several years ago, a friend who teaches dance and movement convinced her to take a class. “I was a forty-seven year-old among all these twenty-year-olds,” Joy recalls, still amazed at her own nerve. She knew that the classes would take her out of her comfort zone and force her into a new relationship with her body, a body she had not taken very good care of in recent years. A transcendent moment occurred when she allowed herself to be lifted into the air by her classmates. She wasn’t just the oldest person in the room, but the heaviest, too; letting go was scary. But her friend and teacher put her hands on her back and said, “I’m taking the burden off your shoulders, and then you can do it.”