In the past two years both of my parents and my father-in-law have been diagnosed with something tragic, life-threatening at best. One has recovered; another is waiting to find out more from doctors and their tests; another’s hope rests entirely on prayer.
They are too young. (And for my part, I am too young – I thought I had a good couple decades before driving parents to appointments became commonplace). Nonetheless, I’ve had some practice in hearing diagnoses and I have contemplated loss. I have foreseen grief (though, praise God, I have not yet known it).
There is a sanctifying characteristic of foreseen grief. It is that way in which even the threat of loss discolours everything; the way in which foreseen grief seems to threaten not just a joy, but all joys, to undermine not just one aspect of life but the ground on which life is set.
In grief for a friend, Tennyson wrote:
“And all the phantom, Nature, stands – …
A hollow form with empty hands.”
When I was a kid, there was a large wall a couple blocks from my grandparents house. It was a standard piece of infrastructure intended to shield suburban areas from the noise of large highways in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The wall was an exciting marker to my young mind. Seeing the wall meant that we neared the end of our drive to Grandma’s. It was thus dubbed ‘Grandma’s wall’-- and so it still is in my mind even though my Grandma passed away several years ago.
Shortly after my wife and I were married in 2019, my parents moved to a small town near Orangeville, Ontario. This town has a beautiful little river that winds alongside the main road on the way into town. In the winter you can even see glimpses of the river from my parents’ back deck. On our first visits to their new home I dreamt that the river would someday be dubbed ‘Grandma’s river’.
One dark December evening we drove home from my parents house after hearing about another diagnosis. I pulled over on the side of the road just past the river and wept. I told my wife that the world was now worth less. The world became a ‘phantom’ with ‘empty hands’, an unstable existence offering nothing. The unknown threat to the life of someone I love so deeply, my Mom, had stolen the gravity and beauty from the world around me.
I cried for fear that the river will never be ‘Grandma’s river’.
The river in my parents’ small town becoming ‘Grandma’s river’ is dependent on the preservation of one life and the beginning of another (my wife and I don’t yet have any kids). For me the meaning, the name, the definition of that river is wrapped in what it might become in someone else’s eyes.
For better and for worse, we find meaning and identity in the world through the eyes of others. For worse, when we seek the approval of people wrongly, when we seek vainglory, when we ground our identity in others perceptions. For better, when we live to see another's eyes light up – when we are selfless.
There is a layer of our experience, shaped by our subjectivity, shaped by the meaning lended to life by the eyes of those we love, and it is this layer of experience, these relative meanings, that are threatened by the illness of a loved one. This is why the world seems to collapse, to become thin and meaningless, with the threat of losing my mom, dad, or father-in-law.
Yet, I despise the idea that meaning is ultimately constructed by human perceptions, either individually or in community. Despite what I feel, I know that reality is held in the mind of God. I believe that the meaning of all things is ultimately ascribed by the maker and sustainer of all things and I believe that He could reify and endear the world to me again even if all I knew was lost.
I also know that I am not truly or fully what my parents or any other person believes me to be. As Dickens wrote, “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” I know that it is the Father who ‘sees in secret’ (Matt. 6.18).
To contemplate the loss of my parents eyes, the loss of their recognition, is to be thrown upon the necessity of existing in and for God’s eyes, and in this there is painful sanctification and a hope of glory, a painful redefinition of the world around me, a trial of my motivations and hopes, an incisive blow to my vanity and desire to live for temporal human recognition, a purifying redirection of my desire to be known towards the heavenly aim of being known by God (Gal. 4.8-9).
Of course, intellectual assent to the reality of God as the creator of all things and source of meaning in all things is radically simpler than the experience of loss. It is easier to explain grief than to live it well. As C.S. Lewis writes in the preface to The Problem of Pain, “the intellectual problem raised by suffering” is far simpler than the “task of teaching fortitude and patience.” It is a great deal easier to say that in the loss of a loved one's recognition I become conscious of existing in God’s eyes than it is to find myself suddenly feeling alone with the Creator. (That oft repeated, silly but somehow profound, metaphor from Lewis’ the Chronicles of Narnia comes to mind. The one where Aslan, as a figure of Christ, is said to be unsafe: “Course he isn't safe, but he is good. He is not a tame lion.”)
It is difficult to sit in the threat of loss. It is difficult to turn from creation, especially the very dearest parts of it, to the creator. But after all, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Lk. 14.26)
“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” I hope to be satisfied in his sight.
(Written December 2021)