Grief and the Charmed Life

Souvenir shops everywhere sell charms, small amulets you attach to the delicate links of a bracelet to indicate where you've been and what you did there, or what you saw. The small trinkets dangling from the bracelet serve as memory goads to recall past experiences, each one telling a story lest we forget delightful vacations and events that we want to remember.

But what if we received charms for all of our experiences, good and bad? By the time we are old, our bracelets would be heavy and thick and we would clink and jingle with every movement.

All of the charms on our life bracelets would be valuable, but some would be more valuable than others. Some would be small and bright, the stories behind them easily forgotten. Some would be pure gold.

I thought of this analogy today after messaging with a friend who lost her healthy young son to a sudden illness. She will not need a charm to remember this experience, because she misses him every day. She struggles to live without him, and she knows that she will always struggle to live without him. The pangs of grief will likely become less frequent over time, but they will still come, unpredictably and with full intensity. This will happen for the rest of her life. Because of the loss of her son, she has become acquainted with grief, like the Savior himself. And while no one would wish to have a charm like that, it would be impossible to calculate the value of it.

Some quotes on grief: 

I walked a mile with pleasure, She chattered all the way but left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow And ne'er a word said she But oh the things I learned from her When Sorrow walked with me.  – Robert Browning Hamilton

Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes. - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude. - Thornton Wilder

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life. – John H. Groberg