Grief and the Perseverance of Love
The older I get the more I understand that life is riddled with hellos and goodbyes. About a week ago, We got news that one of our dear family friends who has been battling cancer was placed in inpatient hospice care. Her time here on Earth was coming to an end. At the same time our family Dog’s health was rapidly declining and was soon after diagnosed with cardiomyopathy( an enlarged heart), his time was coming to a close too. I was left with the feeling I’ve felt so many times before: a friend’s funeral, when a girl breaks up with you, when the weight of injustice bears down on your shoulders, the feeling knowing that all this will end.
I have been riddled with this feeling mostly driving home from moments of beauty: a baptism, a music concert, a play rehearsal, a celebration of another year around the sun, seeing a young couple in love. In those moments, my thoughts honed in our family dog. Maybe it was poetic that he had an enlarged heart because he loved so well. My mom has been sending pictures and videos of him enjoying the nice cool grass on a summer evening, but what he loved most about being out in the grass was being with my parents. He truly loved well.
But with great love, also comes heartbreak. There are a billion quotes by philosophers, royalty, and marvel superheroes about how grief is a part of love, but the greatest one I believe comes from CS Lewis in his book Four Loves, “There is no safe in-vestment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless—-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, im-penetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell”.
And such even the God of heaven has experienced true and unbridled heartbreak. We see it on the cross, in the garden and in the wake of losing his friend. In the story of Lazarus, we are met with a family broken by the devastation of death to the point they said none of this would have happened if Jesus was there. But then we see the shortest and in my opinion one of the most impactful verses in scripture. “Jesus Wept”. Commentators like to say that Jesus wept because of the sisters unbelief or that he was simply sympathizing with their grief. And while both views could be true, I would make the argument that Jesus wept because in that moment he felt the full weight of his humanity and grief over his friend. In this moment we see him in his completely human and completely God state. One that can transcend the laws of the natural, yet in full grief over the loss of his friend, whom he knew he would raise from the dead. In this moment, we see what the Hebrew writer commentates that “we do not have a high priest who cannot relate with us”. Grief is just the perseverance of love.
Edit: I had a really cheesy ending I originally wrote, but since writing this both our family friend and our family dog have passed on. There have been a ton of tears, and its good to know they are no longer suffering, but it’s still so difficult being on this side of heaven. My mom sent some photos of her and my dad laying with our dog in the Idaho grass enjoying the last ounce of summer. Telling him how much joy he has given and how much of a good dog he was. And maybe we should treat each other as such with large hearts knowing that we are not promised tomorrow so tell the ones you love, you love them.
