The Grace to Grieve: Becoming faithful witnesses to our own and another's pain

My friend and I have morning chats that are somewhat of a regular thing, but with life events and holidays so rudely intruding on our routine—the nerve—we missed a couple of days. Finally, with a little time to ourselves and my ear buds strapped on tight, she caught me up on stories as I got dressed while I interjected with the occasional, "He said what?!" and "Someone needs to tell her not to do that!"

I have no idea if he shouldn't have said that or if she should do that or not, but it sure is fun to proclaim incredubility over characters I know nothing about but who obviously need my help.

I was still smiling, imagining the absurdity of the situations much beyond what they actually were, when she slipped in, "Well, how did it go?" I knew what it was.

That's when my smile froze from free-flowing certainty towards people neither of us knew to stuck, stammered sentences that could never reach their end. There was no punctuation. I'd get halfway through a thought, shake my head, and offer in a shaking tremolo, "I don't know. I don't know."

And I didn't know.

Thank God she's well-versed in my life enough to not wait on periods. With her usual directness that houses both profundity and relief all in the same sacred second, she reached in to get me.

"Stacey, I think you're grieving, and you need to give yourself some grace. You've had loss and lots of change happening lately. It's okay to acknowledge them. It's hard."

Well, crap. I tell people this all the time, but for the life of me it never dawned on me to tell myself. But then again, sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else to make it real instead of some half-baked lie you tell yourself to get by.

Once she said the words grief, loss, change, acknowledge, a spicket turned on that I couldn't get to stop; permission and space were not only granted but commissioned to catch my tears that day, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I filled my bathtub at 12:30 in the afternoon, lowered myself in with the reverance of slipping into a baptismal pool, and let my tears disturb the waters I had forgotten to say could move.

From that pool of salt and sanctuary I acknowledged some pretty heavy losses over the past month. I grieved life and death and relationship changes that aren't necessarily bad but feel devastating while they shift. I relived a situation in which I had felt trapped and compared it with the reality that I am not there anymore. I hadn't lost my power, but I did need to go back and pick up hope. I had definitely left that somewhere. I turned 50 this year and in a few months all my kids will be away at school. Change is coming. The years are happening. That needed to disturb the waters, too.

In my work as a Christian mental health coach and mentor, it is my great privilege to have a front row seat to many women's lives. Sometimes it's difficult to define the view, but I sure do love the sacredness of proximity.

Lately, I've been picturing those chairs that movie directors sit in, you know the ones with the word DIRECTOR sprawled across the back? Sometimes I wonder if what I would like my chair to say most is WITNESS. A witness to pain. A witness to triumph. A witness to loss and grief and shifts that don't feel easy. It's pretty easy to find cheerleaders I think, but witnesses are harder to come by, especially ones who will tell you when to be one to yourself.

I wrote today to give you the language and gift of a witness as my friend gave to me, to say that if you're having a hard time and you're not sure why, maybe you're grieving or have experienced recent losses or facing changes you haven't fully acknowledged. Give yourself some grace. These things are hard.

And if you feel like it, maybe disturb your routine at exactly the wrong time of day, lower yourself into the holy waters of release, and be a witness for as long as they have something to say. Ask God to be a witness too. He has never left me alone to work it out by myself, I'll tell you that.

Lastly, if you've lost your hope somewhere, ask God to help you find it again. The good thing about picking up hope anew is learning that it has very little to do with how we feel and very much how present we are to our own or another's discomfort and how active we are in finding a way through it.

I've learned a lot through this, but maybe my favorite is that hope lives where the waters move.

And they move in the presence of witness.