Kirkepiscatoid

This set of readings deals with loss and grief—when it seems the “will of God” is for us to suffer loss.

Reflection questions:

1. Meditate on your experiences of loss. Have you ever shared your grief with those who seem to be responsible for it? If so, write about the experience. If not, image what the experience would be like.

Sharing my grief in my grieving times with the person who was possibly responsible for it would be about as close to “next to impossible” as you could get for me. I am envisioning one of those scenes where the victim’s family is talking to the killer on Death Row. As far as I’ve come in the last couple of years, that is a place I could not yet get within 100 yards , let alone “image what the experience would be like.” I would just shut down.

I realize much of this is because I don’t do well in the “victim of loss” stuff. I avoid being victimized to the point of engating in blatant denial. I am still into kind of clinging to the illusion of “if I don’t appear hurt, or to be suffering from loss...well, then, I’m NOT grieving. “ But I realize that is an illusion that protects my own imagination from myself.

2. Write about how your own grief or pain has brought you to a greater understanding of another’s suffering.

I can talk about this a little. The best example is when I failed my specialty boards in 1995, but later re-took them and passed with flying colors in 1996. I felt humilated in a way I’d never felt, before or since. I contemplated ending my own life. I was a person who essentially had never failed at anything academic—and I was 35 years old when this happened! I was totally caught off guard by it. It took a long time to work my way through the loss and the stigma.

But the “reward” to this (if you can even imagine a reward existing in such a fiasco) is that I gained an empathy for medical students and residents who get in academic difficulty that I didn’t have before. I used to thing their pain and carrying on was so dramatic, so overblown. I learned otherwise. Now I have gotten through it enough tht is is at the place where it became a strength of my character. Other small failures did not look so looming. Failures yet to come were handled differently. I had to re-envision my “fit” in God’s world. I am still working on that!

3. Write about the ways in which feeling another’s pain as your own brought about peace and healing to a relationship.

I hate to say it, but I’m not exactly sure I’ve had that experience. I have felt other’s pain as my own, but it seems this has a tendency to eventually result in me getting MY heart broken in some way, which might set up a situation in which I eventually might get to a sense of reconciliation, but not exactly “peace and healing.” Now, with that said, I don’t know the minds of others, and I suppose it’s possible that my experience of allowing my heart to break open can be a force for someone else’s peace and healing and my never knowing it.

A lot of the time, when I am feeling someone else’s pain, that “someone else” and I already have a good relationship so it’s not like anything needed to be fixed in a big way. I am not able, at this point in time, if someone hurt me, to feel THEIR pain much, because of my tendency to “kick everyone to the curb” when they have hurt me. I can eventually resign myself to some form of reconciliation if it is possible but that takes a looooooong time. What I do know now that I didn’t know a few years ago, is that this is actually a weak spot in me and probably an avenue in which I need to make some improvement.