I am taking a page from Matt’s book, and this year, I’ve decided my blog posts will all reference Ted Lasso in some way, shape, or form. As sunshine-y as the show can be, today I’m talking about darkness and grief.
Since getting my preclearance approval well over a month ago now, I have reunited with old friends, restaurants, pubs, and memories, I’ve started cultivating a strong community with my roommates, and I’ve even started to make some new friends. If you were to look at my social media posts, my Instagram stories, my Snapchats, it all paints a lovely, blissful image of life in Dublin, which isn’t entirely wrong. But that’s not the whole picture.
As I write this blog post, it’s the 2nd of November, and it’s a day that I never imagined would affect me as much as it does. 2 years ago, while in Edinburgh on a weekend trip with my friends during my semester studying abroad, my mom called me around 7 pm to relay the news that my grandmother had passed away. I remember that phone call as if it was yesterday. I was eagerly putting chicken into the oven for dinner, laughing with my friends about the optical illusion museum we had ventured through earlier in the day. How quickly those laughs, jokes and smiles transformed into sobs, sniffles and tears.
Funerals have always been uncomfortable for me, but it wasn’t until I couldn’t go to my grandmother’s that I understood the necessity for them. Not just for the dead, but for the living too. My grandfather’s funeral is full of sad, but fond memories, memories with my family as laughter of past stories was juxtaposed with tears of our painful loss. Ted Lasso once said, “I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad. And that is being alone and being sad. Ain’t no one in this room alone.” That’s the beauty of funerals. Yes you are sad, but you’re not alone in that anguish. You’re surrounded by sadness, but funerals provide the power to grieve properly and honor the departed.
My grandmother’s death pains me much more because of this. I never got to share those laughs with my family, I never got the closure I so desperately needed. I FaceTimed into the funeral and said hello to family members, but that was it. In those dark days following, I felt that I wasn’t just sad, I was alone, too. There was a hole in my heart that couldn’t be filled, a door to which nobody had the key. I felt like I was standing in a valley of sorrow with no one to hear my cries. And today, two years later, my tear-filled eyes are still weighed down by this silent weeping of my heart.
Even with faith, grief is still hard. My tears are not immediately dried, the pit in my stomach is still empty, and my heart is still heavy with loss. But God doesn’t promise a life free from grief. In countless biblical passages,God says He will be with us in grief instead. We cannot avoid grief because grief itself is the gut-wrenching result of agape love. It is the consequence of loving others as Jesus loved us, and though grief is hard, living a life filled with love is worth the pain. The love in my heart for my grandmother still outweighs the sadness of her death. Even tears understand the paradoxical, symbiotic relationship between grief and love. My tears express deep sorrow, but they also represent the unspeakable love reflective of joyful memories, a memoir of the past. An unquenched longing for the happiness of those previous memories intertwined with the disappointment of knowing they will never return.
When I am overwhelmed by grief, I try to remember that grief is natural. Jesus himself experienced grief so strong that he wept at the grave of Lazarus. In the hardest days, when much of your energy is taken up trying to prevent yourself from crying in public, these are the days that we are closest to Jesus, experiencing the anguish that he too faced. These are the days we are most human, pondering the brevity of time and fragility of humanity as a whole. These are the times that outward, material things cannot satisfy the deep pain in our hearts as we long for something greater to comfort us. It is in this grief that we can deepen our own relationship with God, reaching out to the only thing that can fill that aching wound in our soul.
Although grief is pain and sorrow, I challenge you to remember that grief is also love. It is pure, unspeakable, never-ending love. It is the love that we have been called to give as God’s children. It is this love that pulls us out of the darkness and into the light of joy. Grief is the love that reminds us we are never alone. It is a reminder that our lives have been forever touched by a person whose love was strong enough to create a permanent mark on our hearts. And so today, with tears escaping my eyes and a heart still longing for her presence, I try remember that her presence remains within the silence of my heart, guarding and guiding me through the chaos we call life.
Ted Lasso was right. Being sad and alone is worse than just being sad, but lucky for us, we are never alone.
God bless,
Morgan
