Lamenting the losses in life

There are paths through the thicket of loss that mental illness causes. Rachael Newham explores lament.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A Victorian fisherwoman sits on a beached boat, shoulder slumped.

But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley. The title is taken from the Tennyson poem 'Break Break Break'.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

I am lost. I feel utterly bewildered by my surroundings and my head is beginning to spin under the strip lighting. There are people all around me, but I can’t find my bearings. This place should be familiar, it’s somewhere I’ve been a hundred times before, but I feel the panic rise as I try to find my way.

Before I had known exactly where things were, how to navigate the aisles and reach the things I needed with ease, but in the months I’ve been away, things have changed and I cannot face the thought of finding my way around the new arrangement, so I turn on my heel and leave empty-handed.

I haven’t been away on holiday or gone on a work trip, I’ve been locked inside my own head doing battle with my own mind in the shadowlands of mental illness. Stable now, with the crisis averted, I am trying to rebuild and yet the Co-op rearranging my local store has served as a stark reminder that things have changed in me and around me.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it.

This is the where the conversation about mental health awareness falls silent; the reality of the losses mental illness stacks up like Jenga blocks while you aren’t looking. Serious mental illness doesn’t just take your mind; it takes your ability to enjoy the people you love, the work you find fulfilling, the gloriously mundane school run and the life you once almost took for granted.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it, no five-step process to ‘get over it’. There is simply the loss and the life you’re trying to rebuild.

This loss must be grieved. I would argue that all losses must be grieved if we are to learn to live with them. It is as Michael Rosen’s childhood classic “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” reminds us as the family go on their adventure and encounter the winds and sticky mud: “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, oh no! You’ve got to go through it”.

We simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate.

It’s perhaps something the ancient faiths and traditions understood better than we do where there are rituals for grief; whether it be Jewish communities sitting Shi’vah or the Irish keening their songs of mourning, they acknowledge the enormity of grief and the need for communities to come together to process it.

Where the loss is more personal, we can seem to lose access to the healing found in community traditions. When the loss is because of illnesses still so misunderstood and stigmatised, these processes and traditions can feel even further away, still.

And yet.

There are paths through the thicket of loss. William Worden, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association speaks of four tasks of mourning which include accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to the world afresh and finally finding enduring connection. These tasks were designed with bereavement in mind, but they seem to me to speak to losses in the broadest sense and I have found them to be true in mental illness.

In the Bible we find this prophet Nehemiah, who is tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Israelites exile in Babylon. They’ve returned home, but home doesn’t look like they imagined to, the place they longed for no longer exists, and they have to accept before they can begin to grieve what has passed. Author Marya Hornbacher writes that

“managing mental illness is mostly about acceptance- of the things you can’t do, and the things you must”

and I see it every day - perhaps you do too - as I take the medication and get the sleep that’s required for some kind of equilibrium to be maintained

Nehemiah grieves and weeps over the city for an estimated four months; but there is no set timescale for such things, we simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. In the Christian tradition this is called lament; it’s grief directed at God, bringing the pain before him in a way that acknowledges the twin realities of God’s goodness and our grief’s greatness. It is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is the gift of honesty. We do not need to put on our Sunday best for God, but can come in our brokenness and mess knowing that we will not be abandoned to it.

And then we begin to adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in. We test the boundaries of what we can do as anyone in recovery does. There is a slow almost imperceptible move towards more of life; a trip to the local shop much like I did during that disorientating visit to the co-op, a visit from a friend or a phone call answered, long avoided. Nehemiah returns to his work for the King - but even then the King asks him why he’s looking so sad. We need not rush in with fake smiles before grief has finished with us, but be honest with those around us - and with God.

We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church.

The fourth task is that of finding connection. For some it will be found in their friendships, others in their faith communities or peer-led community groups. Whichever way it happens it’s how life grows again around and alongside the loss. Worden I think meant it as a way to continue the connection with a lost loved one, but in the story of Nehemiah we see it as the Israelites first come together to rebuild the wall and then to celebrate it. We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church, we have to find spaces where we can share ourselves, our stories and know we are not alone. It is perhaps one of our most fundamental needs - it is certainly been mine - to know that I am not alone in my loss and I’m not alone as I survey the wreckage and tentatively begin to rebuild.

Article

Creed

Redemption

16 January 2024

4 min read

Discover the kindness of a Blue Monday snowfall

Waking to a new world, Henna Cundill considers the transformation of more than just the view.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Two small chidlren push a curtain aside to stare out the window at snow.

“Blue Monday” in Aberdeenshire (the third Monday in January) turned out to be a “white Monday” in the end. The snow began on Sunday evening, and it continued on and off throughout the night. It was accompanied by an atmospheric howling wind, which woke me up from time to time. At each waking I peeped through the window to see the world gradually disappear under a thick white blanket.

Monday morning was a liminal place – all of us dressed for work and school but drifting about the house as if it were still the weekend. We live next to a busy road, but there were few cars and what traffic noise there was had become strangely muted. None of us could settle to anything, we simply alternated peering out of the windows with checking online for news about school. Then came the announcement that school would open at 10am (there’s little that really stops for snow in Aberdeenshire) so on went the wellies and the woollies and off we went down the front path, both excited and a little awed to sully the unbroken blanket of white with those first few footprints.

Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

But as we walked, we noticed that our footprints weren’t at all the first. Tiny scratch marks testified that the sparrows, the robin, and the blackbirds had long been out and about, busy with their day’s travail. A slinky line of pawprints revealed the neighbour’s cat had paid us a visit too. All around our house, countless tiny stories of industry and encounter had already been told – (some sliding pawmarks and a few stray feathers suggested a gripping plot twist.) Later that morning, it began to snow again, and all these stories gradually disappeared. By the time my boys came tramping home from school, they were once more tasked with picking out a brand-new path across a fresh unbroken expanse of white.

After dinner I went for my own habitual walk. We’d had yet more flurries, so I had to make new footsteps all over again. By then the wind had dropped, the sky was crystal clear, and the snow had gone from powdery to satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. It felt like an awe-filled privilege to leave my trail of footprints. I walked one of my usual routes, but the white covering had softened both the landscape and the soundscape, making everything seem new and unfamiliar. As I trailed back through the housing estate, I noticed snowmen that had popped up in some front gardens, and neighbours who were chatting as they helped each other to shovel driveways and grit paths. Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new?

All in all, it was difficult to feel blue on a white Monday. The snow made it feel as if nothing was permanent, let alone usual. There was no drudgery, no same-old, same-old. I wondered if I could become like one of those tiny birds, skipping lightly through each day’s work? Even whilst canny to the fact that a certain sneaky cat was prowling about. By the time I got home, there were new prints from him also.

In the Bible, snow appears as a metaphor for forgiveness, for making a fresh start. We read in the book of Isaiah: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” There is much in this idea that runs counter to how our modern society responds to misdeeds – especially in this age of instant messaging and social media, when photographic evidence of our blunders can travel the world instantly and be preserved for posterity. There is also much that runs counter to how I respond to myself when I mess things up. It is not usually the howling wind that keeps me up with ‘the dreads’ on a Sunday night, but my mind’s hobby of regurgitating memories of the previous week’s mistakes, misspeaks, and misunderstandings. In the pre-dawn hours of a Monday morning, I am usually awake and well occupied with the prospect that, in the week to come, I will almost certainly make many of those same mistakes again. I walk those same old paths, re-tread those familiar footsteps – the inevitability of my own imperfection is ever before me.

But what if I peered out of the window at the daybreak of every Monday morning and found that there was snow? That I was held in a liminal moment – less sure of what the coming week would hold. What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new? Ideas such as this are at the heart of the Christian hope. In the Bible, the Psalmist writes that God does not treat us as our sins deserve, nor repay us according to our mistakes. Instead, God takes them away so infinitely that they are: “as far as the East is from the West.” They are gone, from red as scarlet to as white as snow.

I suppose snow every Monday would be inconvenient. But snow on Blue Monday felt like a kindness – a gentle rendering of the familiar into the unfamiliar, allowing me to see things anew, to reflect, to reconsider, to redirect my steps in certain ways. As I write, there is more snow falling. Later I shall have to go out with the shovel and the grit, but I won’t do it yet. If I leave it for now, then when my boys return from school in a few minutes time, they too can tread one more time with awe across a fresh, unbroken expanse of white.