Explainer
Creed
Mental Health
Trauma
5 min read

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. 

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Creed
Sport
4 min read

Riding from darkness to light

Long-distance cycle rides give Graeme Holdsworth time to contemplate traveling from light to darkness and back again. And, to grapple with the wordless way our bodies do what they were created to do.

Graeme Holdsworth

Graeme is a vicar of Marsden and Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire. He also cycles and juggles.

A cyclist ascends a village street between stone-built houses as twilight turns to night
An audax cyclist passes through a village as night falls.

I’m standing next to my bicycle at a petrol station in Blackpool, it is 1am. I’m eating a cheap cheese sandwich and drinking cold coffee from a can. What I want is hot coffee, but the machine only takes cash, and the cash machine charges for withdrawals. I’m making do with cheap and cold, because the need for calories outweighs the need for taste. On this night, I’m cycling from Slaithwaite to Blackpool and back, checking the route for a cycling event I’m organising. It’s an audax: a type of sporting experience typically documented by forecourt-chic social media posts. Its name is derived from the French for audacious. 

A glance though long-distance cycling blogs, vlogs and curated media, hints at an experience of transcendence; the emptying of self, in the search of meaning from the zip of tyres over tarmac as the kilometres click past.  

The reality, however, can be more mundane: long distance cycling often involves sitting on a weed strewn curb, while a friend fixes a puncture and though the clouds are not quite heavy enough to rain, there’s a mizziness to the air that seeps through your sportwool baselayer. There is no film crew to capture this epic moment, and you’re alone with your thoughts, which are mainly thankfulness that it isn’t your puncture. 

I’m a vicar in West Yorkshire, but haven’t always been a vicar, or even a Christian and I’ve been riding bikes for much longer than I’ve been a person of faith. As a child cycling was about belonging, I was part of a BMX community whose hierarchy was measured by how high you could bunny-hop. Later, that belonging was replaced with a different sort of identity, found through music. It was only when I was older and fatter that I rediscovered cycling thanks to my wife, who thought we both needed some exercise. 

We loved to explore, and perhaps this physical exploration was why we also began a journey of spiritual exploration. 

Together we remembered how to cycle, and as we gathered experiences, we grew in the wisdom of the cyclo-tourist. We learned that mudguards and rain capes are things of comfort and therefore beauty. We loved to explore, and perhaps this physical exploration was why we also began a journey of spiritual exploration. I’ve no intention to suggest that cycling is a gateway drug to Christianity, more that perhaps our curiosity was being fed physically, mentally, and spiritually, in ways that were not of our making. 

The first time I noticed a spiritual element to my cycling was coming back from a meeting, crossing the North Yorkshire Moors at night. It was autumn and the evening turned to dark quite early, leaving only a puddle of weak bike light to ride with. A phrase from morning prayer returned to me: ‘even the darkness is not dark to you’. A single line from a psalm in the Bible. This one line, on this one night, redefined my relationship with God. Even though all around me had turned to darkness, there was nowhere I could be lost from God. 

These remote fans and supporters are constructing narratives to explain rider’s movement, or lack of it. Yet the rules of self-sufficiency mean you are alone, no one can set you back on the right path. 

Not being lost is an important element to cycling a long distance, especially in a race. In events like the TransContinental – a multi-day self-sufficient cycle race across Europe, spending hours cycling in the wrong direction could be a racing disaster. Race winner Emily Chappell, in Where there’s a Will, eloquently documents the racer’s experience of being ‘watched over’. She tells of ‘dot-watchers’ following a rider’s GPS tracks across a map of Europe. These are remote fans and supporters constructing narratives to explain rider’s movement, or lack of it. Yet the rules of self-sufficiency mean you are alone, no one can set you back on the right path.  

Being alone with your thoughts is a common theme to long distance cycling. While our bodies silently convert glucose into energy through glycolysis, and our muscle memory converts this into kilometres covered, our minds are set free to process our past and present experiences.  

During my time at theological college, I wanted to explore the idea of physical exercise being an expression of prayer. I tried to grapple with the wordless way our bodies do what bodies were created to do. Can our bodies worship without words? Is there a physical language of lactic acid, originally written by a creator who celebrates when creation is true to itself? There’s a poetic language in the Bible that hints at this, that  

‘the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands’.  

Pro-cyclist Jens Voigt famously told his legs to shut up… maybe he should have let them sing. 

Audaxing, long distance cycling, racing across continents; these are extraordinary journeys in which we might travel from light to darkness and back again. Simultaneously, there is a physical descent from adventurous confidence to uncertain determination, where the will to go on is no longer found in the legs, but in a dogmatic determination to see this through. Then, with the dawning of the day, there is a fresh hope: a hope of warmth and a return to strength. With the dawning of the day, the opening of the first coffee shop and this long-distance cyclist’s prayer is answered. 

“O Lord, open my lips, 

and I shall drink this coffee.” 

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