Good grief

I haven't posted in a while in part because it's taken me a while to get into full "rest" mode. Now that I have finished the grief class, I really haven't had anything I had to do (if you don't count cooking, cleaning, and chauffering two kids around). So of course, I have still filled up the time, but with more frivolous things like trying new recipes (if I have to cook, I might as well enjoy it a bit... if it has goat cheese in it, it sounds good to me), reading Harry Potter and the Sorcer's Stone in German, taking the kids to the Wild Animal Park with Gia and Tea Hamilton, going to Campus By the Sea on Catalina for a retreat with David and the kids, and having Mark and Lucas over (where the kids took the opportunity to dress up, Lucas as a ninja, Soren as... a guy wearing camouflage and a wicker purse), amongst other things.

So it hasn't been slow, but it has been good for me to have a minimum of things I am required to do. But all that free time has come with a cost. I very much feel that I should be making the most of this sabbatical, to get rest and to be restored. So I'm trying to choose to do things that are restful and restorative for me, like reading or swimming. But the more time I have to myself, to reflect or even just to do things for fun, the more it hits me that nothing feels good right now. If I keep busy, it at least masks a bit how horrible life feels right now. But then I feel bad for not resting more, so I slow down, only to have this wave of melancholy sweep over me again. I realize that the grief class served to give a very structured setting for my own mourning; when you're taking a class on death, there is no real attempt to feel good about it at all. So I could keep busy, and experience my grief all at the same time.

So now I'm just sitting in my grief, probably more than I have since Midi and Nathan died. It's probably "good" for me, in the sense that it's healthy, therapeutic, etc. It certainly doesn't feel good. The irony of having everything feel off to me during a season that in many other respects is quite idyllic...

Studying Grief

Today was the last day of the Fuller seminary class I have been taking on grief and death. I am glad I took it, although it certainly was emotionally overwhelming at times (every week, a film clip of some weepy movie was shown, think "Steel Magnolias", "Shadowlands", "Ordinary People", etc.). It also made these first two months of my sabbatical more full than I had anticipated. Leave it to me to need two whole months just to begin resting. And after 13 years of no schooling, jumping in with a 20-30 page research paper was a bit daunting. A friend recently told me that in her whole time at Fuller, she only had one professor assign a paper that long... the same one who happens to be teaching my class.

But despite the various costs, I don't regret taking the class. While I had read through much of the required reading before the class even started, I would have never picked up some of the other books otherwise. In particular, I found Ernest Becker's Denial of Death helpful. He posits that it is the fear of death that is the more basic anxiety for mankind, rather than the freudian view of sexual anxiety. And while in the book he backs away from totally accepting Soren Kierkegaard's solution to that fear of trusting in God, it turns out that Becker became a Christian shortly after completing his book, just a few months before his own death from cancer. Having only read smatterings of Kierkegaard's work before, I came away with a heightened appreciation for him and with a renewed enthusiasm for our son's name.

While the anxiety over completing that long of a paper wasn't great, the paper itself was also a good experience for me overall. The topic was up to us, and I elected to focus on children and grief. The material was interesting and relevant; I found myself agreeing or arguing along, based on my observations of Emma, Soren, and Lucas the last 5 months. I think it will also be helpful in my work with college students; it seems like every few years, there is a student in one of the fellowships I work with who loses a parent or some other close family member. Since most of their peers haven't experienced that kind of loss (or even all of the staff I work with), having more materials and expertise to draw from in caring for them seems helpful.

So I'm glad for the grief class. And I'm also glad for its end. It feels a bit like the beginning of the first "summer vacation" I've had in many years. It's not quite the same with a 5 year-old and a 3 year-old in tow, but I'll take it nonetheless.