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.