The Faces of Grief
By: Laura Hussey
As the one year anniversary of the loss of my daughter, Rose, approached I found myself, somewhat feverishly, re-vamping the house. Our three kids all received full bedroom makeovers, the linen closet was emptied and completely reorganized, our primary bedroom closet was gutted and redesigned, and our pantry was re-ordered from top to bottom. Each project took time and effort and drained me, yet as soon as I had completed one task, my eyes were scanning the house for the next… the storage room, the bathrooms, the office…
I had made “progress,” so to speak, in my grief journey. The nights of wounding myself with misguided self-blame, the inability to be in public without the fear of breaking down, the moments of suppressed rage when my child’s life seemed unimportant to those around me, the intense waves of sorrow, the physical pain of aching for her—all of that was…softening. And I was grateful for that softening, if I’m being honest. I didn’t want to go back to those early months of mourning. So, as the one year anniversary approached, I think I channeled my grief into distraction, and it wasn’t until I caught myself analyzing the garage, wondering how I could completely re-do it, that I realized, “I’m sad.”
What’s that old saying?
“Keeping busy keeps the devil away?”
Or, as the Bible puts it, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” (Prov 16:27, TLB).
I seemed to find safety in creating order and beauty in my surroundings, perhaps as a way of deflecting the disorder and ugliness of the one year anniversary of losing Rose. Yet when I realized my busyness was propelled by my sorrow, I decided to let myself sit in it instead. In fact, when the morning of the one year anniversary finally arrived, I couldn’t even get out of bed.
I didn’t take the kids to school. I didn’t get dressed. I didn’t check emails. I didn’t “do” anything that morning other than mourn her… lying in bed, envisioning her perfect feathery blonde eyelashes.
My girl… my perfect little one… how I miss her.
And that missing looks different from day to day. There is no escaping grief, I’ve realized. And if that sounds like a threat, it isn’t meant to. It’s just that I’ve come to understand that grief can look like a person organizing the linen closet as much as it can look like a person unable to get out of bed.
Grief has many faces: from horror, to shock, to denial, to numbness, to anger, to distraction, to sorrow… but what about joy? Does joy get a seat at grief’s table?
The last time my husband, Brad, shaved his face was for Rose’s funeral. It wasn’t planned. He just stopped shaving. I’ve never been a big beard person, but I grew attached to his. In a way, it became a symbol of what we had been carrying. We had been through so much, and because Rose was no longer physically with us, sometimes the only thing, at the end of the day, that looked different about our life was my husband’s face. His beard somehow held the weight of that year and was also a visual representation of the passing of time. Nowadays, we don’t have visible signs of mourning, like wearing black, but his beard unintentionally became that for us.
About 6 months in, I asked him if he would be willing to shave it off after the one year anniversary of Rose’s passing, and he agreed.
So, the day after we marked a year without Rose, he shaved his beard off. The kids and I were utterly shocked to see his face again. He looked younger than the day I met him, and it honestly took about twenty four hours before any of us, including Brad, could look at him without bursting out laughing because the change was so dramatic. I envisioned little Rose laughing alongside us.
Though his transformation was significant, what surprised me most was the lightness I felt in my own heart seeing his face again. Something fundamentally lifted in me that day—joy had been invited to grief’s table.
But of course, it is never as simple as that, because with joy’s arrival also comes guilt’s unwanted return:
“I should be sad.”
“Am I not grieving her enough?”
“Does this happiness mean I’ve forgotten her?”
“If I am happy… who is left to mourn her?”
I still struggle with these questions.
In a sense, I feel the most complete when I am crying for her.
It feels “right” in a way I can’t quite describe.
Sometimes I am tempted to make the sorrowful places of grief my home, yet I can feel Rose calling me towards her… towards joy. I can feel her gentle, gentle presence reminding me that, “We are the Easter people and Alleluia is our song!” (St. John Paul II)
Our song—yes.
Some days it may sound more like a lament than an alleluia, yet we keep on singing.
Each seat at grief’s table, filling our song with harmonies more rich and resonant than we can ever fully hear this side of Heaven.
~
May I gently ask:
What faces of grief have you come to recognize along the way?
Have you ever found yourself unsure of what it means to grieve “well”?
Has joy found a seat at your table since your loss?
Laura Hussey lives in Alberta, Canada with her husband and three children. She is a Catholic mother who has experienced both miscarriage and the stillbirth of her beloved youngest daughter, Rose. Laura holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and is a newborn and family photographer drawn to storytelling through both images and words. A lifelong writer, she turns to words as a place of prayer and reflection as she navigates grief, motherhood, and faith.