Why Must We Drink the Cup of Grief?

What do you do when you know time should stop?

Yet it refuses.

It does not pause even long enough to let us take in grief.

How do we make sense of the unimaginable as our lives move on? Most of us eventually suffer through things we once could not even imagine. We know, intellectually, that tragedy happens. But we cannot believe it when it happens to someone we love.

Out of the corner of your eye you see a child with a red balloon, holding his mother’s hand, his eyes fixed skyward, his laughter floating upward as though it might carry him to the clouds. He doesn’t know my friend is dead. He doesn’t know she was taken in a brutal, senseless way, just as suddenly as if that balloon had burst, laughter turning instantly to tears.

But life does not return like a second balloon.

There is nothing to distract us from grief, only the futile companions of “If only” and “What if,” thoughts that survive only as long as they can outrun reality—and time.

I went home to pay my respects. That place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Not to the house where I grew up. Home is a place, not a building. Home is where I went from being the boy with the balloon to the man who had to say goodbye to a friend.

I was not alone staring into the abyss left by a life so unjustly ripped away. There were many others just as shocked, just as outraged, just as unable to believe that a life of innocence could be so brutally stripped.

There are friends you have, if you are lucky, the few you have lived your life with, who don’t need words. You might fumble for words anyway. It’s what we do. And there are times when, even if words are unnecessary, you have to try. They have to try. We owe it to each other.

How do we make sense of what happened, as though there were any sense to be made? How did we become these grieving adults when only a moment ago we were holding balloons? What does it mean? Can it even have meaning?

The words I have, however frail and inadequate, I can still share with my friends, but not with the friend who was taken.

I know I still love her.

I know she still lives in my heart.

She is with us even here in our grief.

Yet we grieve because she is gone.

In high school we studied A. E. Housman’s poem Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff. Terence asks why anyone would choose to write melancholy poetry when life already contains enough sorrow. Housman’s answer is that grief will eventually come for all of us, and poetry helps prepare the soul before the real trial arrives. At least, that’s how I understand the poem now, after a lifetime of experience.

Life gives us lessons.

Lessons deepen our understanding.

But meaning can be as fleeting as a child’s laughter.

Sometimes what we learn is that some questions are worth asking.

Why Must We Drink The Cup Of Grief?

How swifter than a bird in flight,
The day descending into night,
The Summer turning into Fall,
We blink and we have lost it all.

We still recall the early morn,
The few years after we were born,
When life grew bigger with each day,
And it would always stay this way.

Remember too, those friends with you,
Who shared your days when all was new.
The silly jokes, the stolen wine,
With nothing sacred - all divine.

How quickly we grow young again,
With laughter in our lightened limbs,
When we recall a lover’s look,
The games of youth, a favorite book.

The mirror cannot show at all
The pride that goes before a fall,
When burdened by this life of sin,
We learn life’s not a game you win.

Why must we drink the cup of grief,
The suffering without relief?
Each one of us upon our cross:
To love, to live, to suffer loss?

Yes, Terrance, this is stupid stuff.
I’ll eat my supper soon enough.
Tonight I’ll drink life to the lees,
But first I’ll fall down on my knees

And tell God that I miss my friend.
I don’t know why it has to end.
I understand you lost your son.
I don’t know why that race was run.

Perhaps so it can guide us now,
Not in belief, but faith somehow.
That while He taketh, still He gives.
That every morning my friend lives.