Don’t Throw a Cat in my Face and Other Unsolicited Advice
On grief, collective and otherwise.
Outside on our front porch we stood, paused in painful time. The chilly, winter Cape Town wind whirled around us. The cumbersome taxis whizzed by, horns sounding. People shouted and laughed on their way home from work, unknowing. My friend had just learned of her father’s death. Car accident. She came to tell me but didn’t make it up the final steps. We stood on the porch swelling with terror and emotion.
She hung onto me and I held her in my arms. She was living here in Cape Town, her family in
Zimbabwe. It would take a 22-hour bus ride just to reach her family. Grief demanded an outlet and I was not raised to be that outlet.
She, in her African skin, was no stranger to expression and was boldly free with unrestrained emotion. I, in my awkward North American, white, evangelical Christian skin, was unsettled at the expression and depth of pain that stood between us. I didn’t know what to do with this, this heaviness, this audible lament.
For a while I just stood still. I wondered if anyone else heard her wailing. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see small children in school uniforms walking home from school, their world still intact. I was standing on the precipice of mortality and innocence. I mentally ran through a checklist of what I should say to bring comfort in this situation even though I fully knew better than to attempt something so superficial.
Yet, I did not like the presence of suffering, and on a selfish level, I was ready for it to disappear. What could I possibly offer her to stem the tide of tears?
Oddly, I landed on, “Would you like a cat?”
One of our new kittens had just skittered through the garden and caught my eye. Of all the things to say, I was pretty sure she wasn’t expecting that. She unwound herself from me and stared in disbelief as if she was not sure she had heard right.
Unfortunately, she heard right.
“No, I don’t want your cat.”
Ok, that was understandable. I didn’t really want the cat right then either.
I had never been good at the emotional-exchange-between-people thing. In a traumatic situation? Forget it, don’t come near me unless you want a domestic animal.
At this shift of emotional tide, we walked into the house where I could make us tea and sit on the couch and speak of the surreal and plan for the unthinkable.
This got me thinking…how had I been conditioned to grieve? Have you ever sat with someone in deep, speechless lament? It wasn’t really part of my American upbringing. In fact, I don’t know many people who are taught a grieving process or how to let others grieve. My friend knew how to grieve healthfully and I was grateful for her instruction.
For me, a Westerner with reserved emotions, this was uncomfortable; this helplessness while someone was hurting. I wanted to make it stop. Get past this. Jump in and save them. Too often I wanted to skip over the teeming pool of pain to the healing on the other side. I took a flying jump over it, scraping my bum on the arc of an imaginary rainbow to hopefully land on the happily-ever-after side instead of trudging knee deep into the unknown, risking the undercurrent of mutual pain.
Another friend posted on social media recently that a friend of hers died at age 47, and how she was terribly distraught. I responded with a sad emoji. Not even words, just an animated expression with a giant, yellow head. Let’s be real. If I had been there in person, I wouldn’t have been as eloquent.
Grieving covers a broad, sweeping action on a vast spectrum. It could be the loss of a loved one, or the loss of your chosen candidate during a presidential election.
Grief is not contingent upon my understanding. The loss is worthy of grieving because of the people involved. It’s about those who grieve, not why they grieve, or what they grieve.
Just the knowledge that I’m hurting should bring you closer to me as a compassionate comforter, not only when my pain can be justified in your eyes.
When we turn away from grieving and cover ourselves with a cloak of toxic positivity, we diminish the other and disqualify their fear, anger, and sadness. It’s the equivalent of putting a cat in my face.
It’s filling the space with the ordinary when only the transcendent will do. *
It’s distracting momentarily, an obtuse effort to crowd out the grief, but it’s also disqualifying me from being a trustworthy confidant, capable of bearing the pain alongside my hurting brothers and sisters.
It’s not only times of grief that apprehend us, it’s the isolated quality of our present-day relationships. We don’t even have to interact. We are gladiator-esque spectators, staring at another’s life story, watching, wincing while entertained.
Where are we? In the present, daily, breathing world, where are our connections?
Do we even know how to connect anymore? To sit face to face with hurt and let it be there with us, a guest that demands to be seen and no longer ignored.
To silence the grieving is to respond with tongue-wagging shame instead of with questions and coffee. There will not be understanding or unity until we stop polluting this sacred space with toxic distraction and filling the painful places with irrelevant rhetoric.
I recently read Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner. She wrote of the Jewish traditions that she missed after her conversion to Christianity. One of those was the series of steps the Jewish community walks during the grieving process. Two of those stages are Aninut and Shiva.
Aninut. The recognition of an intense, all-consuming bereavement. The community is not obligated to visit or comfort or feed the mourners because the “death is still happening so the work of comforting cannot yet begin.”
Perhaps today, the death is still happening. The reckoning of what and who we believed to be true and ours is now dawning in realization.
Shiva. The first week after the funeral. Mourners “sit shiva” literally, to sit on low chairs as Job’s friends did. “They sat down with him toward the ground for seven days and seven nights and no one speaks a word to him.” (Job 2:13). They do not leave the house for seven days, except for Shabbat. The neighbors bring food.
It is alive, this emotion, and looking for a safe place to land.
At the invitation of embodied connection, I find that I have a knee-jerk reaction bent on disconnection, self-sabotage and an ungrateful cat. When I do that, I begin the process of building a wall between us. I create more violence and do irreparable damage when I grant my place of comfort more privilege than that of pain.
What if we, the American Christian, ran toward pain, anger, grief, and lament-not stifling it by way of social media posts and witty memes manifested from the echo chamber of loyalty?
We crowd each other’s grief when we offer solutions and platitudes instead of sitting in proximity to the pain with nothing but open arms.
Perhaps we will find that our nation needs to sit quietly in grief and not say a word.
Someone bring food.
My role, as I see it, is to see the pain and bear up under it so it is not endured alone. I am fully human and believe that my job is to love my neighbor. My job is to walk across the divide and be present, sitting low. It is not to say anything, not to offer anything, not to persuade my neighbors that their feelings are misguided or even that God is in control.
Here we are, in this complex, crucial liminal space of the in-between. This much I know: Who occupies the White House is not as important as who occupies my house.
May we strive to always offer a place of comfort, compassion and connection.
Sometimes cats.
*excerpt taken from Kaleidoscope: absurdly short stories of traveling and unraveling by Christina Quist
