Grief Demands A Story

Grief demands a story. It is story inertia - story energy that sits heavy on the soul. It may be so heavy the soul can hardly pull itself out from underneath it. Early on, it simply can't. Grief is meaning that must be storied. Grief introduces piles and mounds and layers deep of meaning with no pre-programmed language or behaviors by which to tell the story. Grief does not ask for you to read lines; it requires that you write them - in a language you have never spoken. Grief, the relentless and ever flowing source of disquieting, disrupting, unstoried meaning, tires the body and wears on the mind, stress-fractures the soul, sets granite boulders on the heart and then says, "speak!" 

For my grieving friends, I know you are tired and weary and may be looking for a place where grief is not or a moment when grief sleeps - so you can also sleep. I also know such a place does not exist and such moments for rest are elusive. You may look at the days before you as an endless line of blank hours awaiting processing. 

It is my prayer that you can find some way in all the disorienting emptiness to story your grief. In words. In song. In dance. In tears. In prayer. In poetry. In mission. In art. 

And it is my prayer that you will have genuine and humble listeners. Real listeners. May listeners be near you when you can story your grief, the kind of listeners who are uninterested by anything else in the world but you, who are undistracted by any other care in the world, whose listening humbly invites more story.