You may have heard the story of Fred Stobaugh, a 96 year old guy that had recently lost his wife of 73 years, Lorraine. There was a song writing contest and Fred was inspired to enter. He wrote basically a poem to Lorraine and submitted it, though he didn't sing or put the poem to music. The people running the contest were touched and turned his poem into a song. The story is in the video below and you can hear the song at about the 5:50 mark.
What I really like about it is for me it expresses what I expect I would honestly feel if I were in his shoes. So for me it's very relatable. Fred seems to be expressing the belief that he cannot experience her again. He says "Life only goes around once, but never again." "I wish we could do all the good times over again." "But the memories always linger on." The sadness and grief is especially deep because he views her as truly gone, except in memories. For me that's how I would feel.
But if I had gone through that experience as a religious person, as in my earlier days, I don't think I would have felt that way. Death is a temporary separation that ends in heaven where the sadness is remedied. This is a comforting belief and I have no interest in preventing others from convincing themselves of this. But it's not really possible for me to grieve in that way any more. This is more how I would have to grieve. It's sadness without (what I consider to be) illusions. I wonder if that is how Fred is grieving.
1 comment:
"Death is [believed to be] a temporary separation that ends in heaven where the sadness is remedied. This is a comforting belief and I have no interest in preventing others from convincing themselves of this."
I don't even understand how people can find such a belief comforting. I will repeat here what I wrote in a blog post about my loss of a close friend: "When I mourn my friend, it is in my life that I need him and miss him: it is his absence from my life that afflicts me. Even if I could believe that I would see him again after my death, that belief would do me no good now. Granted the assumption that I, unlike him, live a normal span of life, the prospect of being able to resume our conversation several decades from now, when in all likelihood my grief over the loss of him will have diminished almost to nothing, does nothing for me now, when I suffer the most from the loss of him."
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