A Different Kind of Grief

      When I was in college, I stopped going to Mass and turned away from my faith. I played hooky and flunked most of my classes. I embarked on a series of, shall we say, "inappropriate" relationships. I suddenly couldn't write poetry anymore. Twenty-eight years later, my therapist put me under hypnosis one afternoon and asked me to complete this sentence: When Alice died ___ . In a later session, she told me what I had said: I died too.   

      I lost my older sister Alice to an unexpected, violent death when I was eighteen years old, and I never connected her death—or rather, the repression of my grief over her death—to the downward spiral my life took shortly after. It could very well be that everyone around me saw the connection, but I was so deep in denial, it took twenty-eight years and a hypnotherapist to open my eyes. With hindsight, of course, it all seems very logical. Textbook, you might say.

     In the meantime, I had returned to the Church and followed a call to religious life, as my readers already know; after nearly two and a half years in the monastery I returned to my parents' house and have since then devoted my life to helping my mother care for my infirm father. In the subsequent years, I watched his steady physical decline, thinking almost daily of the time he would leave us for that better world which is our true home, and praying that my recovered faith would stave off a repeat occurence of long ago, when Alice died and my repressed grief caused me to turn away from God. More than losing my father, the thought of once again losing my faith, perhaps forever, terrified me. Death, after all, is inevitable—but being deprived of Heaven is a consequence of one's own will and free choice.

     Did I actually choose, all those years ago? Was it a conscious choice? Obviously not, since it took me twenty-eight years to realize what happened. But that's precisely why I was so terrified about my father's imminent passing. Would my faith now prove stronger than my subconscious?

     Only one thing can stay the soul in the midst of all that fear: prayer. That wordless kind of prayer when you place yourself like a trusting child in God's loving arms.

     When my father did enter eternal life last week, I felt no sadness for him. I was and am sad for my mother, but not for him. He's home at last. My heart and mind—and my subconscious—are certain of that. I couldn't grieve for Alice when I was eighteen, and I can't grieve for my father now—but thank God in heaven, the reasons are completely different.