Embracing the Valley: Engaging Grief & Loss
“Mock Funeral”
by Alex Graham James
There was no funeral.
No flowers.
No ceremony.
No one had died.
No weeping or wailing.
Just in my heart.
I can’t…
But I did anyway,
And nobody knew I couldn’t.
I don’t want to…
But nobody else said they didn’t.
So I put down my panic
And picked up my luggage
And got on the plane.
There was no funeral.
Published in Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds
by Ruth Van Reken and David C. Pollock
The Weight of Loss
What happens when people quit their jobs, raise their support, say their goodbyes, and move across the world to participate in global missions? These people sacrifice so much by committing to cross-cultural work and in doing so, experience much loss. What about when these missionaries move from place to place? Or when they stay in one place, watching others come and go? How about when they suffer the effects of long-term, unrelenting stress?
At MTI, we often say that what makes for healthy missionaries correlates with what makes for healthy humans. Missionaries are not unique in their need to grieve what has been lost, but they do encounter unique types and frequencies of loss, which heightens their need to grieve well. What comes to mind when you hear the word “grief?” If you thought of death, you are not alone. But grief is not only necessary when death occurs.
Grieving as a Necessity
Grief is the healthy response to loss brought about by changes such as moving, job transitions, relational shifts, and health challenges. Loss can encompass everything on a spectrum between “what used to be” (e.g. minor changes) all the way to “what should/shouldn’t have been” (e.g. abuse/trauma). With younger Third Culture Kids (TCKs) at MTI, we often debrief losses using the categories of people, places, experiences, and stuff. With teenage TCKs and adult cross-cultural workers, we unpack the effects of losing (or struggling to maintain) their sense of context, status, lifestyle, identity, and belonging. These are called “hidden” losses, and they tend to evoke ambiguous grief - the felt need to grieve without exactly knowing why. Hidden losses can be particularly hard to process because they are invisible and difficult to name. They involve a death of “what was,” without the outward expression of a funeral.
As people experience adversity and loss, these difficult experiences and emotions stack up to form “towers” of grief that can eventually topple (see The Grief Tower by Lauren Wells). For me (and many other adult TCKs), the grief tower crashed in college. I had a tidal wave of grief to navigate from 18+ years of mostly unprocessed loss. Inevitably, we all hit a point where we can no longer avoid grief before it begins to severely impact our health in all facets - spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical.
Grief as a Journey
At MTI, we often use the framework of grief as a journey. Unpacking loss is not a linear process. Grief is messy and disorienting, and we all have barriers that can keep us from grieving. Missionaries, especially, tend to avoid grief because they feel too busy, too ashamed, too worried that they have failed, or too afraid that once they start grieving, they will never stop.
How does debriefing help with loss and grief? Debriefing, or telling one’s story honestly, offers the safety to name what has been lost. It creates safe a space to engage the grief, rather than continue to run from it or ignore it. The power of debriefing is that in sitting with another person (and with God) to honor the pain of loss, the grief does not have to happen alone. Debriefing validates the pain and normalizes the idea that losses are worth grieving. Debriefing embodies the reality that grief does not signify failure or lack of faith. For many missionaries, space to grieve is something they most deeply need and most rarely find.