How should we write about people who have gone through grief or loss? What should we pay attention to as we describe grief? Author and winner of MAI’s Lifetime Training Award Miriam Adeney shares how we might treat grief respectfully, seriously and with dignity in our writing.
Rizpah had two sons. She was king Saul’s mistress, but after he died her fortunes changed. People who wanted vengeance against Saul took it out on her family.
One morning her boys were marched out and slaughtered, hung by their necks until they died.
Then their bodies were displayed on a hill as a warning to others. Rizpah was not allowed to bury them.
So she spread a mourning cloth on a rock nearby, and simply stayed there. From the beginning of the harvest until the rainy season, Rizpah did not let the birds of the air touch her boys’ bodies by day or the wild animals by night. Finally, when the new king heard about Rizpah’s agony and her determination, he took the bodies down and gave them proper burial (2 Samuel 21:7-14).
Rizpah’s grief is a precursor to the lament howled 1,000 years later when king Herod killed baby boys (Matthew 2:18):
A voice is heard in Ramah,
Weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
And refusing to be comforted
Because they are no more.
How should we write about people who have gone through grief or loss?
First, we must give them space to grieve. Such grief is not ungodly or unspiritual. If you love somebody, you risk pain. Jesus grieved (John 11:35). God grieves (Genesis 6:6; Psalm 78:40; Psalm 95:10). Even nature groans (Romans 8:22).
Mourning like Rizpah’s indicates that something is valuable. It shows honor.
As writers, we must treat grief respectfully, seriously, with dignity.
What should we pay attention to as we describe grief?
Some people pass through “stages of grief” like denial, anger, guilt, bargaining, and depression. On some days they lash out. On other days they hide away. At other times they fake a manic happiness. It may be that they will need to cycle through these stages several times. I have.
People who live in more communal cultures may not talk about their grief so much. Instead, they may express it through a song or poem or through certain behaviors.
Sometimes a ritual can help a person navigate their grief, slicing open the wound, letting out the festering pus, and then stitching it up with healing salve.
After the Rwandan genocide, for example, Christians developed trauma-healing workshops. Here, survivors told frank and sometimes brutal stories. They listened to others, and cried with them. They wrote out their statements of anguish, nailed these statements to a cross, and later burned those words, praying while they watched the ashes waft upwards. They lighted candles and meditated on scriptural words of hope. A few people knelt and asked for forgiveness.
The book of Psalms has chapters that overflow with grief. Erupting from situations of despair, they are known as “psalms of lament.” Consider Psalm 31:10-12—
My life is consumed by anguish
And my years by groaning
My strength fails because of my affliction
And my bones grow weak
Because of all my enemies
I am the utter contempt of my neighbors
I am a dread to my friends—
Those who see me on the street flee from me
I am forgotten by them as though I were dead
I have become like broken pottery
Filipino pastor Federico Villanueva studied the Psalms for his doctoral dissertation. The balance of joy and sorrow in them reflects human reality, Rico concluded. Filipinos know that life has a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity. Asians sense that reality is cyclical as well as linear. In this milieu, the Psalms provide a regular rhythm of praise and lament, Rico found. They also drew him into community with others who suffered.
A new perspective appears in the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 5:3-4:
Suffering produces perseverance,
Perseverance produces character,
And character produces hope.
But is that really true? Suffering does not always produce character or hope, does it?
Instead, it often leads to cynicism and despair. People grit their teeth just to make it through one more day. Or we erupt in anger. Or we escape into temporary distractions. Those seem to be the options that are available to us.
Not only sad, beaten-down people feel this way, but also many philosophers—from Stoics to Buddhists to the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. That’s life.
How could Paul claim that suffering leads to hope?
Because he remembered the resurrection. Yes, there is a time to cry. Yes, there is a time to sit in silence with someone who suffers.
But beyond Jesus’ cross is His resurrection. God can do new things. He can bring good after evil. He can revive and restore. He can empower through the Holy Spirit. That is the testimony of Christians throughout time, although some of us have to smile through tears.
Rebecca Groothuis was a brilliant Christian writer who slid into dementia. Recently, her husband Doug (author of Unmasking the New Age) wrote about how he felt as while his wife was losing her mind.
He said, “This is my lament and testimony. I lament her losses and the loss to an evangelical world that will no longer benefit from new contributions from her careful thinking and her cogent and lucid writing. But lamentation is the proper response of the soul to the loss of a true good, the recognition of sadness and anger before the face of God…Lament is the element of life under the sun that allows us to hurt before God and even with God. We look up as the tears fall down…And yet I am grateful to the Giver of every good and perfect gift…We lament now. We rejoice later.”
The people we write about can wail inarticulately before God. He hears them. He himself experienced what it meant to be human. He suffered. He groaned, with drops of blood.
So let’s not paint on happy faces too quickly. Remembering Rizpah, let’s allow for grief.
Through her agony, Rizpah demonstrated that she was more than a machine, producer or consumer. Neither was she a mere pawn in a game or cog in a system.
She was a person who loved. She had a voice and demanded a space in which to lift it.
As she did, she glorified God who endowed her with dignity—even in her pain.
Miriam Adeney holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and an M.A. in magazine journalism. She is a professor, book author and writing coach. Her blog Blazing Torches: Miriam’s Blog for Writers is found at http://miriamadeney.substack.com.
*Some material adapted from Miriam Adeney, “When There Is Lament” in Spirituality in Mission, ed. John Amalraj