Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

January 24, 1999

OPENING WORDS

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. . . . . Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all."

Pema Chodron

It starts early. This heartbreak thing, I mean. When somebody that you thought would be there forever is suddenly gone. Heartbreak can happen to you right after birth, if Mom is sick with postpartum depression. Or it can happen when a parent dies an untimely death. Or a family breaks up, and without really consulting you--because you’re only a child, after all--Dad is gone from your life because he moved to Florida—or somewhere.

Certainly it happens to most of us as we negotiate the high wire act of our romantic lives. At some point we make that leap for the trapeze bar, with its promise of ever greater heights: we give ourselves to love. A love that we are sure will last forever. But sometimes we don’t connect, we hang suspended in space and fall, and there seems to be no safety net. Or sometimes we feel certain that the rope will hold—didn’t we inspect it just yesterday?--but it was frayed in places we didn’t even know about. Our life partner decides to leave, and "forever" loses its meaning.

As I said, it starts early. Do you remember your first Valentine’s Day, in elementary school? Do I dare send him a valentine? Will anyone send me one, saying I love you? Am I lovable? This is the question that persists. We are still asking it when we are 80, most of us.

Peter Gerstenzang tells about his first romantic loss. He writes, "I suppose I should thank Diane Di Napoli for teaching me about it. Even if I thought I was going to die at the time.

"When I was ten, Diane and I were in love. The fifth-grade kind, anyway. In the cafeteria, she always saved me a seat and sometimes brought me candy from home. During assembly, I slipped her a hand-carved tiki head I’d gotten in Hawaii. We slow-danced at a party. As much as I hated school, the thought that I would see Diane in Chorus and at lunch got me through the morning and kept my attendance record reasonably respectable. That’s love, all right.

"Did I overestimate her sincerity. Did I imagine that the other boys couldn’t see the shiny chestnut hair, sleepy eyes, curves that were beginning to emerge. One afternoon after a very tough gym class, I was on my way out of the new wing and, with nothing to prepare me, saw Diane Di Napoli sitting on her Sting Ray bike not two feet from Howie Mandlebaum, who was sitting on his Sting Ray bike. They were holding hands, <the most intimate act I had seen to date.> We hadn’t even done that! They finally pedaled off together, still in the offending position, and I—my back against the white cinder-block wall—slunk miserably to the floor.

"Walking home, I felt strange, sad, and frightened. I sensed that I was experiencing something new, something totally overwhelming, but I didn’t know what it was. The feeling was a little like loneliness or homesickness, but worse. And everything ached. Especially my heart. Turning down my street, I knew . . . that life would never be exactly the same."

This story, I have to say, brought back memories of my first love. Why are these experiences so unforgettable? I fell in love with Henry, the son of the Baptist minister. Henry played second chair to my first chair in the coronet section of the high school band. The story of my life. Anyway, who knows why I fell in love? Now I lay it to the fact that I was 14—I lay it to the warm feelings that went through my body whenever Henry’s thigh touched my thigh in that crowded practice space. But why Henry? Who knows why one is drawn to a certain person and not to another? It has little to do with virtue. Or suitability. Usually more to do with the unpredictability of delight. The sudden surprise of desire.

Anyway, I have to admit that Henry did not share my fantasies. In fact, he hardly knew I was alive. The only thing I specifically remember him saying to me was in marching band, during rehearsal on the football field. He said, "Why don’t you stand up straight?" Two years later when I was sixteen, his father was called to a church in Mississippi, and there was a going-away reception at the church. Would Henry tell me goodbye? After all, he had filled my dreams for 2 years. No, he did not tell me goodbye—he probably never knew the condition of my heart. After the reception, he tossed the rose bud from his lapel into a trash can, where I surreptitiously fished it out and pinned it on my bulletin board at home alongside the picture of James Dean, along with my other treasures, until it dried up like a locust shell and dropped in dusty fragments to the floor. That was my first love.

I have to admit further that this pattern of long mourning after loss has persisted with me. Usually when a relationship breaks up—even when I break it up—it takes me twice as long as the relationship itself, to get over it. So if I see someone for six months, it takes a year. For two years, four years. You get the picture. You can run through a life pretty quickly that way, spending most of it getting over things. So I don’t exactly hold myself up as a model in this arena. Every loss has a touch of abandonment in it, and my heart tends to cling.

It is understandable, however, why romantic losses hurt so much. It is in our intimate relationships, specifically in our partner’s arms, that we recapitulate the earliest of our love relationships, that with our mother. In that first relationship, she takes us in her arms and holds us against her warm flesh. We are literally dependent upon her care for our survival, we gain our nourishment from her very body as we nurse. I believe that in our romantic relationships, we are drawn back subconsciously to those earliest moments of intimacy, and that losing the object of our love makes us feel as though we might, in fact, not survive.

I have said that I mourn a long time after a loss, and I think I am not unusual as a woman in handling my feelings that way. Men tend to be different. I’m beginning to wonder if some of these differences are not just hard-wired in. Though men are just as tender as women—in fact, what does the courtesan say in that classic film King of Hearts? "Men are as tender as asparagus tips"—but our culture does not encourage the free expression of their tenderness. The feeling side of human life has been projected onto the feminine, and so men sometimes hide their hearts, even from themselves.

Sam Osherson, psychologist and author of Finding Our Fathers, puts it this way: "To feel at home being left is not in the male repertoire. Being left, living with the feelings—the dependency, the vulnerability—is the more feminine position." Osherson continues, "When women leave relationships, the feeling for many men is so intolerable they don’t know what to do with it. Often they won’t even recognize the feeling as loss. They try to grin it out, immerse themselves in manic activities, become angry." Many go for a quick fix by finding a new romantic liason. If sex doesn’t work, says Osherson, a man may go to alcohol or submerge himself in work.

Of course anyone who experiences a painful loss needs at some point to open to life once again. That opening will come, not on somebody else’s schedule, but on your own. It might be months for some, years for others. One of the most poignant things I ever read was a notice in the personals section of the Lexington Herald-Leader when I lived in Kentucky in the 1970’s. It made such an impression on me that I saved it, for all these years. It read: "To Margaret—I met you at a boarding house on West Third Street in 1931. I’m still thinking about you. Where are you now?" More than 40 years had passed, and still this terrible longing remained. Who was Margaret, and did she know of his love? Was she even still alive? How likely was it that she would see his ad? When he saw her again, if he ever did, would he be able to accept the changes the years had wrought? What is love, and why does it persist?

There is not much logic to the process of grieving, and even though much has been made of "stages of grief," we know that those stages turn up more than once and often out of order. But there is a process, and if we try to skip over the process entirely, we are likely to find grief catching up with us in surprising and sometimes destructive ways.

Like the man named Dylan, who lost his young wife, whom he adored, in childbirth. Left with a three-year-old and the new baby, Dylan drifted into a love affair with a friend of his, a nurse named Jennie. They moved slowly in the beginning, but within six months, they found themselves wildly in love. Jennie recalls, "This romance was too good to be true. We had no problems. I loved him; I loved his kids, his car, his stamp collection." When Dylan asked me to marry him, we started making plans. Then he went away on a two-week trip. Upon his return, he called and could barely speak to me. ‘It’s over,’ he said. I never saw him again." In the months after his wife’s death, Dylan had successfully denied the pain wrought by his deep trauma. The full shock of it hit him when he went off alone on the trip. "I’d been living in a dream until then," he said, "then suddenly I was in the worst pain I’d ever known."

So what happens when you’re down to your last broken heart, as the old country song goes? If love is so unreliable and loss so painful, when why bother?

First of all, love is not unreliable. It is what it is, while it is. It’s just that it can never be still. Any love relationship must change, in order to survive. Some people are fortunate enough to grow and change together, and others cannot. Some have to leave a very special love behind in order to grow. Sometimes when we lose love, we begin to think that the love was never there, that somehow we were lied to and betrayed. But a more generous approach and probably a more accurate one would be to understand that if you felt that love existed, then it did. And that love will never be erased from your history. Each relationship is special in it own particular sweet way, each love is precious, and the memories of what was good can go with you forever into the future.

Why bother? Why risk the pain? I ask you, what is the alternative? Pain is what we all experience in this world if our hearts and spirits are alive. How could we not? The only alternative to pain is to not feel, and this is not an acceptable solution for the long term, for then we deaden ourselves to all of the beauty, spontaneity, and joy of living. The people most prone to heartbreak are "good" people, says one psychologist, people who are trusting, vulnerable, loving. Yes, they’ll hurt, but in the end they’re going to get a lot more out of life than the people who claim they’re never had a broken heart. As the Tin Woodsman says near the end of the Wizard of Oz, "Now I know I have a heart. Because I can feel it breaking."

But what happens when the heartbreak is out of the ordinary, of such magnitude that one could hardly expect a human to handle it at all. Some people have experienced just such pain, and hearing from their experience might help those of us with lesser ills to contend with.

Such a man is Martin Gray. Gray fought in the Warsaw ghetto and escaped from the Treblinka death camp, but lost all 110 members of his extended family to the Nazis. He served as a Soviet Army officer before emigrating to the United States, where in 13 years he became a wealthy antiquarian. He married and moved to France to cultivate a hillside of mimosa trees near Cannes. Ten years later his wife Dina and their four children died when horrendous fires swept the area. He has since married twice more and has four more children. How could he have gone on, given all that he experienced? You might call him a man with a mission. He has built a center of learning for young people, to encourage them to come to terms with their doubts and fears, to rise above latent hatreds, and make a safer world for us all. Gray has written something like ten books on his experiences.

I’d like to share a passage with you from one of those books, A Book of Life. He writes: "I have never known how to pray. I have not learned to. I don’t know if I should call myself a believer. But I am sure that I will never leave those I have loved. Those I loved—all, those in the ghetto, my family, my comrades and then Dina and my children—live in me. I felt that they still guided my steps. I had no need to call on their names, to pray for them. My life was theirs.

To be faithful to those who are dead is not to seclude yourself in sorrow.

We must continue to plough our furrow: straight and deep. As they would have done themselves. As you would have done with them. For them.

To be faithful to those who are dead is to live as they would have lived.

To make them live in us.

In ourselves, only in ourselves and by ourselves, we can decide to overcome the despair of death. But we must turn toward others. Toward life without number.

A tree survives first by its roots. But without sun it will perish.

Others are our sunlight."

So Martin Gray’s answer is "others"—"Others are our sunlight." But how do you get through the devastating pain so that you can bear to think of starting over, of joining others in ordinary human endeavors once again? I asked this question of Chuck Belleville and Ellie Tatum, a couple in this congregation who endured unendurable loss. This March will mark ten years since they lost their one-year-old daughter and four-year-old son to a drunk driver. They themselves were seriously injured in the accident. Ellie said that the lowest point for her was a year later when she gave birth to another son, only to find that he had a 90 per cent chance of severe mental retardation and required multiple surgeries. To make matters worse, right after her son was born, Ellie was hospitalized for over two weeks from complications from injuries in the collision. That was when she was down to her last broken heart, she said. In Ellie’s words, "I have always marveled at gnarled old trees and thought how beautiful they are. Life does that to us, too, when we sink our roots deep down . . . and keep reaching up even through the storms, and heal over our broken branches. There’s no magic to it, no heroism. You just do what you have to do when you have to do it. You give up, or you go on. We make choices, grow bitter or be humbled, accept our limitations, and remember the serenity prayer: ‘God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’"

Ellie continued, "Much of the depression and anxiety <in human life> is fed by our grandiosity in believing that we can or should be able to control things which we cannot. I think it’s important not to waste energy trying not to fall apart when you are down to your last broken heart. Just let yourself feel the fullness and the emptiness of your brokenness. Only by embracing the pain can you put the pieces back together. The process cannot be rushed no matter how much we desire to do so."

Chuck also responded to my question. "Ours was a very public grief," he said, "different perhaps than many. I didn’t seek out spiritual comfort as much as just desperately . . . seeking something to hang on to. <The words of the old hymn came back>: ‘just as I am, I come to thee.’ <And passages of scripture>: ‘I was naked and you clothed me; I was hungry and you fed me.’ We were naked before the whole world, it seemed, and I guess love and grace found us. Love and time seem to be what helped the most. The love we received as children that bound us to this world; the love of our parents and the desire to spare them the loss of a child; love that was unexpected, unsolicited, unconditional, and felt strangely undeserved. We clung to each other; we <remembered> our wedding vows in which we had spoken of the incredible strength and fragility of love.

"We found diversions. We redid our garden. We later were able to get pregnant, perhaps a desperate need to invest ourselves in new life, in the future. We channeled our anger in pursuing our legal case and becoming involved in public causes against drunk driving. We read, attended support groups, sought pastoral counseling from Alan Deale, did art therapy. I even sought the counsel of an African medicine man. We realized we are all in this together and no one has the answers. It was a horrible loss, but an epiphany as well. Perhaps it was the three angels who appeared at our doorstep and nursed us through our wounds; or the two robins who <came through> our kitchen window one morning. God was and is all of that and perhaps it is only times like that when we feel the presence."

Nothing, no, nothing is ever lost to us. Every bit of love that was given us is still ours and is still at work within us. Sometimes the loss of one we love is how we come to know in the clearest and deepest way what that person stood for, what that person meant to us. Oh, yes, his life was about integrity and courage—he acted from his own inner voice and no other. Oh, yes, her life was about compassion—when she listened I felt surrounded by love. Because he existed, I have more courage. Because she existed, my compassion grows. And those lost loves, the ones that tore my heart in the leaving, I love them still and carry them with me into my future.

Love, all kinds of love, you see, comes from the same Source. Call it what you will, call it for want of a better word, the mind of God. Because our minds are finite, we think that in the pain of loss, love is gone forever. It is not. There is an endless supply. It just changes form. When we awaken from our sleep, from the numbness and the worst of the hurt, there is the universe, alive and waiting, ready to receive us once again.

Remember the story of Peter and his first love in the fifth grade, Diane Di Napoli? Peter walked around in a daze for weeks, not eating much, listening to sad Frankie Valli songs. Sometimes just sitting in the park, watching birds fly from tree to tree. Then one morning, as he stumbled into the entrance to school, already late, he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. It was a little girl with blonde hair and sea-green eyes. "Hi," she said, trembling. "My name is Kelly Jones. It’s my first day. Could you please tell me where Mrs. Cummings’ class is?" Peter stumbled and stuttered, his heart was skipping and jumping so. "Can you?" she asked again. Then Peter realized that he was in Mrs. Cummings’ class. "Yes," he said, "I sure can."

And I say to you, "Yes, we can."

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

God of love and mercy, we don’t understand why there is so much suffering in this world. We grow tired of it. We feel the injustice of it, and anger swells up within us. Help us somehow to get to a place that is bigger than our pain, that is more far-reaching than our loss. Send us the comfort of the Everlasting Arms, that source of all that is, that we might have the courage to begin again and again and again.

So be it. Amen.

BENEDICTION 

May all your heart wounds be healed, that you might be an open channel of love.

Copyright © 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.