Three Rules for Surviving the Ruins
From the Wisdom of Science and the Bible
I threw up into the toilet the night my husband told me he was having an affair.
After a few hours of processing his confession in a state of disbelief, I started shaking. I was confused. My mind seemed fully intact, but my body seemed to have a mind of its own. I was lightheaded. I needed to lie down, but then I was hit with nausea. I ran to the bathroom and knelt at the foot of the toilet bowl gripping its sides. I vomited over and over again till there was nothing left. My body continued to shake with violent spasms. I was exhausted.
The tile floor at the foot of the toilet looked as inviting to me as the softest feather bed. My face and chest felt like they were on fire. I desperately wanted to feel the cool of the tile on my cheek. I spread out on the bathroom floor and brought my knees to my chest.
I didn’t pray. I didn’t call out to God. In the fetal position, I rocked back and forth to ease the spasms and cried.
I didn’t know it then, but this was grief.
He came for me, his presence as heavy and impenetrable as river mist. It didn’t just settle over me, it seeped into my very pores.
By the time you reach middle age, he is no stranger. At least, he is no stranger to me.
Grief is the companion of trauma and loss, and we cannot move through the world without his presence. The moment we choose to love, to care, we open ourselves to the pain of losing. It leaves us with a haunting question:
How do we move forward when we lose what matters most?
The reality is that we will move forward whether we want to or not. As a minister in the field for over twenty years, I have watched grief transform people. Some emerge forever embittered. You can see the anger carved into their faces, expressions frozen in a permanent winter of pain.
Others come out different—softer, kinder—as if they looked the reaper in the eye and reached a certain understanding with him. Some even learn to laugh again, because the reality of death has made the gift of life all the more precious.
Emily Dickinson explores this in her poem, Because I Could Not Stop for Death. She portrays Death as a polite, civil companion sitting beside her in a carriage. They travel through childhood, middle age, following the path of the sun:
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –We passed the Setting Sun –
As the ride continues, the mood shifts. The speaker is dressed in gossamer—the gown of the dead—and driven toward a “House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground.” The poem reminds us that from the moment our lives begin, death rides with us. His presence shapes the human experience, and every experience must eventually end.
Our cultural coping mechanism is to do the opposite of Dickinson: we simply don’t think about it. We focus on the “good times” and ignore the dark passenger in the carriage. This works perfectly well until grief plops in your lap, uninvited and aggressive, leaving you woefully unprepared.
This is why we need these three rules. If we know grief is inevitable, we must be prepared. Think of these rules like carrying a navigation device through a large and dangerous city; do not walk through life without the tools to find your way.
