Lessons from My Father: How to Grow from Grief

Today would have been my father’s 70th birthday. Instead, he left us far too early, in December of 2019, taken by cancer. He was the best of us, a brilliant leader with even bigger heart; I know too well how lucky I was to be his eldest daughter. As I grow older, I reflect on the many lessons he taught me. I plan to share more of these lessons, as they inform the decisions I continue to make as a person, mother, friend, colleague, leader. But today, feeling fresh the ache of his loss, I will only talk about what I learned from his death. Something I think he could teach us all.

Grief is a funny thing. C.S. Lewis once said, “No one ever told me grief felt so like fear.” And it does, in a way. I’ll be driving along in my new life in Switzerland — a life he never got to see — and start listening to a song that reminds me of Dad. Suddenly my chest is in a vise grip, I am barely able to breathe, I feel like I’m drowning in waves of sorrow and loss that leave my body cold and hot and weak.

Grief is intermittent, though. I don’t wrestle with it or tell it to go away. Grief is a companion, sitting nearby. Grief watches me experience great joy, with my daughters, as we laugh and dance. Grief sees me find hope, in new beginnings and a steady approach to wholeness. And Grief never goes far away, so when I least expect, it will come to settle on my shoulders like a mantle. I am enrobed in sadness. It’s the kind of sad that just takes time.

But I am my father’s firstborn daughter. So I reflect on what that means. What are you trying to teach me? What am I supposed to learn here, Dad?

I consider the words of Robert Browning:

“I walked a mile with Pleasure,

She chattered all the way.

But left me none the wiser,

For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow,

And ne’er a word said she;

But oh, the things

I learned from her

When Sorrow walked with me!”

I think of how my father traversed his own grief, to see what I can learn. How I watched him, when he was maybe just a little bit younger than I am now, soften as he allowed pain to teach him. I was with him when he saw his own mother take her last breath. I remember so well the keening cry that ripped from him, my strong father. The aching wail that he let loose. I recall how he responded when I was in a motorcycle accident at 13, in Indonesia, and for a moment he thought he could have lost me, too. How it shook him awake.

So when I seek answers for how to deal with my dad’s death, by remembering how he lived, what I learn is that he used grief to fuel his compassion.?

Francis Weller, a psychotherapist and grief expert, explains it well: "The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That's how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I'll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I'll become saccharine and won't develop much compassion for other people's suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible."

Grief I have in spades. Gratitude also. I’ve experienced many different kinds of losses over the past few years, from every angle. And I’ve also been awakened to real and abiding joy. Do I just allow both to live together, in my heart? How do I do this, Dad? How did you?

To my father: Dad, in those last few years with us, especially after the cancer diagnosis, you were so easily brought to tears. Your heart was softer than I’d ever known. You knew the end was near, and love and pain were ever near the surface. And yet you were also at your most powerful — when you loved so fiercely, so generously, so truthfully.

Your softening was the fabric that lent Truth its winsome power. Your life, well lived and well loved, now gives me grief and gratitude.?

When I think of a future without you in it, I am undone. Yet on your birthday, I remember again how truly lucky we are that you came into this world on October 9th, 1952. And that you kept growing and gentling through the years, to show us what it meant to honor righteousness with humility, to seek peace with justice, and to speak truth with grace.?

I will love you for the rest of my life.?

I know you loved us to the end of yours.