The following was derived from the foreword I wrote for a book called WasWillBeLand by Frederick Baus, an allegorical poem about the journey through grief.
“Despite the variety of ways we experience loss, the core experience of grief for all humans is the same. What we really lose are our hopeful visions of the future, the people and certainties we were sure would be there, and the expectations we had for our lives in that future—the imagined future that was but isn’t anymore.
“Loss is painful, but it isn’t something that can be avoided. It will be processed in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously. Even if the loss involves positive things, e.g., new babies who must become the centers of our attention; children who graduate from college, get married, and move to a city 1,000 miles away; new jobs with higher salaries—adjustment to our “new lives” takes time. It involves the letting go of what was—old dreams and comfortable routines—and the discovery of new possibilities, often ones we would not have sought without the loss, the re-envisioning of what will be for us.”
I woke today with fresh grief for the death of John Lewis, piled on top of loss I have been processing and responding to for years now about the state of our country and feelings of warmth I once had for many I once knew. I began the process of grieving the day I learned of this gentleman’s cancer (read that as the two words it comes from—gentle man), a signal that he might not be long for this earth. Part of my “pre-grief” involved imagining what life without John might be like and now I will find out if my imaginings approximate reality.
I learned to “pre-grieve” when the specter of loss arose because I am, as the English translation of an ancient Hebrew prophet wrote, acquainted with grief. From the time I was nine until I was 17, I would suffer the loss of eight people who figured in some important way to my sense of well-being and expectation. The last of that period was the unexpected death of my father, a man I never knew. With him went the expectation that I would someday hear from the horse’s mouth why he walked out when I was an infant, leaving a wake of despair behind him that included a child’s wondering why her birth seemed to coincide with his escape from responsibility.
From my vantage point as a white Southern woman in her 60’s who has never been consciously or subconsciously racist—I make that distinction because I am quite sure I have been unconsciously racist in not recognizing some of the mechanisms of discrimination that have operated in my world and the privileges I have enjoyed as a result of the luck of being born Caucasian—I have often wondered why I never thought people of color or different ethnicity or language, by virtue of their skin tones or other surface characteristic, were less in importance, less deserving of liberty, less in any way. I have come to think that it was a function of my early experiences of loss, of grief for undeserved mistreatment or ignorance.
In our country, at least, no subset of humans has been so mistreated. The fact that I am a woman who until 100 years ago could not have voted, the fact that in 1959, my mother couldn’t get a mortgage, the fact that although I was “gifted” with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity and an apparently large memory, I cannot to this day be a senior pastor of a church in the “Christian” denomination in which I grew up simply because I have two X chromosomes and no Y—all pale in comparison. We as women have surely been oppressed via the mendacity of similar lies told for centuries, many of us convinced that our worth is confined to our abilities to bear children, by a “male” god imagined by men. But, I’m sorry, ladies—our grief does not compare.
Let me hasten to say, though, although I grieve much these days, I still hope for the “new life” full of opportunities for goodness and justice we have not yet seen or accepted as the virtuous aspirations they are. Why in the world is this so? Because a young man whose skull was fractured simply because he dared to walk across a bridge in 1965 became a member of Congress and stood for 30 years as a beacon of that hope and a standard for the character sadly missing in too many today. Although his footprints will be forever huge, I look with anticipation to see another young person step up to take his place, and I wait in anticipation for the day—most likely from another vantage point beyond the veil—when the kingdom of God as truly described by a person of color from Nazareth finally appears on earth.
Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Prodigal Prophet 
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