The mad midnight moment

 

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis in the opening line of A Grief Observed, written after his wife’s tragic death; a way for Lewis to survive the “mad midnight moment,” as he described it.

As I shared in a previous column, “Take it all down,” (Issue January 16, 2021), one of our daughters is struggling with cancer at age forty-two.

I feel my heart has emerged raw under the surging, glacier-like grind of grief across its vulnerable surface. A grief that equates to relentless mental suffering.

As a man of faith, I immediately identify with the title of Sheldon Vanauken’s award-winning bestseller, Severe Mercy, recounting Vanauken’s loss of his young wife, Jean, to a mysterious illness. The couple were close friends of C.S. Lewis, whom they met at the University of Oxford.

As Severe Mercy attests, there is so much that goes on “underneath the flow” inside a person who is grieving.

C.S. Lewis confesses, “Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

New York Times bestselling author John Michael Green’s narrative in his book, The Fault in our Stars, suggests, “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

I have found protracted grief to be exhausting. It feels more as if it is dismantling me than defining me. Maybe, in truth, it is disarming me. Words crumble under its tortuous, overlying pressure.

One of the best-known biblical stalwarts, Old Testament Job, who certainly knew the bitterness of grief and loss, wrestled with God, the “watcher of humanity.”

While Job did not reject God, he did challenge and accuse Him, claiming, “… mountains wear down and boulders break up, stones wear smooth and soil erodes, as you relentlessly grind down our hope.” (Job 14:18) The poetic book of Job excavates issues near to the heart of every human who experiences suffering.

Antiquarian bookseller Henry Wessells reflects, “We learn substance and worth through others’ eyes.” Certainly this is true in observing Job’s circumstances.

Alison Nappi suggests, “Your grief is your love, turned inside-out. That is why it is so deep. That is why it is so consuming. We have all kinds of ridiculous judgements and rules about grief, loss, and healing, but the truth is that grief shows us just how deep our love goes. When your sadness seems bottomless, it is because your love knows no bounds.”

My heart agrees.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act 4, Scene 3, the character Malcom, designated heir to the throne of Scotland, cries out to the loyal Scottish nobleman, Macduff, after Macduff learns of the loss of his family at the hands of Macbeth, “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”

That was my experience April 30th. My heart broke. I was admitted to Region’s Hospital for heart surgery.

It has been a heartbreaking, agonizing fourteen months watching the life ebb from the once robust frame of our beautiful daughter and, while she continues to valiantly cling to this life, my father’s heart could not keep pace. Too much deep seeing. Too much grief.

Platitudes played out, like Job, pleading prayers remain. Blessings are now deciphered in moments, not days. There remains a silver strand of light stretched ever so thin across an unsettled midnight sky, our fragile humanity hoping to postpone the “mad midnight moment.”

We remain a family who are not without hope in this life, Thessalonians 4:13-14.