In Book Nine of his
Confessions St Augustine writes of a conversation with his mother, St
Monica, as they stood together by a window overlooking a garden. They spoke, he said, “with much dear tenderness,”
of God and heaven and eternity. It was
one of those precious moments in life when heart meets heart and it seemed as
though the two of them soared beyond time to embrace the Divine.
Finally his gentle, long-suffering mother said to her son that there was nothing now in this life that delighted her. Her unceasing prayer and her tears for Augustine’s conversion had been abundantly answered. “What am I still to do here and why I am here I know not...” she asked. Death held no terrors for her; heaven beckoned. A fortnight later, after a short illness, she died.
“I closed her eyes and there surged into my heart an unspeakable sorrow, which overflowed in tears,” wrote Augustine who was 33-years-old at the time. Overcome by grief he wept for his mother who had for so many years wept for him. In time his tears became, he said, “a pillow ‘neath my heart which found rest in them.” He was then able to pray for his mother with thanks, and ask God’s mercy on her whose only dying request was to be remembered at the altar of the Lord.
Who does not recognise the great sense of loss and the grief experienced by Augustine on his mother’s death? The unexpected departure of the one we love, the silence he or she leaves behind, the awful realisation that they are gone, gone forever, devastates us. Our life is irrevocably changed and will never be the same again. As Dietrich Bonhoffer wrote, “Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say God fills the gap; he doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, he keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of memory” (Letters from Prison).
“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said. Blessed as they who weep for their dear departed but weep not without hope. Blessed as, like Augustine, they pray for those they loved. Blessed as they entrust them to the arms of a loving God.
Blessed too are those who help the mourners to come through their sense of loss, their anger, guilt or depression, reactions that are not uncommon in the bereaved. One pastor, writing in The Tablet said that he considers the setting up of a bereavement support group one of the most significant pastoral developments in his parish over the past 10 years. “It allowed the bereaved to talk freely about their feelings,” he wrote. The group’s hope is to help the bereaved person not only to face the reality of death but “to grow through what otherwise could be an extremely destructive experience in their lives.”
Blessed are the sorrowful; they shall find consolation (Matt 5:5). Support groups like this help. So do letters, a word of sympathy, a quiet understanding presence. Our Lord, who wept for his friend Lazarus, sees our tears and knows the anguish and loss we feel. It was to a woman mourning her brother that he spoke the greatest word of consolation that the bereaved could ever need, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever has faith in me shall live, even though he dies; and no one who lives and has faith in me shall ever die” (Jn 11:25).
Sr Redempta Twomey is Assistant Editor of the Far East at St Columban’s, Navan, Ireland.
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