CHAPTER 9
Love never fails.
—1 Corinthians 13:8
In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to hear the clang of a bell resounding across the countryside as the ominous clouds of a thunderstorm rolled in. That was because people once believed that evil spirits were present in the tempest, and that the sound of a church bell was powerful enough to cause those evil spirits to flee.
In those days, church bells were named, blessed, baptized, and commissioned for service in the spiritual warfare that was waged in the air all around. It was thought that there was a supernatural force in the toll of a bell. The inscriptions etched on the bells told the story of their powers: “Fulmina Frango” (I break the lightning); “Fulgura Compello” (I drive away the thunder); “Cunctorum Vox Daemoniorum” (My voice is the slayer of demons); “Pestem Fugo” (I put the plague to flight).1
Because of this belief, it was also customary to ring a bell when someone in the community was on their deathbed or in extremis. This was known as the passing bell and to ring it was a tactic of offense against the evil spiritual forces that were thought to be particularly active at the point of death. It was also a call for the community to pray. If demons and devils were making a special effort to obtain possession of the soul of the sick, then a resounding bell and the intercessions of God’s people were a holy force to be reckoned with.
Thirteenth-century canonist William Durandus wrote about the deep sense of confidence that society had in their communal bells: “That by their sound the faithful may be mutually cheered on towards their reward; that the devotion of faith may be increased in them; that their fruits of the field, their minds and their bodies may be defended; that the hostile legions and all the snares of the Enemy may be repulsed; that the rattling hail, the whirlwinds, and the violence of tempests and lightning may be restrained.”2
In his famous Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne, who was convalescing after a life-threatening illness, tells us that the passing bell, no matter whose illness it is proclaiming, serves as a reminder to the whole community that every one of us is ephemeral. Because mortality is a universal human condition, we are all one. We share in one another’s sorrow and in one another’s mortality. “Therefore,” he writes, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
In extremis—to be at the extremity, at the point of death. An invalid, an old man, a woman in labor, a child weakened by disease. As they lay in their beds and teetered on the edge of eternity, the people of God prayed. While the passing bell may have waged war against the dark forces of the air, more often than not death still seized its victim. The commotion and tumult of the illness, the raging battle against mortality, would come to a crashing halt. Life on this earth was over.
But there is another bell for that moment.
Closure. Letting go. Resolved grief. Filling the void.
These are concepts I’ve never been able to really get onboard with. The fact is that years after my losses, I still don’t feel like I’ve come to a clear sense of redemption. That’s not to say I think I’m suffering from what some psychologists have called “chronic grief” or “prolonged grief disorder.”3 I’m no longer in shock, and the grief doesn’t typically impede my ability to function on any given day. But I still feel deeply and profoundly wounded by it all.
I was told that if I viewed my loved one’s dead body, that if I attended the funeral, that if I went through her things, it would help with the closure. Perhaps those rituals aided in my acceptance of what occurred. I suppose that’s no small thing. But closure to me indicates a cessation. Resolution implies that the dissonance of death has somehow harmonized, as if mortality made some sort of peace offering and now we are once again on friendly terms. Letting go feels like I somehow close the loop, that I bid grief farewell and move steadily along as if nothing has happened.
But all grief is chronic to some degree. Nothing fills the void of the person you lost. Contrary to popular belief, having a baby does not mentally and emotionally undo a previous miscarriage. Making new friends does not lessen the pain of losing a friend. Remarrying does not replace the deceased spouse. There is no “recovery” from that kind of pain.
It seems to me like grief has taken up permanent residence in my life, like a bad roommate who always leaves a mess, clutters up my well-ordered existence, and never pays her share of the rent. There’s no way to evict grief, nowhere for grief to go. It’s a parasite, a freeloader, a leech.
While the passing bell was rung as a herald of death, a different tolling, known as the death knell, was sounded immediately after the individual actually passed away. One purpose of the death knell was to communicate to the community who had passed away. In fact, the word “toll” is derived from the word “tell,” as bells were said to provide notification or “be tellers” of the news of death.
Different regions had various systems worked out for communicating the specifics, but generally speaking it was common for two strikes—or two “tells”—of the bell to indicate a woman had died, and three “tells” if a man had died. Tones of the bell had meaning too. Tenor bells were rung for adults and treble bells were rung for children. After a pause, it was customary to announce the age of the deceased with one stroke for every year corresponding to their age. Denoting the gender as well as the age was how people would know who had died.4
To set the sound apart from the ring of a typical church bell, a bell used for a death knell would be half-muffled. Part of the bell’s clapper would be covered with a leather muffler, which produced a softer chime.5 Bells were later tolled again at the funeral and burial of the deceased.
A bell was certainly not the only instrument used throughout history and culture to announce a death. The African tradition of beating the “drum of death” continued to be practiced on some plantations in the American South when a slave died. The sound of the drum of death informed the community of the loss and summoned mourners.6 Brass instruments were sometimes played at a church to announce a death, and we are all familiar with the mournful sound of taps being played to honor fallen military servicemembers.
The use of the death knell as a means of communication persisted well into the 1900s in Appalachia because telephones and other modern means of communication were so scarce in the mountains. One individual testified to the use of the death knell in Cades Cove, Tennessee:
You can feel the silence pass over the community as all activity is stopped and the number of rings is counted. One, two, three—it must be the Myer’s baby that has the fever. No, it’s still tolling—four, five, six. There is another pause at twenty—could that be Molly Shields? Her baby is due at any time now—no, it’s still tolling. Will it never stop? Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, another pause—who? It couldn’t be Ben; he was here just yesterday; said he was feeling fit as a fiddle—no, it’s starting again. Seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two. Silence. You listen, but there is no sound—only silence. Isaac Tipton. He has been ailing for two weeks now. It must be Isaac.7
Somewhere along the way, the death knell ceased to be a commonly practiced ritual, but the memory of it continued on through the ages as a well-known idiom in the English language. We now use it to note the end of an endeavor, to indicate something has met its doom. Some even mix and match their idioms and refer to a death nail, when really what they are probably getting at is a “nail in the coffin.” Same difference, I guess.
The death knell is cessation. It is the end. With it comes finality.
In one sense, death always happens abruptly. It is a clear moment, a before and after. Even if the illness is long and drawn out, the passing itself happens in the blink of an eye. One moment a person has breath, a beating heart, some sign of life, feeble though it may be. And then, suddenly, they don’t. Capacity for consciousness and brain stem function is lost. They flatline, expire, and pass into the unknown of the afterlife.
The finality of death stands in stark contrast to the ongoing nature of grief. Contrary to what the idiom would have us believe, a death knell was actually intentionally long and drawn out, a measured, plodding toll. It went on and on. The word “knell” is derived from the Old English word “cnyll,” which means “a sound made by a bell when struck or rung slowly.”8 The death knell is sustained, spacious enough for contemplation, for dread. It is haunting.
What is true of the ritual is true in life: Death is fast. But grief is slow.
In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced her famous Five Stages of Grief in her book On Death and Dying. Though critics have long questioned the validity of Kübler-Ross’s approach, citing a lack of empirical research, the Five Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) have become ingrained in our subconscious. They’ve provided a lexicon with which we talk about the complexity of the various emotions surrounding bereavement.
Even Kübler-Ross herself, in her final book, On Grief and Grieving, which she cowrote with David Kessler, noted that grief is much more complex than a simple understanding of the stages suggests. “They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages… There is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives. Not everyone goes through all of [the stages] or goes in a prescribed order.”9
The Five Stages is a woefully inadequate model and yet, despite its critics, the model may forever be a part of our vernacular when we speak about grief. Perhaps we are lured by the false hope that we might be able to categorize the journey of bereavement into five tidy stages that one can move through linearly and consecutively. It’s enticing to think we can methodically progress from stage to stage, acquiring mastery over one before we advance on to the next, ticking boxes as we go. Eventually all the boxes are ticked, and we graduate from grief.
But grief has a way of defying our most well-constructed strictures. Proverb 30:15–16 articulates the enduring tenacity of grief: “There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, ‘Enough!’; the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’” Death never seems to be satisfied. Grief doesn’t give up. It persists. You never graduate from grief.
Even when the initial anguish of grief has abated, all kinds of random occurrences can trigger a surge of sorrow: filling out family medical history paperwork; opening a kitchen drawer and seeing the napkin holders my grandmother gave me; cleaning the bathroom, where the smell of bleach takes me back to a hospital room; hearing a song come on the radio that I listened to while in a war zone; chatting with a new acquaintance who asks a simple question: “Do you have any siblings?” or “How many children do you have?” Learning to live with grief is learning how to navigate a million mundane, tiny, brutal reminders of what you’ve lost.
As we have seen, different cultures have acknowledged the duration of grief in their rituals. The Victorians believed that a widow should grieve two and a half years. My Iraqi friend Sargon shared with me that where he was brought up, if a close family member died, you were expected to grieve for a year, and to refrain from parties or wedding celebrations. In Jewish culture, a child grieves a parent for an additional eleven months—known as shnat ha-evel—after the first month of mourning. These timelines typically allow more space than the American norm of expecting someone to bounce back a few weeks after a loss. But even the most generous expectations fall short in acknowledging the lifelong nature of grief.
Six months after my sister’s death, when Tim and I were renovating our bathroom, we went to Lowe’s hardware store to pick out some accessories. I suddenly found myself weeping while looking at the toilet paper holders. Growing up, Rachel and I shared a bathroom, and we had one of those old-school chrome spring-loaded toilet paper holders. It was tedious to change and would shoot back in your face if you didn’t handle it properly. That device may have been the greatest source of our childhood conflicts. Neither of us liked to change it out, and we each would frequently leave empty tubes on the holder, hoping the other would deal with it. Seeing the simplicity of the dispensers they now had on display would have made Rachel laugh as we reminisced about our passionate sisterly rows.
How do you explain to the Lowe’s associate why you are crying in the bathroom accessories aisle? At funerals and memorial services, we are prepared to lose our composure. But how can you steel yourself or explain yourself when grief sneaks up in the most unsuspecting and inconvenient moments?
Meghan O’Rourke writes, “My mother’s death was not a single event, but a whole series of events—the first Easter without her; the first wedding anniversary without her… The lesson lay in the empty chair at the dinner table. It was learned night after night, day after day. And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.”10
These moments don’t go away. They keep happening. Just when you think you’ve moved past stage five, you are startled to find yourself tumbling back into stage one. You have not moved on; you have not healed. Yes, the shock may have worn off. The adrenaline surge of trying to survive may have subsided. But now you are on the grief hamster wheel. Now it’s just the steady hum of sadness that she is still, still, still gone.
The passing bells, death knells, and funeral bells fell out of common use for a variety of reasons. As urban centers became more densely populated, bells lost their effectiveness as a tool of communication. Neighbors didn’t know neighbors, so it became increasingly difficult to know for whom the bell actually tolled. Newspapers and telephones became more effective ways of informing friends and loved ones about deaths. And of course, now we have Facebook.
As we saw in the case of the Black Plague and the Great War, widespread catastrophic events impacted the use of rituals, this time, bell ringing. Significant smallpox and yellow fever outbreaks in the United States in the late 1700s led to ordinances limiting the tolling of bells. It was thought that the continuous, ominous sound of death knells and funeral bells would afflict the living with fear and weaken with dread those who were already sick with the disease. In 1793, publisher Mathew Carey wrote that in Philadelphia the funeral bells had “been kept pretty constantly going the whole day, so as to terrify those in health, and drive the sick, as far as the influence of imagination could produce that effect, to their graves.”11 Some rituals, even though they are meant to honor and aid in closure, can be demoralizing.
Two centuries earlier, the death knell and the excessive use of funeral bells were suppressed by the Reformers because they felt that ringing bells for the dead could too easily be construed as an invitation to pray for departed souls in purgatory, a thoroughly Catholic practice.12 As I’ve learned is often the case, the church has a tendency to stamp out rituals they find are rooted in bad theology. I can understand this to some degree. But there’s an important theological truth beneath the ritual of the bells that I’m afraid was also lost.
Our ancestors acknowledged the spiritual battle that rages all around us, particularly in times of death. It was a fear of demons that led them to “conceal” themselves in black clothing and avoid staring into the mirror for too long. They would ring bells to counteract the evil spirits that hovered around a deathbed. Our forebears had a respect for the reality of spiritual warfare and took ritualistic measures to engage in it. I understand that the tactics they employed may have seemed more like pagan superstitions to some, and I know the Reformers were eager to put an end to Catholic customs they viewed as misguided. But I’m afraid in our efforts to regulate this ritual, we’ve forgotten how susceptible we are to malevolent powers when we are in grief.
I still believe that the ruler of this age prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour. The mourner is the perfect prey, their faith upended, their sense of security shattered. When love is bereft of the object of its affection, it can easily wander off into the void. The Enemy’s tactic is total warfare. Nothing is off-limits or untouched.
Bells wage war. Rituals wage war. They name the enemy and chart a strategy to outflank, attack, and subdue. But bells, like so many other rituals, have been decommissioned, discharged from service. “My voice is the slayer of demons.” My apologies to John Donne, but I can’t help but wonder for whom the bell tolls now. Anyone at all?
Nicholas Wolterstorff writes about the loss of his son to a climbing accident in his book Lament for a Son. He began writing in the immediate aftermath of the loss, but later he reflected on how his grief changed over time: “Rather often I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote. The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over. Grief is an existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides.”13 I suppose it’s the difference between moving on from versus moving forward with. Wherever I go, my grief goes with me.
Love is a powerful thing. First Corinthians 13 tells us a lot about what love should look like. It’s patient. It’s kind. It doesn’t envy or boast. It’s not proud and it doesn’t dishonor others. It’s not self-seeking or easily angered. It doesn’t keep a record of wrongs or delight in evil. It rejoices in the truth and protects. It trusts. It hopes.
But what does love look like when the object of the love no longer exists, at least not physically in time and space? Is love just a memory? Is it past tense? Is it delusional to love someone who is gone? Plenty of people have reflected on the fact that grief is not the absence of love. Rather, it is simply love reborn, remade into something new.
Paul’s conclusion on the matter of love is what impresses me the most. He says that it “always perseveres” (1 Cor. 13:7). The Greek word Paul uses here is hypomenei, which means “to remain under.” He finishes his exposition by saying that “love never fails” (13:8).
Love never fails. That has always been a fairly intimidating statement to me, as if Paul expected real love to always be perfect, to never make a mistake. But Greek scholars have noted that the common translation here is somewhat inadequate. They believe that the phrase is more accurately understood as “Love never comes to an end.” It should communicate the idea that love never disappears or diminishes. It will never cease to be. It will never become invalid or obsolete.14
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve—even in pain—the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.15
What does it mean to grieve? I’ve heard the word, said the word, and written the word a million times and yet as I type this, it occurs to me that I’m not entirely sure what it means. Is to grieve to feel sad? To miss someone? Is it reorganizing your world around a massive hole?
And what exactly is the work of grief? Freud was the first to introduce the concept of “grief work.” It was his belief that hypothetical psychic energy was bound up with the memory of the deceased. Grief work, in his estimation, was when little by little, memory by memory, the bereaved released their attachment to the deceased and set free the energy that was bound up with them.16
As much as I’ve read about this, I’ll admit my understanding falls a bit short. To me, the work of grief is less about release and more about learning how to hold on in a way that is healthy and whole. To grieve is to love. The labor of love, in the face of unspeakable loss, is the grief work. Meghan O’Rourke notes that the word “grief” is derived from an old French word meaning “to burden.”17 Grief is learning to endure, to bear up under the beautiful burden of love.
Hypomenei, “to persevere,” is the same Greek root word James uses when talking about perseverance (hypomone) in the first chapter of his epistle: “You know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (1:3–4). The word literally means “to remain under.” It means “to stay.” To carry. To grieve is to endure. To grieve is to remain.
My friend Bev is especially passionate about this Greek word hypomone. After twenty-two years of working in the aid world, responding to hurricanes, wars, and epidemics, she knows a thing or two about bearing up under a heavy load. She tells me she first learned the concept of endurance as a kid growing up in the Yukon of Canada, a wild and frozen landscape where it wasn’t uncommon to have bears as neighbors. When I ask her what perseverance means to her, she tells me she pictures a traveler far from home, pressing into the cold Yukon wind as the sun sets. “Perseverance is staying on the trail,” she says, trusting that it will lead you where you need to go. Perseverance is leaning into the elements. She says it’s unwavering and consistent, never swerving from its purpose.
Hypomone is not passive, as a term like “patience” might indicate. Rather, hypomone is an active noun. We always laugh that Bev is the best teammate to send into a disaster zone first, because when you give her a mission, she is like a dog after a bone. She leans into the elements and carries the purpose forward.
This disposition of hers came in especially handy when she was diagnosed with stage four cancer last year. When it came to confronting the challenge of cancer, Bev was a dog after a bone. She bore up under the burden of treatment and illness with tenacity and strength. She committed to the path of healing, physically, mentally, and emotionally. She didn’t run away or try to bypass the pain. She stayed in the game. She remained fully present in the journey every single day, and still does.
Bev was one of a small number of heroic people who fought on the front lines of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. As a water and sanitation technician, she worked in a treatment unit and saw firsthand what Ebola does to its victims. She told me that at one time, when the unit was bursting at the seams with patients who were experiencing the most violent stages of the disease, she had a moment where she completely froze. She said it was like all the sound dropped out of the room as the chaos swirled around her. She remembered that she could almost see the spiritual forces of good and evil swirling frantically above her, the demons summoned at the imminence of death, the angels rallying for a counterattack.
Love kept Bev’s feet grounded when she could have fled, when she could have hopped on a plane and gone home. Love “puts the plague to flight.” Love is the “slayer of demons.” Love endures. Love remains behind when everyone else leaves. Love stays on the path. Love carries. Love never fails.
Sometimes, the thing you thought would kill you… doesn’t. So you go on living as the walking wounded.
“But, Amanda, how are you doing… really?”
It’s a question I’ve come to dread because the answer is so complex. People will never be satisfied with the response “I’m okay!” They’ll assume I’m avoiding the question or hiding my struggle. They are trying to show they care, trying to probe in order to support.
But sometimes the answer “I’m okay” is genuine. Because I am okay. And also, I am not okay. Herein lies the concept I’ve struggled most to articulate as I write and talk about grief: how you can be two things at once; how you can be both not okay and okay at the same time; how you can be simultaneously broken but strangely mended. I do not have closure. I have not resolved anything. Redemption has not presented itself to me in a neat, tidy box. I have not passed through all the stages. I have not graduated from grief. I did not earn an A+.
And also, I am breathing. I am surviving. I have not given up.
In his book The Other Side of Sadness, psychologist George A. Bonanno challenges conventional views of the grief process, including Kübler-Ross’s five stages and Freud’s notion of “grief work.” Bonanno posits that in reality, human beings are psychologically well equipped for resilience. He estimates that only 10 to 15 percent of bereaved individuals are likely to struggle with enduring grief reactions that interfere with their ability to function in daily life.18 That means most people are able to move forward with life, and even find happiness in spite of the grief they carry.
It feels a bit too reductive to me to say that grief is simply overcome by resilience. Frankly, I think it’s almost impossible to explain the mysterious and sacred phenomenon of healing from grief. Once again, words fail us. The life of grief is learning to live with a peace that passes all understanding. It is learning to live with an affliction for which there is no cure. You integrate the wound into your daily life. You learn to live with a gaping hole in the world.
I feel that slowly, over time, I’ve developed some sense of agency, like the sorrow no longer controls me. Grief will always be unruly from time to time, but little by little it’s become more and more tame. It’s a bit like a domesticated cat now, and less like a roaring, prowling lion.
I’ve come to believe that just because I’m devastated doesn’t mean I’m not coping well. Perhaps this is what Paul is getting at in 2 Corinthians 4 when he describes a life in which we are hard pressed, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down. We even carry death in our bodies, but it is the death of Jesus that eventually gives way to life. Yes, the pressure, persecution, and perplexity of life may continue, but we do not have to be crushed by it. We are not endlessly despairing. We are not abandoned. We are not destroyed.
Mary Oliver, in her poem “Heavy,” states:
It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—19
She goes on to write that embracing the burden of grief requires practice and a sense of balance, much like bearing any other physical burden. It also necessitates a keen attention to both the sorrow and the joy that invade our grief-filled lives.
Wendell Berry writes in Hannah Coulter:
I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough… But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.20
I’m not sure I would put this weight down even if I could. I think of the people I’ve lost. I loved them. I still love them. To say it was easy or that I was past it would be to diminish the love we shared. Because of my love for them, I will endure the long, slow, plodding toll of grief.