CHAPTER 2
Sighing has become my daily food;
my groans pour out like water.
What I feared has come upon me;
what I dreaded has happened to me.
I have no peace, no quietness;
I have no rest, but only turmoil.
—Job 4:24–26
To know yourself is a gift.
Imagine a world where you had never seen your own face. Perhaps you had seen an obscured reflection of yourself rippling in a dark pool of water or a gentle stream. You had observed the length and width of your shadow on sunny days. But the various shades of color in your eyes were unfamiliar to you. You wouldn’t know the exact contours of your face or the shape of your smile. You would be well acquainted with the faces of others, but not your own. Your self-perception would be based solely on the reactions and descriptions of those around you. You really would have no certain idea of how you appeared to the world.
Now imagine an object that would change all of that.
Mirrors are magical. Peer into the history of this commonplace household item, and you’ll find a world of mystery. Derived from the Latin mirare and mirari, the word “mirror” means “to look at” and “to wonder at, admire.” Historians believe that the first mirrors may have been invented eight thousand years ago in what is now the country of Turkey and were made of smoothed obsidian stone. Two thousand years later, the Chinese were making mirrors of polished bronze. Modern-day mirrors are made of glass, silver, and aluminum.
Over the years, mirrors have been valued for much more than their ability to reflect a person’s countenance. Many cultures used them as a tool for seeing the future. The Mayans believed mirrors provided a window into the world of the gods and deceased ancestors. The Chinese believed mirrors could dispel evil spirits and bring fortune to a home.1 To this day, breaking a mirror is seen as a bad omen.
Laborious and expensive to create, for most of human history mirrors were possessed by only the wealthy elite. It was just in the last few centuries that the average household gained access to their own images. It’s hard for those of us raised in a world of compact mirrors, smartphone cameras, and social media selfies to relate to this absence of personal images. I know exactly what I look like. Perhaps too well. Self-reflective by nature, even self-obsessed, my generation may relate more to the mythological character of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. But imagine the moment of awe and transcendence in seeing your reflection for the very first time. It is no wonder mirrors hold such a powerful space in our minds.
For reasons historians can’t precisely explain, multiple cultures have had customs and rituals surrounding mirrors in the wake of death. Traditions from India to Ireland, from Germany to Cajun country, mandated the immediate covering of all mirrors in the house when a loved one died. Mirrors were to be draped with crape, black mourning cloth, or simple bed linens.
The origins of the practice are mysterious and unclear. Oral history and folklore suggest multiple explanations. Perhaps the most common purpose in covering mirrors was to keep the deceased from seeing their reflection, lest they somehow be prevented from entering fully into the afterlife. The fear was that they’d be trapped in that thin seam between the living and the dead, belonging to neither world, eternally homeless. Since most people in the past died at home, all mirrors in the house were covered so that the loved one could be fully released unto death.
In a way, the death of a loved one positions us at a precipice. At this boundary line, we stand between what was and what will be. Often, it is excruciatingly difficult to accept this new reality. Maybe the act of covering the mirrors as a way of allowing the dead to proceed peacefully into the next life is less about their unwillingness to move on and more about our need to let them go. Perhaps we are the ones who are trapped in the in-between. We cower and wait and deny when, really, what we need is to proceed into a new life, a life without the person we love. We move into our own afterlife. It is life after the life of the one we love. We are never the same again.
I care a lot about what people think of me. Too much. Perception management is my favorite pastime. I’d much rather be the hero than the victim. I like people to think of me as someone with a good head on her shoulders, the person you can count on most when things are flying off the rails. Maybe it’s just me, but I suspect most of us are born with this propensity to try to prove ourselves to ourselves and to one another. And maybe to God.
For me, it’s an inclination that I’m certain was exacerbated by years of working with humanitarians. In my experience, it’s fairly common for aid workers, social workers, emergency healthcare workers, and first responders—the folks who show up when all hell breaks loose—to make every effort to maintain a brave and stalwart exterior. The traditional way of proving your brass in the field of aid work is to appear tough and somewhat unaffected by suffering. Seasoned aid workers “push through.” In their minds, vacations are for sissies, time off is for the entitled, and therapy is for the fragile. Only novices cry at the sight of a slum or a refugee camp. At least, that’s how many of us think.
In her book The Idealist’s Survival Kit, humanitarian psychologist Alessandra Pigni observes that aid workers have no problem sharing with incredible candidness personal stories recounting bad bouts of malaria or stomach amoebas. It’s true. We’ll divulge all the gory details of the time we lost our lunch on a UN flight, or the time we spent an entire week on the floor of a latrine in some far-flung corner of the world. But we will never talk about the refugee camp that wrecked us emotionally, the AIDS orphan who stole our heart, or the aerial bombardment that left us forever jumpy at the sound of fireworks. Pigni writes: “There’s a form of heroic narrative that is somehow built into the non-profit work culture… Talking about personal suffering is taboo among many do-gooders. People would rather be infected with the plague than admit that they are mentally and emotionally shattered.”2
Why is it so hard to admit that we are shattered? Why am I so embarrassed by my grief? After all, I’d spent my career trying to convince aid workers to be more vulnerable! Why, when my own world crumbled, did I become so hell-bent on maintaining my dignity, on not allowing bereavement to get the better of me? My natural predisposition to curate, to perform, to “toughen up,” and to self-scrutinize went into overdrive. The temptation toward vanity may be especially strong when we are required to reckon with the humiliation of death. We “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”3 We refuse to admit what we all know to be true. Death can get the better of you, steals the very best of you, in fact.
But oh, did I rage.
In some traditional Jewish homes, the mirrors are still covered during shivah, the weeklong period of mourning after the death of a loved one. One reason for this is a conviction that those in mourning should be given the space to focus solely on their grief and their love for the person who died.4 The mirror might interfere with that process, distracting the mourner with superficial concerns about appearance or vanity. A mourner might be tempted to check their hair or makeup, might become preoccupied with the dark circles under their eyes or the hollowness in their cheeks. They might begin to worry that others are judging them. They might begin to judge themselves.
Pride makes a terrible companion on the road of grief. Grief and trauma responses are not a performance. There is nothing to prove. Jen Pollock Michel writes, “We don’t get good at grief. Suffering is inventive.”5 Bereavement is rarely a flattering look. No one ever becomes totally proficient in sorrow. It makes fools of us all, can make us feel like we are going crazy. Death, King Solomon tells us, is unyielding (see Song of Songs 8:6). Grief just doesn’t quit. It’s unrelenting.
The writings of Jewish mystics underscore the belief that staring obsessively at one’s reflection can lead to arrogance. They teach that the act of gazing in the mirror can give power to evil spirits, which are particularly prevalent during seasons of death and mourning. It was thought that spirits might even attach themselves to a reflection if a mourner peered at themselves for too long.6 This is another possible explanation for why mirrors were covered in a shivah home. Self-scrutiny leaves us especially vulnerable to attack by the spiritual forces of darkness.
I know well the “demonization” brought on by grief. The feeling that you’ve been exposed or violated. The loss of control. The wounding, the exploitation.
The feeling that you are going mad.
Celtic mythology tells the story of a beautiful young woman named Mis, who had raven black hair, deep dark eyes, and pale porcelain skin. Her father was the powerful ruler Daire Doidgheal, who set out from his homeland in Europe to invade Ireland and fight the famed warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill. The fierce battle lasted a year and a day on the western coast of County Kerry, Ireland. Fionn eventually defeated Daire and his warriors. In the aftermath of the bloodbath, Mis, who had traveled to Ireland with her father, frantically searched through the dead and dying bodies on the beach, desperate to find her beloved father.
At last, she found his decapitated body. Overcome by her grief, she flung herself on his corpse and began licking his wounds as if she were an injured animal. When she realized he was gone from her forever, her spirit broke and her mind slipped into a world of madness. She howled and screamed, rising up into the air like a crazed bird. She flew away from the beach and into a desolate mountain range in western Ireland that would someday take her name.
There, among the vales and peaks of Sliabh Mis, she lived as a wild creature, growing fur and feathers and long sharp claws. She would tear apart any animal or human she met and could run as fast as the wind. She had shape-shifted from a beautiful young woman to an untamed beast. Grief was the conduit for her grim transformation. She was so feared by the people of County Kerry that they dared not go near the forbidden mountains of Mis.7
Mythologist and folklorist Sharon Blackie writes:
Sometimes madness seems like the only possible response to the insanity of the civilised world; sometimes, holding ourselves together is not an option, and the only way forward is to allow ourselves to fall apart. As the story of Mis shows, that madness can represent an extreme form of initiation, a trigger for profound transformation… This old story shows us a brutal descent into darkness during which all illusions are stripped away and old belief systems evaporate, and in doing so it suggests that the extremities of madness or mental breakdown, with their prolonged, out-of-control descent into the unknown, might offer us a path through which we can come to terms with the truth.8
Here’s the truth: Grief changes you. Even if you don’t descend into full-on madness as Mis did, life after deep loss can feel like madness. The day after my sister died, I awoke from a fevered sleep, took a shower, and combed my hair. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember which side of my head I parted my hair on. I’d been parting my hair on the same side of my head since the mid-’90s. I must be going crazy, I thought. I peered into the mirror, and I hardly recognized myself. It was as if I’d aged twenty years in three weeks. I’d lost nearly fifteen pounds and any confidence I’d ever had that I could remotely predict the future.
For months, I felt like a zombie. There was a constant ringing in my ears and time seemed like it had come to a grinding halt. I couldn’t keep track of anything. I was constantly losing my keys, my purse, my phone. For months, I would forget what I was saying midsentence. I would get mixed up in meetings at work and stumble ineptly through presentations. My email in-box would pile up. I would begin typing responses but then be unable to decide what to say. And then, when friends or colleagues would show concern or ask me if I was okay, I would feel insulted and embarrassed that the facade of fortitude wasn’t holding up like I thought it was.
Grief can upend domestic status and wreck family structures. Spouses become widows, daughters become orphans, siblings become the only child, as I did. I didn’t know how to live without a sister. Our family of origin had been reduced by 25 percent. How do you pick up the pieces of a shattered family structure at a time when you have no energy to rebuild anything?
I would get angry at people, snap about things that never used to bother me. Minor inconveniences, like a clogged drain or a bill that needed paying, would send me spiraling. I had almost no capacity for stress and my feelings were easily hurt. Any character flaw or personal struggle I’d had to begin with was exacerbated.
It wasn’t just my behavior that changed. My worldview began to shift. Truths I once held dear no longer seemed reliable. My theology felt shaky. Faith narratives began to give way under the weight of so much bewilderment. In many ways, when it came to my beliefs about God and myself and the world, I felt like I was starting again from scratch. Minuscule doubts became colossal; tiny uncertainties transformed into monsters.
Grief is like water. It follows gravity. It finds the lowest part of you and hollows it out even more. It exploits your weaknesses. Grief goes where it wants with or without an invitation. It seeps into the empty spaces. It cannot be harnessed or redirected, at least not easily. It branches out from the headwaters of the main event into hundreds of tributaries. Few areas of your life remain untouched. New losses are discovered almost daily. Life progresses without the one you love in it, and you miss them all over again with every new season and every turn in the road.
So how does the story of Mis end? A gentle young harpist named Dubh Ruis went searching for her in the woods on the mountainside. He built her a shelter of branches and moss. He played his harp for her and offered her bread. He took her to a pool of clear water, not to show Mis her hideous reflection, but to wash her clean. He kissed her and held her until eventually, over time, she transformed back into a lovely woman again, not the same as before but beautiful in a new way. The young harpist guarded Mis’s humanity. He called it forth. He was present and patient despite the savage nature of Mis’s grief. Mis was remade by love. She was loved back to life. Yes, death is unyielding. But, as the bridegroom Solomon writes, so is love.
Most scholars agree that the first book of the Bible ever written was Job. It is compelling to me that when God set out to reveal Himself to humanity through the written word, the first topic He wanted to address was the problem of pain. There is a tenderness in that choice, an acknowledgment that the universal human experience is suffering. Grief is an ancient sentiment, as old as time and as ubiquitous as breath. Whether you are wealthy or poor, godly or godless, foolish or wise, you will know the kneading pain of loss, catastrophe, or illness at some point in your life.
Job is the personification of bereavement. His wealth and possessions are lost to marauders and firestorms. His children all die in a windstorm. His health is overtaken by an excruciating disease. Satan has it out for him. In the story’s telling, the veil that divides the physical and the spiritual realms is lifted, and we are given a behind-the-scenes view of the battle that rages around us, the struggle that “is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).
As the story unfolds, we find that Job is not alone in his grief. In two short verses in chapter 2, we meet his wife. She speaks briefly in a manner that seems mocking of Job: “Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9).
These are infamous lines, well known by a church that is wary of the wanton words of women. John Calvin referred to Job’s wife as “Satan’s tool,” and Augustine called her “the devil’s assistant.”9 I’ve tended to agree with those assessments. I’ve always dismissed Job’s wife as unregenerate, unfaithful, weak, and fickle. I’ve scoffed at her inability to rise to the occasion.
That is, until I experienced grief.
Put yourself in the place of Job’s wife for a moment. The life she had built shoulder to shoulder with her husband was lost. Their financial security was wiped out. Her children, all ten of them, were lost in one day. The bodies she had birthed into the world, the mouths that had nursed at her breasts, the souls she had loved and nurtured were crushed all at once in a moment of natural violence. If children are the heartbeat of a mother, it’s a wonder that her heart didn’t stop that day. I imagine the disbelief, the unbearable agony. I imagine how desirable death must have seemed to her in that moment. We cannot talk about the suffering of Job without acknowledging the suffering of his wife. She must have been driven nearly mad with mourning.
We meet this woman even as her husband, Job, is walking through the rituals of grief. He has shaved his head and torn his garments. He has worshipped. When his wife approaches, Job is sitting in the ashes, scraping his wounds with a piece of broken pottery. It is from this place of ancient ritual that Job hears his wife’s outburst, and then inserts a word of grace into her life: “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak” (Job 2:10 ESV). Theologian Christopher Ash notes, “In kindness he does not actually call her a foolish woman. But he says that what she has suggested is not worthy of her. She has spoken under stress, as if she were a fool.”10 Job must know his wife to be wise and certainly not a fool. But grief has changed her.
Then, from this realm of ritual, Job asks a simple question that invites his wife into a space of wisdom and acceptance: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10).
I cannot excuse the words of Job’s wife. Nor do I condemn her. I know the foolish and hateful thoughts that arise from a place of maddening grief. I remember feeling resentful of recovering COVID-19 patients who came off ventilators, because my sister had never come off her ventilator. I remember cursing the Duchess of Cambridge, who announced she was pregnant with her third child, even as I mourned the loss of my first. The day after I arrived home from Iraq, I threw a broom at Tim’s head because he had not swept the living room floor to my standards (apparently, my standards of cleanliness become significantly higher than normal in the immediate aftermath of trauma).
There are angry thoughts, vindictive thoughts, thoughts that are beyond comprehension under the normal circumstances of your life. I remember thinking at one point, as Job’s wife did, Maybe I should just give up. That thought was not worthy of me. And yet, there it was: Death seemed to be suspended before me as a merciful option. The invitation was strong; at times, even stronger than the invitation to live.
Most of us probably feel like we don’t have the luxury of succumbing to a complete and total breakdown. There’s no time for it! Bills need to be paid and babies need to be cared for. People depend on us. That’s a heavy burden, but also, perhaps, a grace. It keeps us tethered to the world.
Wendell Berry writes this in his book Hannah Coulter about a young woman whose life is marked by grief: “The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life… It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.”11 Life, with all its demands, responsibilities, and yes, joys, insists that we press on.
It used to seem strange to me that family members of the deceased are listed in the obituary as “survivors.” The term seems to imply that you were struck by the same malady as the one who died, only you pulled through it somehow while they succumbed. My grandmother struggled with pneumonia in her final days, and my sister battled the flu and static seizures. I didn’t experience either of these illnesses at the time, and yet I am referred to as a survivor. The term “survivor” denotes withstanding some kind of disaster, a shipwreck or a car crash or a terrorist attack. It indicates a near miss, a brush with death, or a close call of some kind. It seems to say that death had plans for you, but those plans were thwarted through some divine intervention or miracle of human strength.
I understand the term a little better now. Grief is, in many ways, a fight for survival. You do battle with death, wage war against hopelessness. Instead of quitting, you get up and put one foot in front of the other. You go to counseling. You pray. You cry on the shoulders of friends and take a walk. You watch reruns of Seinfeld and change your kid’s diaper. Perhaps most importantly, you give yourself grace. You endure. Survival is the only real option.
There are some even darker and more foreboding legends that account for the tradition of covering mirrors after death. Some Jewish historians attribute the practice to the belief that the angel of death had visited the household, and that if a mourner saw the reflection of this grim reaper, they, too, would perish.12 This is not the only tradition that cites danger in the mirror for loved ones left behind. Many cultures maintain the belief that if a relative or friend sees their own image in a mirror while grieving, they will be the next to experience severe illness or even death.13
As it turns out, some people cover the mirrors in order to survive.
There are some catastrophes in life that create a before and an after. We all know the moment, the thing that changed us so irrevocably that it feels like we have led two lives. The life before seems to have existed in an alternate universe. The one after is perilous and unknown, but it is here to stay. We find ourselves in the aftermath of an atom bomb explosion, desperately searching for the “silver lining to the mushroom cloud,” as my brother-in-law, Dan, likes to say.
I’m not sure we ever find it.
Grief changes us. It was not a change I invited into my life. It was not a change I was ready for. Nevertheless, there it is. I am not the same.
I didn’t like my new self at first. People ask me sometimes if I sense my sister’s presence still, if I am haunted by her ghost. I am not. But I am often haunted by the old me, the ghost of my former self, my former life. I miss the me who didn’t know what it was to lose something I loved so much, who didn’t know in her bones how fragile and frightening life can be. I liked that Amanda. She was nice. She was sharp and witty. She was responsible and usually on time to things. She was fun.
Perhaps our ancestors’ fears of looking in the mirror after a personal loss were not unfounded. When a loved one dies, you die a little too. But this death to self, at least in the spiritual sense, is a familiar motif for those of us who read the Bible. We should not fear it or resist it. In fact, this is precisely the paradox that grief introduces. We must fight to reject the invitation of death, must insist on our own survival. And yet we must also embrace the idea that we are no longer who we once were, that our old selves have died. We are new.
The death to self to which all followers of Christ are called, whether blessed or bereft, is a death to self-reliance and to egotism. It is a death to religious performance and pious achievement. It is a letting go of our expectations and of our tightly held personal agendas. It is a release of our careful curation but also an embrace, instead, of authenticity.
Somehow, someway, God makes room for new life. Little by little, God remakes us. This process of resurrection is most hindered by our pride, our self-righteous resistance. We have to be willing to accept the untidiness of it all, to succumb to its slowness, its disruption, its lack of quick conclusions. Like Mis, who was loved back to life with time, intentionality, and the tenderness of the one who cared for her the most, we can find a new way of being in the world. We can be remade by love.
“It has to get messy before it gets clean!” This is a mantra my mother would repeat with cheery conviction every time we undertook the process of spring-cleaning at our house. She’d strip the beds and empty the bookshelves, pull out all the broken toys and half-eaten graham crackers from beneath the furniture. Brooms, mops, vacuum cleaners, and dust rags littered the floor. Life was upended until it was put back together, sparkling, orderly, and brand-new. It had to get messy before it got clean. As my sister once wrote, my mom’s mantra is “a philosophy that pretty much sums up every meaningful experience of my life.”14 For me, this includes grief. You must accept that the house is being turned upside down. It has to get messy before it gets clean.
You may not like who you are for a while, maybe a long while, after grief. It is wise, I think, to cover your mirrors after the death of someone or something you love. Suspend your expectations of yourself. Stop the performance. Stop worrying about appearances. Live fully into the new normal. Ask your friends to cover the mirrors for you. Accept grace from others, and show grace to yourself.
I do not think we can say of grief, “This, too, shall pass.” There is no going back. A new landscape has been carved by grief’s rushing water, and if we are to survive, we must make a home in it, however that might look. For a time, it may feel like a wilderness. But there is an invitation to wisdom and acceptance in this wasteland. There is a new you to discover, and it may be a holy encounter. And in fact, the wilderness is a great place for death and rebirth, for getting lost and then being found.
And sometimes, like our ancestors’ experience of glimpsing their reflection in a mirror for the first time, the encounter may be transcendent.