In the Sea of Mourning
A rant against (but also some grudging respect for) cucumber beetles—and a conversation on grief with an ethicist and an expert on spiritual formation
The 79th Day of Coronatide*
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Hey friend,
This is the eighth installment of this little scrapbook. Since several people have asked, if you missed it, you can find the fried rice recipe here. Folks are still sending me photos of their versions, which is awesome. And let me be clear: I hate peas, carrots, and corn in my own fried rice, but if it makes you happy, who am I to judge your lifestyle choices? Here’s a carnitas fried rice, which my friends April and Werner made for dinner on Tuesday.
Last week, I transplanted some yellow crookneck squash seedlings to my little plot in the community garden. Two mornings later, I found the plants transformed. Had some elves gone wild with a tiny hole punch? Was this an intriguing modern embroidery project, with a bold abstract pattern of plant-based textile and negative space?
My eyesight has never been all that great, so it took me a minute to identify the culprits: Cucumber beetles. The yellow-and-black beasts had invited themselves to a $free.99, all-you-can-eat, squash-plant buffet.
I’m at the beginning of the process of learning about and from this land. It’s still telling me new things: How the sunlight hits it and when. How the soil feels on a dry, warm day and what changes come after a brief, hard rain. What other creatures inhabit this place, both the ones I like (hello, fat robin! hello, plump worm!) and the ones I don’t (I killed six cucumber beetles in thirty seconds, and still there were more). Whether this land might soon need some rest (I’m pretty sure that’s a strong yes).
Here’s the truth, though: I hate the cucumber beetles not because they’re eating my plants but because they’re devouring my illusions. Why can’t they just leave me with my Instagrammable farmer fantasies? This is how it really works when I dig in the dirt: Every single day, I’m humbled. Every day, I’m reminded to pay closer attention, to ask better questions, to discern what I can control and what I can’t, to understand where my effort matters and what must be left to God and the elements. I haven’t even harvested anything yet, and I’m already being taught again about loss.
As I said, this is the eighth installment of this little scrapbook. Among my people, the number 8 is supposed to be auspicious. It’s the luckiest of all, a harbinger of prosperity, a numerological prophet of success. Yet looking at the world around us, I don’t see much luck or prosperity or success—not in ways that matter, not by any holistic or just definition of human flourishing.
My hope with these letters has been to share some beauty, work through some conundrums (or do you prefer conundra?), and invite you to my garden and to my table. My hope has been to stir some hope—in me and in you. I want that hope to fuel us for our journeys through the sorrows of the world, and I mean it when I say “through” the sorrows, because I’m convinced that there is no healthy way around them.
This week has brought many sorrows—and these are just the ones in the headlines: The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the long, ugly story of which this is just the latest grim and hate-filled chapter. The continued destruction of Hong Kong and its unique way of life. The enduring trials of my LGBTQ+ siblings; a writer who’s quite respected in some evangelical circles wrote a few days ago that we should thank God for COVID-19 because it means there won’t be any Pride parades this June. And of course the ongoing, multifaceted toll of COVID-19 itself.
COVID-19 has now killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S., a terrible milestone that should give us pause anytime we’re tempted to talk about our exceptionalism and greatness. Is it because we don’t want to face our failures that we’ve done almost nothing to mark the toll as a society? I don’t mean a perfunctory lowering of flags to half-staff or a halfhearted tweet. I mean genuine mourning and shared sorrow over the deaths of 100,000 humans—people with stories and experiences, traumas and joys; parents and children and lovers and friends; bundles of hope and disappointment, with promises kept and dreams unfulfilled.
I wanted to dig into this more, so I called two wise, wonderful teachers from very different backgrounds. Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns, a professor of spiritual renewal and Christian formation at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee, is a daughter of the American South. Dr. Grace Yia-Hei Kao, a professor of ethics at the Claremont School of Theology in California, grew up in a Taiwanese immigrant church community. Together, we wrestled over questions of grief and mourning amidst Coronatide. Below, you’ll find excerpts from that conversation, edited and condensed. Come and eavesdrop, and share your thoughts and reactions in the comments.
As always, you can email me at jeff@byjeffchu.com. I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together. I’ll try to write more again soon.
Much love,
Jeff
*I’m counting my days from March 10th, when my governor, Gretchen Whitmer—also known as That Woman in Michigan, First of Her Name, the “Mothering Tyrant of Coronavirus Dystopia”—declared a state of emergency. Though some parts of Michigan are reopening, we’re not all there yet. So, for the love of God and the sake of our neighbors, may we continue to #StayHome.
Grief and Mourning in the Time of Coronatide
Jeff Chu: I’m wondering how you define grief and mourning. When I think of grief, there’s a physicality to it—a weight. And mourning is the resulting action, the processing of that grief.
Cheryl Bridges Johns: Grief is something that comes upon you almost suddenly. You’re seized with grief; you’re overcome with grief. Someone you love has died or someone you love is divorcing you.
Grace Yia-Hei Kao: When I think of grief, I think of more than being sad. It’s deep, deep sorrow. When I think of mourning, that seems almost like grief squared. People talk about going into a period of mourning, like a stage of life. It has the connotation of ritual. In some places in East Asia, there are professional mourners that you can hire who will cry for you and bow for you and do all these things.What I’ve read is that this is how you pay respects. Just like when we celebrate in this culture, there’s champagne for those who drink or flowers on Valentine’s Day, because that’s the marker—if that is the form required for the ritual, you need to have people bowing and crying. Even if we’re not accustomed to the practice of hiring professional mourners, we could still have an empathetic response to people’s tears. If you see people wailing, don’t you sometimes feel drawn in?
Jeff: They set the tone. They show the amateurs how it’s done.
Grace: Yes! They’re literally professionals! In my context, I’m seeing different ways to remember the dead. All the customary things we would do—have a funeral, a memorial service, a viewing of the body—these are the things we cannot do now, in the interests of public health. There is grief, but there cannot be the public mourning in the ritualized sense we’re accustomed to.
Cheryl: I like what Grace said about mourning being grief squared. I think mourning is the state of giving grief its space without grief completely taking over your life. Grief can be the disruption; it’s like the problem that has you by the throat. But I think grief needs to settle into something. I see the rituals as part of that. Like the old Irish wakes where people would spend days telling stories and eating and talking about the deceased and going through that portal of grief. Mourning is where you settle in, a space you inhabit. But our culture is such an anti-mourning culture. We allow for a moment of grief, but you’d better get over it quickly. We don’t even like to have funerals; we have celebrations of life.
Grace: We’re over 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 now. I remember a meme that came through. Someone was saying, “I want the young people of the US to know, when 9/11 happened and 3,000 people were instantly killed, we eulogized the dead and we were devastated.” It was a comment on the lack of nationwide mourning. That for me is tied to the difference we feel about a crisis event being one of war and a crisis event being death from disease. Folks killed in war make headlines in ways that folks killed from, say, sanctions or malnutrition do not. We have different affective responses.
Cheryl: I do believe mourning takes us into the companionship of the Spirit. There’s a sense of being accompanied in it. My question is, Where is the church corporately holding the grief? Where I am, people are looking at it like it’s a foreign thing. It’s not my skin color. It’s not my geographic location. How can we grieve what lives have been cut short and hold that space? In the 1800s, Protestant churches, especially those on the frontier, had this section called the mourners’ bench, where people who were seized by grief—or conviction or guilt—could sit. We don’t have that liturgical space to hold mourners now. We don’t have a mourners’ bench. We mourn individually.
Jeff: What’s the cost of mourning individually but not collectively?
Cheryl: We were already at empathy deficit going into the pandemic. There’s a sense of hardening of hearts. There has been malformation. I’ve seen people say things like, “How do we even know these deaths are real? I don’t know anyone who has died.” Are they not willing to acknowledge the reality of the death? If you don’t acknowledge that reality, how far does that put you from the person? Very far!
Grace: The hardening of hearts and the malformation are real.
Cheryl: Are we at some point going to be shocked into acknowledging grief and mourning? As long as some people can still travel first class and others go down in steerage, there will be that non-acknowledgment.
Jeff: It seems some people finally took the virus seriously after Tom Hanks tested positive. It might take the death of someone whom that segment of the population truly respects for this to become reality.
Cheryl: It’s a failure of love of neighbor. It turns out we only want to love the neighbor we know. The others aren’t worthy of our love. And if your skin color is different, that’s another thing. Tom Hanks is a white man. Down here in the South, we’re still dealing with the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery. It’s all symptomatic. I saw a hardening of hearts in some Facebook discussions about this young man’s death. There was the sense of, “He should not have....” Again it was distancing from him in a way that put them more in affinity with the white guys that killed him. Lack of empathy and lack of mourning at least go hand in hand. The Bible says, “Mourn with those who mourn.” I can’t mourn with someone I don’t have empathy for or love.
Jeff: Empathy is harder when it’s just numbers, not faces, bodies, and stories. I know some news outlets have tried to tell the human stories of those who have lost their lives. The New York Times devoted its front page to naming the dead this past Sunday. And I follow a Twitter account called @FacesofCOVID. But the rising death toll seems just like statistical background now—like something normal.
Cheryl: NPR has been doing some storytelling. Those people are getting chances to tell about their loved ones who are dying.
Grace: It’s not a good situation for us to normalize the deaths of 100,000-plus people in the US alone from COVID-19. We shouldn’t become hardened, because in many, many, many of these cases, these deaths were preventable. They were connected to unwise decisions at the level of government officials, co-morbidities connected to social inequities, and different social groups’ different abilities to be healthy. That is the danger from a policy perspective. Different governors and mayors have been talking about reopening and easing “lockdown” measures. Some are as bold as to say, “Sure, people will die!” As an ethicist, I would not want people to be indifferent about suffering and death. That would be a huge cost.
Cheryl: Huge. But that’s where we are. The people I have seen in the streets and yelling the loudest are not the ones who are hurting the most financially; they’re just inconvenienced. One of my former students said that she now understands Nazi Germany, comparing stores being closed to life in Nazi Germany. One of my former students! How did I miss it? What did I do wrong?
Jeff:We’re talking about how we’re failing. How can we do better? How are you showing up and showing care?
Grace: In the Christian tradition, we talk about the ministry of presence. But in this time, the meaning of “presence” has to be rethought because physical presence is physically dangerous. So much of my business and professional life is now on Zoom. For that reason, I associate Zoom with work. So if I want to connect with my friends, I’m handwriting notes and dropping them in the mail.
Cheryl: I’ve been doing more of that too. I’m showing up by listening, especially to my students—praying with them and grieving with them. I’m trying to show up by wearing a mask and staying away from things that I need to stay away from. I’m showing up by not showing up. Churches are opening up again around here, but neither my husband nor I feels comfortable with that. I don’t want to be part of something that could harm others when I could have avoided it. And I’m trying to be still before the Lord. Stillness is what I think the Lord is calling me to. Even quietness. I haven’t done so well on the latter.
Jeff: What do you mean by stillness?
Cheryl: Being outside. Watching the sunset. Seeing the bats come out. I remember when I lost my brother and my sister and my father and my mother, I could not tolerate music or crowds. It felt like a violation of my mourning space. I’m sort of that way now. I just want to sit in the quiet. I know I’m privileged. I’ve got space to do that on this little farm. But little things like looking out a window, if you’re in an apartment, has a way of taking down the blood pressure and the anxiety. For me, nature is the friend, the soulmate, the counselor, the companion.
Jeff: That’s an inward way to deal with grief. What about appropriate outward ways? That’s hard for me, because in Chinese culture, you’re not supposed to stand out.
Grace: Similar to you, there are certain norms I internalized in my family and in my Taiwanese immigrant church community. Harmony is and remains a key value. You’re not really supposed to stand out or stick out or to see yourself as the exception to the rule. You’re not supposed to be the squeaky wheel.As your question pertains to grief and mourning and public expressions of it, there’s a certain immigrant Taiwanese Christian sensibility which is modeled after Japanese sensibilities (given Taiwan’s colonial history). You’re just not supposed to draw attention to yourself. There has always been a reserve, a sense of restraint and even-temperedness, that’s been prized.
Cheryl: It’s all cultural, isn’t it? I’m seeing some rage in my students and in former students and minister friends. Rage is a way of mourning too. Anger, rage, and grief are sometimes close companions—and it’s not unhealthy. I think it’s very healthy.
Jeff: I see the benefit of creating space for anger. But we also see a lot of anger online—and I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re talking about.
Cheryl: I’m talking about anger that will be channeled toward goodness, not anger that is just thrown out without any real purpose other than catharsis or taking someone down or finding a target and shaming that target. I’m also talking about other kinds of spaces. My husband and I are thinking of creating a Facebook page for the people in our denomination who have died. We are wanting to create that space because people haven’t had funerals, to post a picture and say something and allow others to hold sacred. Recently, I asked in one of my classes, “Can you share with the class one person who died? Tell us their name and something about them.” And for just a few minutes, we held that person corporately and we remembered them. We need spaces like that. What if every pastor did something like this every Sunday, whether their church is meeting in person or Zooming or whatever? Hold space every week to remember someone who has died. Say their name. How can we hold a wake?
Jeff: People would have to be willing not just to tell stories but also to receive them.
Cheryl: That would be a way of mourning with those who mourn. I don’t think we’re getting creative about it because we don’t care. If we cared, people would be thinking of more ways to do this. It’s back to the lack of empathy. I recently heard a man say that the coronavirus has really hit hard in all the places where they have Democrat governors. “They’re all liberals!” That dehumanizes. The people who suffer aren’t seen as fully human.
Jeff: Grace, as an ethicist, how do you weigh appropriateness of expressions of grief?
Grace:I can think of inappropriate ones first. There’s that term “oppression Olympics”; someone posts about incident X and the response is to belittle that post because he or she or this other group has it so much worse. In general, I would not advise that. It doesn’t build empathy, and it doesn’t show appropriate concern.It also leads to a situation where folks always have to be thinking, “I have to censor myself because people can’t take my pain.”I would hope that, instead of playing oppression Olympics, we would be able to compassionately be with those folks, wherever they are. It’s hard. A friend of mine, her husband dropped dead of a heart attack going on 4 or 5 years ago. From time to time, she posts about how difficult it still is for her and her surviving sons. Then she’ll also post that she’s noticed people are unfollowing her. While I don’t know the details, I could easily see that happening. Frankly, it can be hard for us to be really be with people who are in pain for a prolonged period of time. Sure, most of us get the period of flowers and cards and meals and visits. But then, to hang in there for intense grief, that’s a really, really hard thing for most of us to do.
Cheryl: It’s so complicated, especially on social media. What I find myself doing is responding by pausing for a moment and saying, I’m sorry this is so hard. I’m going to hold you right now in my heart. I don’t just think it’s good to just scroll by and say, “They just need to get over it.” It can be tempting, though.
Jeff: That’s our tendency, I suppose, to rank grief.
Grace: We do have a tendency to rank the suffering and the loss. And there may be some wisdom in doing so, as the loss of this vacation that they planned or some other thing that came from a place of privilege can and should be appropriately put into perspective of all of life’s potential woes. Ideally, one would recognize, for instance, that your inability to not go on your hoped-for cruise is not the same kind of disappointment and loss as someone who is out of work or whose business has just collapsed. Still, I would encourage us to be reflective of why we’re doing that. Are we trying to ration how much we will care about someone’s expression of loss based on the value we have assigned to it? I would encourage us to do some self-interrogation of that need to rank.
Cheryl: We have a tendency to rank the grief of others, but we also have a tendency to rank it in our own lives. We have to check ourselves. Maybe when we’re hard on ourselves, we are also hard on others. Sometimes we complain about something and we’ll catch ourselves and say, “I don’t have any right to complain!” Because there are deeper tragedies. But I’m learning it’s also okay to say, “This really sucks in my life,” without going to the next step of feeling bad for feeling bad. It’s okay to feel bad. It’s all right.
Jeff: It’s hard to know sometimes what to share and what not to share, especially on social media.
Grace: Not everything needs to be shared instantaneously. Just like not every witty thing we have to say needs to be posted or published, there’s a lot of wisdom in discerning who to share your losses with. It’s important to think about the capacity of the person you’re sharing your troubles with. If you know that they have experienced an even more horrendous loss than you have, this is not the time to say you can’t go to your favorite five-star restaurant and you’re so sad about that. I haven’t said anything publicly about my griefs. I’ve made my own calculation that, in the sea of mourning, Facebook is probably not the place for me to share my losses.
Jeff: A lot of people aren’t posting from that place of wise discernment. Any advice about how to do so?
Grace: I was raised in a culture where the burden of communication rested mores on the listener than on the speaker. People would say things indirectly or give other, nonverbal cues. So as a listener you would have to discern: Is that person getting tired? Are they dancing around something? Mainstream American norms tend to put the burden of communication on the speaker.
Jeff:I’ve noticed that many readers now accept little responsibility for how they read a post or a text, which forces the writer to imagine every possible context in which something might be read or every possible angle from which it might be perceived. But maybe there’s something both to knowing your audience, if you’re the speaker or writer, and empathizing with the writer, if you’re the listener or the reader.
Cheryl: Perhaps I would see it more as a shared burden. There’s the burden to help translate into language that others can understand. And there’s the burden to enter the other person’s world if they can’t cross the bridge and enter into yours. I think narrative is a good way: Can you tell me the story behind this? Can you tell me what happened? Slogans are not so powerful, but narratives are. They’re a good doorway.
Jeff: Grace, you used the phrase “sea of mourning” a little earlier. That’s so powerful. How do we navigate it wisely?
Grace: I would encourage us to have the empathy for people where they are. For instance, that sixteen-year-old who just really wanted to go to prom and had a date and had the dress and is not able to experience that? As someone in my mid-40s who has been to a gazillion dances, it would be easy for me to be dismissive. But to that sixteen-year-old, it’s devastating. Do we have internal resources where we can step into the place of the other, whether it’s the owner of the small business that’s collapsing or the sixteen-year-old whose prom can’t happen or the student whose school will be online indefinitely?
Finally, if you’re swallowed up in your own pain, I would hope you would have the courage to ask others to care for you. I was really impressed by the boldness of a friend of mine. She has published before about being bipolar and struggling with depression. Recently she posted on Facebook: I’m having a really hard time. I’m anxious. I’m depressed. I would love to receive mail from you. If you would send me a letter, PM me for my address. That’s amazing! I don’t know if I would have the courage to do that, to declare my vulnerability so broadly. This person did, and good for her. A lot of people, including me, responded to her. If you are the person in that space, I would hope you would let people know. You’ve got to know yourself. You have to know what you need.
Cheryl: I love everything Grace said. I’d say “Amen” to that. Also, this is a time to try softer. Be soft with ourselves. If I didn’t get anything accomplished, if I’m just paralyzed by this pandemic—be soft on yourself. Be soft with the 16-year-old. Be soft with the people who are hurting. A spirit of gentleness is so important.
Jeff: Gentleness is pretty countercultural.
Cheryl: Gentleness is such a rare commodity. But people are so hungry for it. A gentle word turns away wrath—and it’s just not our native tongue. There’s something uniquely, deeply mysterious about a person who has a deep spirit of gentleness. I believe that it’s a good time to begin to foster that.