Social Affairs

Thinking Anew - the dignity of loss

Honouring our personal and collective grief

Photograph: Getty Images

Wendy May Jacobs
Sat Nov 19 2022 - 10:00

We arrive again at the end of the liturgical year. Tomorrow is the feast of Christ the King, our last Sunday before Advent begins. The gospel reading from Luke is the painful account of Jesus on the cross with the soldiers and the crowds and even those being crucified with him mocking and jeering and sneering at him.

November is that month when the daylight drains away and it can be easy to feel unsettled about the future, not least in these turbulent times. It is also the season when we focus on remembrance and loss, looking back at those whom we have loved and lost, honouring our personal and our collective grief.

As we live the liturgical year we are always given what we need. This spiritual practice of remembrance is very wholesome. It is important for us to acknowledge our mortality, and those who have gone before. Most of all, our souls cry out to have our griefs and our losses honoured. When this cannot happen for whatever reason, a layer of loneliness is laid upon our existing sorrow.

This time last year I was in the Highlands of Scotland, and I visited a beautiful little chapel called St Conan’s Kirk, on the banks of Loch Awe. I noticed there a marble plaque on the wall, commemorating a young 19-year-old soldier called Ian Alastair Campbell who died in the second Boer War in 1899. He was mortally wounded while giving water to a wounded foe. Does this not sum up the heart-breaking pity of war? One minute our job is to kill our enemy. The next, we are giving our enemy a drink because he thirsts.

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This young soldier died in a war that we would consider shameful today – imperial Britain fighting colonial settlers over territory and gold and diamonds which belonged to none of them in the first place. In our own time soldiers have perished or been broken in unpopular wars. It must truly add to the anguish of those left behind or broken by the conflict when the wider culture no longer legitimises the cause. We all know that what is terrorism to one person is a legitimate war to another.

This is poignantly experienced by the main character in the novel Mornings in Jenin by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa. Her husband has been killed in a bombing in a refugee camp, and she has resettled in New York. The 9/11 terrorist attack happens, and the public outpouring of shock and sorrow (in which she shares) triggers an awareness in her of how, by contrast, her own husband’s death was accorded no dignity. “Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honour given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children’s loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity. And there was me ... with the disparate worth of my husband’s life. The disdain for my loss.” How bitter this neglected grief and how widespread this experience must be!

There are many other factors which can diminish the respect given to those who are grieving, such as when a person dies in prison or in disgrace or addicted or by their own hand – all these can stigmatise loss.

At this complicated and tender season, let us try keep our eyes quietly open, so we may be aware of the many different experiences of loss around us which we may not at first recognise, and weep with those who weep.

Jesus has already been there, as always. His death was a shameful one, designed to humiliate, a condemned man in the company of other condemned men. He has gone ahead of us. “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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