The grief of leaving

A week before Christmas I went to a full performance of Handel's Messiah. One part that struck me particularly was the parts of Isaiah that are applied to Jesus, from the 'servant songs':

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief...

Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows!

and a bit further on:

Thy rebuke hath broken His heart; He is full
of heaviness. He looked for some to have pity on Him, but there was no man, neither found He any to
comfort Him.

Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow.

The main focus is on his bearing the sin and grief of others, in an atoning sense, but there's also a strong thread of Jesus' experience of rejection and abandonment. It set me thinking about how Jesus approached his own death. Even from a non-Christian point of view, I think it's clear that in the gospel accounts Jesus has set himself on a collision path with the religious leaders and the Roman authorities that can only end in his execution - just as it had for several self-proclaimed messiahs of the time.

It's easy perhaps to imagine that Jesus, believing in his special status and his victory over death, would be less worried about death that most people. Of course crucifixion is presumably incredibly painful and humiliating, quite apart from the tortures of being beaten and flogged. But does he lose anything important of himself? My guess is that he does - he loses his actual relationships with people he knows, what it is to be a brother, a son, a friend, a leader. What he gains by his death is incredible, but he still loses something as well. To me this an element of his deep sorrow in Gethsemane -- the tears, the prayer to "take this cup away from me".

If you'll forgive the transition from deep significance to light fiction, I was reminded of this when watching David Tennant's last episode as the tenth Dr Who. Discussing the prospect of being regenerated in a new body, he says that it's still like dying - someone else takes over his thoughts and being, while he dies and loses what he loves.

Having gone through the grief of staying - knowing from the day of first diagnosis that Jen was almost certain to die and leave me - I've started to think more about Jen's own experience, the grief of knowing that you'll die and leave those you love. At the time we were both so overcome with the weight of own situation, let alone the rigours of chemo and radiotherapy, that it was hard still to enter the other person's grief, even though I was right beside Jen the whole way.

It's tempting to imagine in the abstract that you could be calm about approaching death, and leave something to comfort or reassure your loved ones. In "The Time Traveller's Wife", Henry, who knows he's going to die at 43, leave his wife Clare a letter to opened after his death. In one part he says:

Please Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. Of me - put me deep inside you, and then go out into the world and live..... After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true anyway

Real life is harder than fiction. Death is uncertain. You might imagine that you'll be able to gather yourself to say or write some last words. At the start of July 2009, post-chemo, when Jen was found to have multiple secondaries, I was fearing that we might have weeks left, but our oncologist was talking about months. In fact Jen was dead within two weeks, and in her last week she was struggling to have energy to get through short conversations. Moreover, Jen was one for passionate engagement rather than cool detachment, and although we had conversations about how I'd go on after her death, I don't think she could have written a letter like Henry's.

Instead Jen was facing her own grief at dying and leaving us. As a Christian she could look beyond death and see the reassurance of something far better. Yet even that prospect did not somehow cancel out the loss. Whatever she has gained - and I trust that it puts everything else in the shade -- she has still lost what it is to be a mother, a daughter, a wife, and a friend, and those losses are permanent.

The last part of the Messiah is about victory over death, and it contains some of the most moving parts of the entire oratorio.

In the voice of the soprano:

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though worms destroy this body yet, in my flesh shall I see God.

Then in the voice of the bass, and to the uplifting sound of the trumpet, much better in the concert hall than any recording:

The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.