"Yearning" by Rev. Thomas Schade

[Memos from Rev. Barbara Merritt and Rev. Tom Schade]

M I N I S T E R ‘ S   M E M O

“Yearning”

A significant new study done at Dana Farber Cancer Institute has changed the
understanding of what people experience when some one they love has died.

For years, people have talked about “the grief process.” It has been
observed that people typically go through some general stages of grieving
someone they have lost.

For a long time, these stages were called “denial, anger, bargaining,
acceptance.” New studies have refined the understanding of these phases and
have highlighted an emotion that had not been included in the older models.

The new understanding is that the stages are “disbelief, yearning, anger,
depression and acceptance.”

First of all, I welcome the re-naming of the first stage from denial to
disbelief. The world “denial” carries a judgment, as though the grieving
person was unwilling to recognize reality and had slipped into some sort of
delusional stage. And in the world of chemical dependency and addiction,
denial carries a distinctly negative connotation. Denial is what is said
about someone who enables the self-destructive behavior of others. I think
that “disbelief” is both a more accurate and compassionate naming of the
feeling that a loved ones’ death “just doesn’t seem real.”

But the most important innovation in this model of grieving is naming
“yearning” as the most common emotion felt after losing someone. Examples of
“yearning” are pining for the person, missing them intensely and hungering
to be with them again.

It turns out that the time of grieving is more likely to be experienced as a
time of longing and yearning than a time of sadness and depression.

The hunger for another person, longing to be in their presence: are there
more powerful emotions than these. Often we do not even realize how much we
love another until we are swept away by the intensity of our yearning for
them when they are away.

I remember my freshman year in college, when I could be brought to tears by
Bob Dylan singing, “While riding on a train going west, I fell asleep to
take my rest. I dreamed a dream that made me sad, concerning myself and the
first few friends I ever had.” And I would remember my friends from my high
school church youth group, and simply ache with loneliness and longing.

My young man’s grief at leaving friends behind was but a foretaste of the
sadness of life’s later loves and losses. As I move among you, I hear the
broken voices and see the glistening eyes of those who are remembering, and
yearning for those who have left us behind. Their memories arise everywhere,
and with them come the sharpness of the missing, the longing, the pining,
the yearning and the hungering.

I think that this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay captures the pain of
yearning.


      "Time does not bring relief...”


<http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#top>
<http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#top>
<http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#top>
<http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#top>
<http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#top> Time does not bring relief; you all
have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,--so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

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