When Mourning Comes

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Those are the words of Jesus. For Christians, there is no higher authority on wisdom. Many Bibles even take care to highlight things Jesus said in red so we all know that those words are special and carry a great weight behind them.

“Blessed are those who mourn…”

Mourning is awful. I get up from a night of fitful sleep filled with unpleasant dreams. I stumble through my morning routine. I feed the animals. I write about unpleasant feelings in my journal. I consider whether to make a coffee. In the middle of all that mundane routine, I want to scream. The world has changed! Things should be different! Why is the world going on as if nothing happened? Why do I have to care about what to eat or if I’ve had enough water? The world changed, and none of this changed with it. It feels unfair. It feels wrong. It feels disrespectful to just…go on with life.

Mourning is awful. I am sitting in my chair trying and failing to read a book. Tears are suddenly rolling down my face. I am sobbing. It takes several seconds to realize that I have suddenly thought about how my sister often referred to herself in the third person as “your ol’ sis.” Somewhere in my mind I remembered this. Then, I realized I will only ever hear that voice in my memories, and my body began to weep with neither my permission nor my awareness.

Mourning is awful. I wake up from my third dream of the night where I learn this was all a misunderstanding. It wasn’t my sister that died. It was someone else. This was all a big misunderstanding. She was actually just in the hospital, but she’s better now. She can explain what happened. When I wake up from that dream, I realize the awful truth. Again. My dream logic collapses as my mind wakes. But part of my mind insists that it should be okay to just hold out a little bit of hope. That won’t hurt anything, right?

Mourning is awful. So why on earth would Jesus say that those who mourn are “blessed?” That seems patently untrue. I don’t feel blessed. I feel cursed.

And then I think about how humans have been feeling this loss for as long as there have been humans. When Abel died, Eve and Adam felt this same loss. When Mary watched her son die right in front of her, she felt this same loss. When each of our great-, great-, great-grandmothers died, her family and friends felt this loss. All of them felt this same confused emptiness, this same stumbling loss, this feeling of profound endings. In a very real sense, these feelings are part of what it means to be human, to love deeply and without reservation, to love in spite of death itself.

Why are the mourners blessed? Because they shall be comforted. It’s very easy to read this as a reassurance. This too shall pass. Time will heal your wounds. It won’t always hurt like this, and yes, all of that is true no matter how much it doesn’t feel true. But that’s not the comfort, the wisdom, I see right now.

Mourners are blessed because other humans know that pain from experience, and they do a very human thing in response: They reach out to comfort those who eyes are blinded by catastrophic loss. Strangers and loved ones alike reach out instinctively to hold the person racked with sobs. They reach out via text to say, “Don’t worry about work at all. We will handle this. I am available 24/7. Tell me anything you need.” They quietly put a bowl of pretzels in front of the person who hasn’t eaten in hours. We do all these things because we are human. We know what it is to love someone. We also know what’s it’s like to lose those we love. We connect with each other in our times of deepest need, and in depths of despair, we are presented with the best of what it means to be human. We are blessed in our pain with a kindness that seeks only to help without expectation of reward. In our lowest moments, we see the face of God in the faces of those around us who took a moment to comfort us. And that is the blessing.