Does Anyone Ever Get Over Anything?

You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories
-Stanisław Jerzy Lec

When we first meet Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, he is strung out on lotus flowers, unable to resist the chemically induced amnesia. He wishes to not remember the war he won so decisively, the life he used to have but does not now deserve. And so he eats to forget. In the forgetting, the fabled events vanish from existence — or at least so far as Odysseus is concerned they do. His memories accuse him, so the only consolation he can find is in the oblivion of nothingness delivered one petal at a time.

Odysseus has found a way to silence the past, but few would confuse it with health.

Grief is a most unwelcome houseguest — showing up unannounced, inviting itself in, stretching out on your couch, eating your cheese curds — but it shows up just the same. It does not respect any restraining orders we put on it, either. Many people never recover from their parents’ divorce. Or the one that got away. Or a car accident. Or anything, really.

The Atlantic’s David Frum recently produced an interview with his wife Danielle Crittenden entitled “How to Survive Losing a Child,” which documents the couple’s grieving process after they suddenly lost their daughter when she was thirty-two. In the interview, Crittenden speaks to the misconception that grief is ever done and done with. “The goal of most grief books is for healing, to get you, as they say, ‘through it.’ And then, apparently, you’ll come to some eventuality of acceptance, or you’ll be fine,” she says. “And that just seemed to me palpably untrue and palpably unhelpful.” For her, grief was not a means to an end that resulted in personal growth. It was like being transported to an alternative universe. 

The loss of her daughter changed Danielle Crittenden forever. The way she lived, the way she thought, the way she woke up in the morning all shifted dramatically from that point on. “As people’s lives move on, they expect you to move on. But you don’t really move on. You just quietly nurse this horrible pain.” In other words, grief is not a season that comes and goes. It is, rather, awkwardly adjusting to a new life in exile where one must grow new roots.

The movie Sheep Detectives centers around a flock in rural England whose beloved shepherd is mysteriously murdered. Up until that point, the sheep are completely ill-equipped for suffering. Whenever something remotely uncomfortable happens, the sheep perform a mysterious ritual in which they collectively wipe the negative memory from their minds. They have trained themselves to forget the troublesome past in order to cope with the present.

The film’s director, Kyle Balda, spoke of how the flock’s desire to avoid living with painful memories struck a personal note with his own mother’s death. For the first year, he put her death out of mind, busying himself away from grief until he could not keep it at bay any longer. When he first read The Sheep Detectives script, Balda immediately identified with the instinct to circumvent the pain. He wanted the movie to help provide families a space to talk about death. “As much as it might hurt,” he said, “it’s a gift to be able to remember your mother’s face.”

No one ever really “gets over” anything. Outside of Odysseus’ lotus stupor or the sheep’s memory wipe, what we grieve can never be entirely forgotten. Nor should it be. Health is not a forgetting but a remembering differently.

A friend of mine who lost her husband several years ago told me that loss stays with a person, but its immovability is not always a bad thing. Not only did losing her husband fundamentally change her. The process of healing from her loss has changed her, too. And how exactly has my friend healed? By fixating on the memory of her husband. Rather than look away, she fixates on her wound. Does it still hurt? Yes. Only, over time, slightly less. Catharsis is not a pain killer as much as a wound healer.

God offers us consolation in not letting go. Jesus insisted that we never let go of what happened on that fateful Friday. Any holy communion service pays heed to his command to continue “a perpetual memory” of his death. There is no shelf life to this memorial. We are to obey his command to remember — not for a thousand years or even five thousand years – but until he comes again. Each Sunday, we relive his death. We refuse to get over it. Should we ever attempt to “move on” from the crucifixion, we would be moving away from the source of our salvation. Ironically, in order to experience true healing, we go deeper into the wounds of Christ. 

Garrison Keillor’s famous retelling of a Thanksgiving memory comes to mind in which a family member, Uncle John, is asked to bless the food:

Everybody in the family knew that Uncle John couldn’t pray without talking about the cross and crying. Sure enough, Uncle John prayed, talked about the cross, and cried. Meanwhile, the rest of us shifted nervously from one foot to the other and longed for the prayer to end. All of us knew that Jesus died on the cross for us, but Uncle John had never gotten over it.

Each Sunday, when we kneel before the altar, what was once hard to endure is now sweet to recall. The death of our Lord. Here, it is much better to be reminded than it would be to forget. As much as it might hurt, it’s a gift to remember our Savior’s face.