Mine Is Not The Loss They Ask About

Eleven people will ask your wife how her mother is doing.

They will be right to. That is a real loss and it belongs to that family and it is the one the room knows about, and every one of those eleven will mean it warmly.

And nobody is going to ask you about yours.

Because yours does not have a slot. He was not family. He was a friend, of a particular kind, for a long time, and the world has no form for that. There is bereavement leave for a cousin you saw twice. There is none for a man you spoke to four times a week for nineteen years.

So you will stand in a room full of people who are kindly attending to a grief, and yours will be in the room with you, and not one person in there will know it is there.

Let me say the first thing plainly, because I think nobody has ever said it and you have half accepted the opposite.

The size of a grief is set by what the person was to you, not by what the relationship was called. Those two things come apart all the time and almost nobody talks about it, and a man in your position ends up quietly concluding that he is making too much of something.

You are not making too much of it.

And before anything else: if these months have taken you past what one man can hold, 988 is a crisis line and it is answered, and a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust is the right room. Nothing here stands in for a qualified human being.

I am distressed for thee, my brother

There is a lament in Samuel for a friendship, and the fact that it is in there at all is the point.

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. (2 Samuel 1:26, King James Version)

My brother Jonathan. He was not his brother. That is the first thing to notice: David reaches for the nearest available word and it does not fit, and he uses it anyway, because the language did not have what he needed.

And then he says it plainly: thy love to me was wonderful. He is describing a friendship, and he is grieving it at a volume that the categories of his own time did not provide for, and he does it in public, in a song, that was then taught to a whole nation.

Nobody in the text tells him he is overstating it.

You are not inventing a category, and Scripture put a lament for a friendship into the public record. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a grief that has no correct name, and it is written into 2 Samuel 1:26 that a man borrowed the word brother because the language had nothing better.

And notice the word he opens with.

You have a grief that Scripture states plainly, and the Holy Spirit receives a distress that no form accounts for. The written word never once measures it against anybody else's, and 2 Samuel 1:26 begins with I am distressed for thee and does not qualify it once.

What having no slot does

Now let me be exact about the specific damage, because it is not the same as ordinary grief and it should be named.

An ordinary loss comes with a set of things attached. People ask. There is somewhere to be on a particular day. There are sentences other people know how to say, and there is a period afterward of being treated slightly differently, with nobody needing to be told why.

Yours has none of that. There was possibly no day. The news may have come late. There may have been no way to say, at the time, why two weeks went the way they went, and a different reason may have been given.

So every part of the grieving has had to be done privately, without any of the ordinary supports, by a man who has additionally been managing a general impression that he is fine.

You have carried the whole of it without a single one of the usual supports, and 2 Samuel 1:26 was sung out loud rather than kept in. The Spirit of God is present in a grieving that had to be done entirely in private, and the written word gives a man a public song for a loss that had no official standing.

And here is the second thing. Because nobody asks, you have almost certainly not said one true sentence about him out loud in months.

And a grief that has never been said out loud does something particular. It stops feeling real. Men in your position frequently report that after a while they begin to wonder whether they are exaggerating it, because there is no external evidence anywhere that it happened, and the only account of it is inside one head.

You were never exaggerating it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a thing real that nobody else is confirming. Scripture treats that kind of loss as worth a song, and 2 Samuel 1:26 puts a private friendship into a public lament so that it existed outside one man.

Tell one person who he was

So here is the assignment, and it is one sentence and it is about him.

Tell one person who he actually was to you, in one sentence, and ask for nothing back.

One person, chosen because they will not immediately compare it with anything. Not the person in the middle of the other grief, who has no room.

And say what he actually was. Not: a friend of mine died. Say the true weight of it: I spoke to that man four times a week for nineteen years and I have not known what to do since March.

You are able to state it rather than rank it, and Scripture gives a man language that reaches past the category. The Spirit of God is with a man saying the true weight of something out loud for the first time, and it is written into 2 Samuel 1:26 that a lament for a friend was made public rather than kept.

And ask for nothing. Not sympathy, not a conversation, not for them to check in with you. Those are all fine things and none of them is the point.

The point is that one other person on this earth now knows the actual size of it, so that the account of it exists somewhere outside your own head. That is what makes it real again, and it is the thing you have been missing since March.

You are putting the true size of it somewhere outside yourself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives a statement that asks for nothing. The written word does the same thing in front of a nation, and 2 Samuel 1:26 begins with a plain declaration of distress and requests nothing from anybody.