”An Autumn’s Journey - Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” - Part Three

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

They leave sporadically. Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance. Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses. The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray. Trees stand as tenements emptied, their residents having taken wing for warmer skies.

But it was the geese really. Their movement was monumental; indescribably massive in scope as if a whole nation of waterfowl moved in unison. Other birds would cluster in sordid bands and bounce southward; a grouping here and a grouping there. But geese . . . they would advance as an innumerable army seizing the very skies themselves.

As a kid, they would surge down the Atlantic flyway as if it were a conduit that compressed untold millions of geese into an invisible highway in the sky. The main body would come in droves of thousands; an endless string of black pearl strands being pulled southward; waving like the tail of a grand kite in the wind. It was too vast to embrace; being one of those things in life that defies the parameters of our imaginations and spills far outside the reach of our senses. Because it does, we’re never quite done with it because we never quite absorb it all. It slips by experienced as something grand, but we inherently know that the grandeur that we were able to embrace was but a minuscule part of the whole. As I kid, I knew that.

The Atlantic flyway cuts a mystical swath through the heart of the southern Lake Erie region. All but an hour's drive or so away from home, we would tumble into the car and head out to sit on the sidelines of the miraculous. From miles away, you could see thin layers of black string formations low-slung across the sky; birds ascending and descending in numbers too vast to count. The water, the adjacent fields, the roads themselves were thick with them, each seeming to be an exact replica of the other; each energized with a corporate sense that something grand was afoot that was as individual as it was collective.

Even as a kid I knew that what I was observing was but a moment in time. Some things are too grand to last for long because you can only absorb so much wonder and majesty before you’ll explode. But therein lays the rub. You want it to last, even if the sheer pleasure of it all kills you. At least death would be happy. You’d die with a smile.

To appreciate most things you have to let them go. Some things become even more precious by their absence. When you lose something you grieve the loss and the exercise of grief can be brutally hard. At the same time, appreciation for that thing is dramatically enhanced in kind of a give and take exchange. It’s the push and pull of life that as a kid watching a million geese I didn’t get. All I wanted to do was to stand in the middle of this ocean of airborne life and somehow try to be a part of it; to find my place in it and believe that I could join it if only in the celebration of a season turning and a migration transpiring.

In feathered constellations of hundreds and sometimes thousands they would launch themselves from all around me in a deafening burst of pounding wings and haunting voices; assailing the sky and rising to warmer horizons. And in it I was left behind, simultaneously feeling a sense of abandonment, an equally thick sense of loss, but a deeper instinctual sense that this was right and proper and good. I had to let go. I had to let it be. I had to close out this moment, let it pass into my history, go home and resume my life. As a kid, that was tough.

Yet there was something temporal is the grandness of it all. Jacques Deval said, "God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." Some things cannot be bound over or held, despite our desire to do so. It's in the context of unabated freedom that we experience the highest exhilaration and seize the fullest manifestation of that which we are enjoying. Caging it kills it because it robs life of the freedom to be its fullest self. Geese need to fly unfettered, otherwise the majesty is gone. Life is much the same.

Somehow making something temporal makes it precious. Standing amidst thousands of migratory geese, I knew that part of the magic lay in the fact this incredible phenomena was only momentary; a brief moment at that. Holding it would make it ordinary. I couldn't fathom it all as being anything but wildly extraordinary and so I stood in the midst of the sheer magic of the temporal and relished it until it passed. Then I would walk away with a living piece of the magic embedded in the heart of my soul. I had to allow it closure or the magic would be stripped.

Closure – Fighting Against Ourselves in Adulthood

Fall was passing, hugging the calendar on the cusp of an arriving winter that was set to push fall off the page. Sometimes life moves too fast. At times we want it that way. At other times we wish that the calendar would seize up and come to a complete halt, taking away the reality of a pending end and suspending change that we don’t want. Why is it that we can’t stop the clock even when it feels completely legitimate to do so? Why is time so ruthless and insensitive as not to grant us even the slightest pause; to hold the sweeping second hand of life for even a single moment when such a reprieve would allow us to briefly hold a little longer that which life itself is stealing away? To let kids stand amidst wild geese a bit longer?

But time moves on, creating an endless space within which change unfolds and flourishes. The passing of time means that all is in transition all the time. It means that we gain and lose along the way as part of the transition, but it also means that life always has the opportunity to be new, to be fresh and to be tried again. It means that life is left wide enough and unfettered enough to unfold with all the boldness and mystical expansiveness that makes life, life. But with the freedom comes the reality of change and the fact that it renders everything temporary and existent only for a season. An end will come.

However, we can know that change and any end is grounded in “Jesus Christ (who) is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8, American Standard Version). With that undergirding, we can find peace in change, knowing that change is ultimately grounded in Him who is unchangeable. Therefore, change need not be feared, grieved or hated as something that steals or depletes or cheats, but rather as something that is ordered by Him who ordered the entirely of creation from eternity past and beyond. We can let change be the creative molder of life, hating it at times but believing in a final outcome as purposeful.

Passing and Change

Ice had begun to take a toe-hold around the edges of the pond. From the edges, it sent slight crystal fingers out onto the surface of water chilled and sullen. Songbirds had taken flight southward. Geese were massing in thread-like V-formations that drew silky black threads of pounding wings across graying skies, their call drifting in the deep woods as they passed. That year I had not stood among them. I had not for years.

Frost had laid a wafer thin layer of ice crystals on the beams of the wooden bridge. It was yet tentative, instantly melting to the touch and pooling in tiny droplets under my fingertips. Everything was changing and I found myself angry and resistant about it all. I didn't care about what might be diminished in stealing freedom. I wanted life caged and held.

The Illusion of Holding What We Can’t

I’m sometimes not ready for things to pass; for geese to ascend and cross horizons out of my line of sight. Life is precious. That which is precious we strive to hold. There is something about its value that drives us to possess it, to retain it; somehow feeling that possession is the only means by which that which is precious can be truly enjoyed. Without possession it is fleeting, easily escaping our grasp and robbing us of the pleasure that it brings. And so we seek out that which is precious. We hoard it if possible. We lock it up, insure it, put it in wills so that it remains under our control even in death, and do our level best to preserve it against anything that would steal it away. And because we hold it, it is no longer precious for we have robbed it of what is most precious . . . the possession of inherent traits too precious to ever be held.

Yet, I think we hold the precious out of fear. Fear that life will be flat, that we will have lived empty lives filled with the damp grayness of a sullen existence; the kind of dampness that goes right through you and the kind of grayness that suffocates you. We fear that endings won’t begat beginnings and that geese won’t return. We have to accumulate that which is precious and keep it in order to stave off the dampness and lighten the grayness. But how do you possibly accumulate and hold a million geese heading south or a mother dying?

Life then becomes the summation of the possessions that we think we hold, which in reality is finitely very little, temporal at best and killed by the fact that we're holding it. Our purpose becomes the continued holding of these things. Our identity, whatever it is that they are. Our passion becomes their maintenance so as to preserve them. Our hope becomes entangled in the continued accumulation of them to stave off potential loss. Our future becomes a cycle of maintenance and continued accumulation. And we can’t let go because if we do, we’ll have nothing left. We then lose the sense of awe when life sweeps our way, and we forfeit the humbling sense of appreciation when its time in our lives is concluded.

The Obedient Letting Go

“If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms” (Luke 17:33, The Message). Fall was obediently letting go, not demanding some other terms. Summer had let go a long time ago, releasing all of the energy, vitality and splendor of life despite the fact that the life it was releasing surged with a stamina and passion that simply seizes you with wonderment. Yet, summer let it go. Fall was letting go a spectacular inferno of color that raced through endless treetops and splashed the forest canopy to the sky’s edge. It launched millions of geese and hurled them southward over forests thick with falls fire. It was all precious and blindingly glorious, but life found a way to let it go, to release it, to allow it to be free. It seemed to celebrate and revel in the releasing as much as it did when the season first came.

Mom was dying, and I didn’t want it to happen. I railed against letting go. I had no interest in closure because I didn’t want the loss in the first place. She was precious beyond description, a woman unique in a way that makes uniqueness priceless. Time would not stop for her. The sweeping second hand moved with terrible precision, marking off precious seconds that I could neither hold nor halt. It seemed at that moment that I could hold nothing, precious or otherwise. Everything was slipping through my fingers and drifting off on the winds of time much like vapor caught in the swell of a firm breeze; much like geese rising and heading south without me.

We walked across the broad timbers of the arching bridge, into the hospice and down the hall to her room. She was in the throes of death, able to hear but not able to respond. Pasty and a million miles drawn away from me, she laid there; each breath laborious and slow. Her eyes fell into a sinkhole of graying cavities, the blue sparkle having lost its luster as the light of her eyes faded and then found itself doused. Her vision had shifted, catching fantastic glimpses of something majestically eternal which only the eyes of her soul could see. It was all spectacular, rendering entirely unnecessary any need she might have for closure as the magnitude of her destination obliterated all loss. Those deep blue eyes were needed no more.

Obedience and denial found their place in me at the same time, each vying for a place that they could not simultaneously possess. I wanted to let her go, but denied that I needed to. I was appalled by the course freedom had chosen that was allowing her to die. I wished to hold her captive as I might hold endless hoards of migratory geese; not understanding the futility and absolute absurdity of such a thought.

For the next six hours every thought, each memory, the vast storehouse of emotions, the swill and swell of all that makes me human; all were plumbed to depths I could not have imagined. The more she faded, the deeper I went. Up from their subterraneous caverns all of these things surged in an engulfing flood, allowing me to touch my own humanity in a way that made my humanity entirely unfamiliar to me. I shared it with her as she drew further to some distant horizon that I could not go to, reciting those kinds of memories that sweep you away with warm and thick emotion regardless of the number of times you tell them or play them off the folds of your mind and heart. I surrendered to the inevitable course of life and watched her take wing as I had done as a kid engulfed in a million geese all gloriously free.

The Freshness of Obedience

And here I let go. I let go because life is not based on the holding of anything. Life is based on freeing yourself from holding so that you can embrace the wildness of the journey. Holding onto something renders you captive to wherever that thing is at, holding you hostage to whatever that place is. Life that is held is life stagnant. Life that is stagnant is not life.

Life rolls on because it must, because it was designed that way. It’s ever fresh, building upon the past in the present in order to enrich the future. Holding life kills it, much like holding a flower eventually wilts it. That which is precious can’t be held or possessed because it’s fragile and elusive. It’s those qualities that make something precious. If it’s not fragile and elusive, it’s not precious.

So I let Mom go in a sheer act of will that seemed to entail more energy than a million geese aloft, with an exhilaration of equal proportions. I released her to a deepened belief that God’s plan is a process, a series of events that flow much like a river; pooling here and there at times, and cascading in a bubbling froth at others, but always moving. If we attempt to throw a dam across this river, it will pool, stagnate and go no further than the parameters of the dam we have constructed around it. It will eventually mass itself and burst any dam that we can construct because life is irreparably bound to the achieve the complete manifestation of its design and intent. Freedom is entirely and indisputably indispensible to that objective.

Regardless, we attempt to manage it anyway. And in doing so, we will have managed it to death and controlled the vitality right out of it; much in the same way that forbidding the migration of geese would rob us of the wonder of it all; as if we could forbid it at all anyway.

Likewise, if I hold the past I cannot simultaneously seize the future. My grasp will be directed in one place or the other; my energies vested in holding onto misty mementos locked in an unalterable past. Or I can take a firm hold of a future that is unwritten and therefore entirely unencumbered. Letting go lets me grieve. Letting go allows me to run in the natural currents of life, therefore resting in the fact that whatever the outcome, it will be good and right.

Grieving Through Accepting

At that moment, I began to grieve. Something broke open that permitted the first feelings of grieving to flow. You have to release to grieve. Releasing is accepting the course of things out of the belief that there exists a sure and certain order to this course. Geese fly south with an uncompromised certainty. Releasing releases us from our battle to alter the course that our life is taking, and to rest in both the gains and losses of where it’s going; geese moving on, seasons turning and Mom’s dying. We are free to celebrate wildly when it’s called for. And we are likewise freed to grieve deeply when it's appropriate. We can embrace both sides of life rather than attempting to control it in a manner that we experience neither.

A fall sun was preparing for an early slumber. A myriad array of geese and ducks had settled on the periphery of the pond, drawing up against the deepening twilight. I was once again able to walk among them, to join them a bit before I would lose them to the instinct of migration.

Mom would not live to see the next day. She would be gone by the time this array of waterfowl would take to the sky on pounding wings at the first blush of tepid dawn, heeding a call to skies far south. The sun would edge over the eastern horizon without her smile to illumine or her eyes to take in the glistening promise of a new day. For the first time in my life, the sun would rise without her. Life had moved on, leaving yesterday forever in a myriad collection of seemingly endless yesterdays. For the first time, she had moved into yesterday as well.

Acceptance – The Key to Freedom

Acceptance is our willingness to admit that we can’t control life or direct outcomes. It embraces the fact that robbing life of the freedom it needs in order to be everything it was designed and ordained to be is deadly, audacious, and in the end entirely impossible anyway. Acceptance either comes as we teeter on the precipice of sheer exhaustion; our own spent nature leaving us no alternative. Or we readily embrace acceptance because it puts us seamlessly in step with God rather than grating against Him by vying for control with Him.

Acceptance is errantly viewed as surrender when it’s really an acknowledgement that we don’t have the control that we pretend to have and that we’re not as powerful as we might like to think. Geese will fly and people will die. Acceptance is embracing our insecurities. It‘s recognizing that control is our attempt to establish a sense of security and safety in a frequently tumultuous world. Acceptance then is embraced by relinquishing our need to control and choosing instead to rest fully in God’s constant care and provision.

That sense of acceptance that is heavy with peace and rich with empowerment is a sense that when walking with God, life rolls on as it should, even when the gravity of situations or their course would seem to suggest otherwise. It’s about discerning the ebb and flow of life for the clues that God has placed there, rather than merely having our vision halted by questions about whether life is good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust. “Those who hope in me will not be disappointed” (Isaiah 49:23, New International Version) says the God of geese and the overseer of death.

It's looking past the nature of events to the lessons and flecks of gold that God has scattered liberally within them. Acceptance is letting freedom give life ample space to do its work without our mindless intrusions and savoring its subsequent bounty.

We can accept whatever comes our way if we know that in the event, regardless of the nature of the event, God has placed something there for us that’s of more value than the situation within which God has allowed it come. Acceptance creates infinite room for an infinite God to work out the infinite in the finiteness of our worlds. It geometrically expands our worlds out beyond the most unimaginable horizons. It breathes possibilities into everything that looms impossible. We throw open the windows of our existence; pulling back drapes of despair and we let our souls air out in a vastness that takes our breath away. In the releasing that acceptance demands, we lose everything that we thought was something, and we gain everything that that is truly everything.

A kiss on a dying forehead that was even now becoming cool; my hands stroked her face and brushed back hair so gray and still that it seemed to have already fallen into an eternal slumber ahead of my mother; a final goodbye. We stepped out into a parking lot somehow sterile and lifeless; people coming and going as if moving through some sort of mechanized script. The angst of holding on and letting go plied hearts and hands as they stood somber over awaiting cars; numbed and lost, fumbling for keys and answers.

And then they burst across the treetops. Hundreds of geese in a collection of V-formations surged over us, skimming the underside of a fall sky and brushing the last pastels of twilight. Fall accepted its own departure, seeing itself as part of some grand drama that played out in the simplicity in geese aloft or as vast as a turning cosmos. Everything seemed thrilled to be a privileged part of it all. In embracing such a feeling, I found the beginnings of closure and a door to the future.

I waved goodbye to the airborne minions and I said goodbye to Mom. Somehow in the letting go I experienced a transition to a place where I was allowed to settle; a place warm and familiar. And in this place of solace, I was likewise prepared for yet another unexpected goodbye.

Additional Resources

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