This morning I read an essay in Christian Ethics Today by Robert Baird, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. I have summarized and rewritten his words here:

As we age we lose people that we have loved. We lose friends, neighbors, co-workers, grandparents, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. We lose teachers, mentors, relatives, wives, husbands and sometime we may lose our little girls grownup and our coltish boys turned men.

Grief tears holes in our hearts whenever someone we love dies. Our scars are a testament to the depth of our love. The deeper the love, the more dreadful the scar. 

Scars testify to the richness of life. Scars bear out a life lived deeply. And scars affirm that we can suffer the unkindest cuts of all and continue to live and love.

Grief comes in waves. At first wreckage overwhelms us as we gasp for air. The waves tower above us, pummel us, exhaust us. Down, down we sink as we drown in grief. We cling to beguiling memories that hold us up, stop the sinking. Friends and loved ones swim out to help us endure the engulfing waves. 

After a while, maybe weeks, perhaps months the towering waves that wash over us billow farther apart. Crushing breakers continue flooding over us but in between we can breathe, we can function, we can live.

The undulations recede, but remain and then in a certain season or an anniversary or on a birthday they come rolling back washing over us with sweet memories of cheerful times past. We reach out to pull loves past toward us but as we do these recollections fade as with an ebb tide.

They keep coming, the waves, but we go on. We survive. We love again with a richer, more profound love born by loss, sustained by remembrance of things past, renewed by hope in the eternal.