Those who comfort us

“Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life also is filled with much hardship and sadness….But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters on Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief, loss, and comfort in recent weeks. My mother-in-law died Saturday in her home, just a couple of weeks short of her 94th birthday. She was the widowed matriarch and pillar of a large family, a strong-willed woman who outlived her initial diagnosis after a stroke last year.

My husband is working on his mother’s obituary as I type this. No matter how old you are, I reminded him, losing your last parent is a major life passage. When we were kids, our parents and grandparents were the superheroes who banished the monsters from our closets and kept us safe. We assumed that the grown-ups we relied on for strength didn’t have challenges of their own, or that they “lived effortlessly” while we struggled. We believed our elders were indestructible.

Inside each of us is the little boy or girl who still wants to believe that.

When someone dies, our first instinct is to comfort those who are grieving by sharing our own experience with loss. We assure them that they will find strength and love as they mourn their loss. I told my grieving niece on Saturday that I remember my own grandmother every day, even though she died a month before I turned 11. My grandmother’s sudden death was one of the first major losses in my life, and it broke my heart. But her wisdom and love still guide me daily.

In today’s quote, Austrian author Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that those who console us have suffered deeply too. The comfort they are able to offer others grew from the lessons they learned from their own heartbreak. ~CL