Good Grief: Living with Sorrow and Loss

By Malcolm Duncan

"Good Grief will bring hope to those who feel, that because of the sheer pain of their loss, there could never be another tomorrow worth living." - Rob Parsons OBE, Chairman and Founder, Care for the Family

We all walk through grief and loss. It comes in many shapes and forms.

As a husband, father, son and a pastor, for the past thirty-four years, Malcolm Duncan has experienced loss in many forms. Duncan has seen grief destroy some people, and his own experience of loss and grief came close to destroying him. Yet God has carried him through.

In this intensely personal journal, Duncan guides the reader through grief and loss, examining how it changes us, and affirms that God is with us every step of the way. Intimate and well-grounded in scripture, Malcolm Duncan shows us that no matter how dark it gets, the light of His grace will always be there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Release date: Mar 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780857219909

Malcolm Duncan

Rev Malcolm Duncan F.R.S.A. is Lead Pastor at Dundonald Elim Church, a Pentecostal church located in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Malcolm is the author of Amazon bestselling #Niteblessings and its follow-up More #Niteblessings. He is the Chair of Elim's Ethics and Public Theology Task Force and Theologian-in-Residence for Spring Harvest and Essential Christian. Malcolm regularly helps the British government and other groups to understand the role of church in society. He is deeply committed to serving the poor and excluded. Malcolm is a passionate communicator and he has regularly written, broadcast, taught and lectured on the themes of mission and Christian engagement with society. 

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INTRODUCTION

If I do not write this book I will never write again.

I have written and deleted the first sentence 314 times over the course of two and a half years. I have never been able to pass the decision to delete the sentence and stop writing. It has been too hard. That was attempt 315. It will have to do. It is the truth. I think it is because these first words, written on a page sitting in front of me on a computer screen feel like I am opening a box that I will not be able to close until I write the last sentence of Good Grief. These words, these thoughts, and ideas about grief and loss and sorrow and pain have lived with me for years; no, they have lived with me for decades. I wonder if they have lived with me all my life? To put them in type is to open the box, to let them out, in a way that I have never done before. I have preached on grief and loss; I have spoken to individuals about their sorrows and heartbreaks. I have buried family members, comforted and consoled men, women, and children that I love through their tragedies and their traumas, but I have never written it down. I have wanted to, I have needed to, for a very long time, but I have been putting it off, allowing myself to be drawn into other things that needed to be done, other books that needed to be written. In the deepest part of me, though, the part that only my wife and children and my sister and brothers see, this book has been brewing, growing, developing, gestating for years. It has been formed in the dark womb of personal loss and trial. I think, perhaps, I have known that when I start to write it, I will not be able to stop. Having opened the box, I won’t be able to close it – God will not want me to close it – until I have said as much as I can say. I realize that my thoughts and reflections will be partial, incomplete, and unfinished because even when I am finished with the book, I will not be finished with grief and loss because they are part of the warp and the weft of life. Yet I think that something that I say might help some people. I hope so.

Some books are written because of a sense of possibility and others are written with a sense of urgency. Some are written because an idea has been birthed in your soul and others are written because of the whispered voice of God in your heart or in your imagination. Some are written because they are a beautiful story, or they tell the remarkable tale of someone else. Some are written to tell your own story. This book is all of those and none of those at the same time. It is a book of paradoxes. Crafted in the inner parts of my soul when my life felt darkest and most foreboding, yet it is a book, I think, full of hope. It prods at pain not to make you sore but to help you find hope. It stares at the shadows of sorrow in search of light. It deals with subjects that none of us can avoid yet most of us run away from: death, loss, and grief. It is written because I want to write it, after all no one is forcing my fingers to the keyboard (although my publisher probably thinks that they have had to do so because I have pushed the deadline so many times), but it is also written because I know I have to write it. I don’t mean by that that the issue is a deadline, or a contract, or a moral obligation. I mean what I said in my first sentence – that I must write this book, or I will never write again.

I write as a pastor, a missiologist, and a public theologian. In those three vocations – pastor, missiologist and public theologian – I have been confronted with death, grief, and loss and I have discovered that the way we handle the pain of life has a profound impact on those who are watching us. Indeed, and without a shadow of doubt, the single most powerful part of the witness of the churches that I have led has been the way in which we have handled pain, sorrow, and grief. This dark thread has been used by God to point far more people to faith than evangelistic campaigns, healing meetings, outreaches, and missions. I have lost count of the number of people who have been impacted by the vulnerability, honesty, and desperation of faith in the darkest places. (Their names are often changed in Good Grief and their locations are either omitted or changed to protect their identities.) That leaves me wondering why we run away from sorrow and suffering so often, but that is a question for later, I think.

Suffering and sorrow are an unavoidable part of life and, therefore, they are an unavoidable part of faith, because trust in Christ is never exercised in a sterile vacuum. Our faith must express itself in life. While suffering and grief may be unmoveable objects in our path as we journey, how we respond to them is not a given. I have seen many grow in their faith, deepen in their understanding, and become stronger followers of Jesus through sorrow and loss; but I have also seen many lose their faith, and their way, as a result of tragedy and grief. Some have found the loss too great, the heartbreak too shattering. My prayer is that Good Grief will help more people to find hope in the midst of their loss, and a way through the heartbreak.

I think perhaps I should have realized that my pastoral ministry was going to be one that was marked with sorrow and loss in a particular way. When I was studying undergraduate theology, I was also exploring pastoral and ministerial formation. Part of that process was what was called Sermon Class. In it, each student who was pursuing the pastoral and ministerial formation track was required to preach a sermon to the class on a subject of the lecturer’s choosing. The sermon would then be dissected and discussed by the class – with you present – each student offering their critique and observations. It was a pretty gruelling exercise, although I am told it was good for our humility. The sermon would then be discussed with the lecturer and a grade given. The subjects were normally quite straightforward. Students would be given topics such as the resurrection, or a Christmas or Easter message, or a sermon suitable for the dedication of a baby, or a gospel message, or a sermon for the funeral of a long-standing member of your church. The subject that I was given was different. I was asked to preach a sermon that would be suitable for the funeral of the death of a young child in tragic circumstances where the mother was a Christian and the father was not.

It is only as I look back that I realize the significance of that challenge, because my pastoral ministry has been peppered with tragedies and challenges. I presided at my first funeral when I was just twenty-five years old. A man who shared my Christian name discovered he had an aggressive form of cancer and died less than three weeks after diagnosis. He was frightened of death and I did not know how to help him. In the end, the only gift I could offer him was my presence, so I visited him every day and we played chess together and talked. Simply being with him was the greatest gift I could give him. A few weeks later, a lady in the church who had fostered a young boy was coming to the end of her life. I had walked with her and her husband and their son, who was only seven at the time, as best I could. I knew it was approaching the end of her life and I wanted to help her prepare for her death. On one of my visits, I brought her a book that I wanted to suggest that I could read to her about facing death with courage and preparing for heaven. I was nervous and uncertain about how to broach the subject with her, and that nervousness was heightened when I realized that the people who had been to see her just before I had arrived had told her that she would not die, but live, and declare the praises of the Lord in the land of the living, which is a quotation from Psalm 118:17. I sat down with her and her husband, (their son was at school), and we prayed together, as is my custom when I meet people pastorally. I then began to explain why I had come and gently asked her if she might be ready to prepare for her death and for heaven. She and her husband broke down in tears and told me they had been desperate to have this conversation. She knew she was going to die. She just wanted someone to give her permission to talk about it, and she wanted space and time to ask questions about what would happen to her. It was a beautiful and profound moment for me in pastoral ministry because it taught me that there is a time for a pastor to talk to members of her or his flock about preparing for death. We do our congregations a disservice when we avoid the subject. The longer I am in pastoral ministry, the more important this is to me. We must find ways of helping those we pastor to talk through their fears, questions, and anxieties about death and loss. We are failing as pastors and we are failing as Christian communities if we paint a picture of life that avoids grief and loss. Not only that, but in pastoring one person through their sorrow and loss and helping them with their grief, I am pastoring the whole church, sometimes the whole community, through their uncertainties and fears. Every time someone dies, all those impacted are reminded of the other losses in their lives. There is a very simple reason for that. We never get over loss. The idea that we should is ridiculous. We learn to live with it. We learn to walk through it. We learn to acknowledge it, but we never get over it. I will explore why that is the case later in Good Grief.

As I write, I am sitting in a prayer and writing room in the garden of a house my wife and I own on the coast. We built it to remember my mum. She died in November 2016. I loved her very much and miss her every day. Outside, the sun is shining. The Irish Sea lies before me, calm, gentle, and shimmering like polished glass. In the distance I can see two specks of white – presumably some yachts or motor cruisers enjoying the August weather and a moment of calm on the Antrim Coast. Immediately in front of me, a small sailing boat is weaving backward and forward in the water leaving a soft and barely visible wake in the water. To my left, the sea laps gently on the rocks. Birds are sitting on the balustrade of my decking looking out to the horizon. An occasional car sweeps past the bottom of the garden on the single carriage road, buzzing like a passing bumblebee. I have the door of my writing room open to let some air circulate. The gentle breeze is refreshing. Behind me sits a white rocking chair that belonged to my sister. It is special to her. On my right is an old prayer stool I use. Its top is stained with my tears and the leather on the kneeling section is worn out. I love it here. I come and sit in this room often to pray. I come to cry. This is a place where I remember those whom I have loved and lost. It is also a place where I remind myself of the faithfulness of God. This is a place where I am also reminded. The world flows on around me. The universe does not stop when I grieve. I struggle with that sometimes. Yet it seems fitting and right for me to write this book here, in this place, because I not only write as a pastor, I write as a person who has loved and lost.

Our son and daughter-in-law lost a baby in 2019. My mum and my big brother died in 2016. My brother-in-law and one of my closest friends died in 2015. My nephew and my brother’s partner died in 2014. I fought serious illness in 2009, 2000 and 1993. My dad dropped dead in 2002. My grandmother died in 1998 – all my other grandparents died before I was born. My step-grandfather died when I was eleven. My wife and our youngest daughter almost died in 1999. We lost a baby in 1995. Our son fought with life-threatening illness throughout his childhood and our daughter went into kidney failure in 2014. My wife lives with chronic and debilitating respiratory illness. Her family faces its own heartbreaks. These and many other losses and sorrows are part of the tapestry of my life. They have changed me. They continue to change me. Loss is part of life. Sorrow is part of living and loving. Grief is part of the journey.

Good Grief is not my therapy though. I will not go into all the details of my own individual sorrows and losses, other than to mention some of them here and there, and say that I have had more than my fair share. My family have had more than their fair share. We’ve walked through deaths from illness, addiction, tragedy, dementia, and suicide. We’ve navigated sudden death and slow death. We’ve grieved the futures that we thought we would have, and have had to come to terms with the futures that we do have. I am not sure that I help anyone by traipsing through the details of those losses here. In any case, I believe that some of those stories must be told by others and not by me. What I can and will do in Good Grief is to try to share how God has carried me through those losses. This is a journal of my personal journey through grief and how God has carried me; it is not a diary of death, or a show-and-tell story of the sadnesses and losses of my family. This is the story of how God has led me, not how He has led others. These are the lessons that I believe God, in His graciousness and mercy, has taught me through the years. What follows are fourteen chapters that describe the metaphors, the pathways, the ideas, and the truths that have sustained me through this personal journey of learning how to live with sorrow and loss. I write as a victim of sorrow and loss, but I also write as someone who has known and continues to know the victory of God in grief, sorrow, and loss. I am not over it because I never will be. Yet I am not defined by my losses – I am being refined by them. I write as a father, as a son, as a brother, as an uncle, as a cousin, as a husband, as a grandson, and all the other myriad sets of relationships we each carry in ourselves.

I have been changed by grief and loss. In the wake of some of the heartbreaks I have faced, I have cried myself to sleep or cried my way through the night. My wife has held me through those times. Grief made me unable to think straight for months. A fog descended that would not lift. There were times when I felt utterly alone and forsaken. At one stage, the trauma I was experiencing meant that I could not remember very much. Two instances stick with me. Once, when I was sitting at the dinner table in our home in Buckinghamshire, I looked around the table at my wife and four children and I could not remember any of their names. It terrified me. I knew I loved them. I knew who they were – but I could not remember what they were called. On another occasion, I was at the pulpit preaching, close to Christmas, and I could not remember the name of God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. As I approached the moment in the sermon where I knew I had to mention Him, I prayed silently, Lord, you know I love you, but I cannot remember your Son’s name. I have never felt so broken. I have watched those I love going to hell and back and I have felt utterly unable to help them other than to hold them, love them, walk with them, pray for them, and be the presence of Christ to them. Yet they have also been the presence of Christ to me. They have held me, loved me, walked with me, prayed for me. So, while my reflections are my own, the strength that has carried me through has come from God and from others.

I have no doubt that my life has been changed by loss, but I am also sure that more than that has happened. My life has been revealed through loss. The person I really am has been exposed by my sorrow. Grief and loss have let me see my deepest convictions, my greatest strengths and weaknesses. I have come to celebrate that the tears that I shed are not a sign of weakness, they are a sign of strength and they are evidence of love that sits so deeply in my heart that it will never be shaken. Above all of these realities, I have discovered that there is a Love that is unshakeable and a Hope that is indestructible. My prayer is that Good Grief will help you, somehow, to not only walk through sorrow and loss, but to discover that God is strong enough to carry you through the storm you are facing.

Sorrow and grief are not the end of your story, but they are part of it because they are part of everyone’s story. You have almost certainly experienced grief and loss yourself. Losing someone you love is inexplicable. For some, it feels like fear and anxiety or concussion and drunkenness, and for others, it is almost impossible to describe what they are going through.¹ These great losses, the loss of someone, are common experiences for us as people that are hard enough to express, but add to them the smaller but still significant losses of a job, a reputation, our security, a friendship, a planned future, a marriage, a relationship, a role in a family, or a business, or a community, and it is easy to see how loss and grief affects everyone. Yet it affects each one differently.

Sometimes our grief cannot be articulated in words, it can only be articulated in tears. I remember being told a story by someone in Rwanda just after my mother died. I was visiting the country with a charity called Mercy Ships and part of the trip involved visiting the genocide museum in Kigali. I felt very rocky and uncertain about it and after the visit needed a little time to collect my thoughts. I fell into conversation with someone about the impact of loss in their life and in mine, and they told me that they had visited a temple while in Asia where a poem about loss had been carved into the stone. The poem was only three words long, but two of the words had been scratched out of the rock, with only the word ‘loss’ remaining. The reason? Sometimes loss can find no words. What we need, above and beyond everything else, is time. Time to grieve, time to weep. Time to stop. Time to shout. Time to be. Time to be honest, open, and vulnerable as we discover what good grief looks like and as we learn to live with sorrow and loss.

Do not hurry

as you walk with grief;

it does not help the journey.

Walk slowly,

pausing often:

do not hurry

as you walk with grief.

Be not disturbed

by memories that come unbidden.

Swiftly forgive;

and let Christ speak for you

unspoken words.

Unfinished conversation

will be resolved in Him.

Be not disturbed.

Be gentle with the one

who walks with grief.

If it is you,

be gentle with yourself.

Swiftly forgive;

walk slowly,

pausing often.

Take time, be gentle

as you walk with grief.²

1

WHEN SHADOWS FALL

Walking through the valley of grief and loss

Death has descended on my life like darkness. Grief has caught me like a hidden trap of fear. Loss has lingered over me like a cloud that obscures the light, robbing me of sleep and making me long for dawn to break and another twenty-four hours to start – even if I fear the beginning of yet another day. Losing people that I love has felt like stepping into the shadows. In an instant, I felt like the lights around me had been extinguished and I was thrashing about in the dark. When I think of those that I have lost, I sometimes think that their lights have gone out here on earth and I consider the world to be a darker place without them. In my experience, facing loss has meant facing darkness. In the midst of his despair, as his life was stripped back and he felt like he had lost everything, the biblical character Job cried out, My face is red with weeping, and deep darkness is on my eyelids (Job 16:16).

The image of deep darkness resting on Job’s eyelids is powerful. My own experience of grief has often had that same sense of entering the shadows and losing the light. Emotionally, relationally, spiritually, and psychologically, death can be a dark place. On the morning I conducted my father’s funeral, I had a profound sense of being engulfed by darkness as I stood beside his coffin. The room itself was dark and I felt alone. I did not sense the sustaining presence of God. I did not feel strong and it somehow felt like everything that was happening around me wasn’t real. I went through months of battling with a sense of isolation, confusion, sorrow, and pain. At times, I felt as if I would not make it out the other side.

There are many ways in which darkness became associated with death and with grief and with loss for me. Sorrow has come draped in shadows. It arrived uninvited – and often unexpectedly. When it did, I found myself walking through valleys. I felt like I was a voyeur, watching what was happening unfolding before me. In my own journey through grief and loss, both as a person and as a pastor, I have heard people say things like this feels unreal or I cannot believe this is happening to me or this happens to other people but not to us. Given this sense of darkness, of shadow and of uncertainty, I have spent time reflecting on the ways in which the metaphors of darkness, shadows, valleys, and journeys can help me navigate the straits of sorrow.

Darkness – a symbol of despair and a sphere of encounter

I think that my initial reaction to the sense of darkness descending on me through sorrow and loss has been rooted in the ways in which I assumed the Bible spoke of darkness. There is no doubt that the Bible connects a sense of despair, sorrow, pain, and confusion with darkness and night. Rooted in the very opening pages of the biblical story we read: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:1–2).

This darkness is mentioned almost eighty times in the Old Testament.¹ It carries a fourfold sense of darkness: the absence of light; obscurity and hiddenness; mystery or incomprehensibility; and judgment or calamity. The word is used a further three times in the opening chapter of Genesis, denoting God creating order out of chaos and separating light from darkness.² Then it is not used again in the whole of the Bible’s first book. It reappears in the book of Exodus, which tells the story of God’s people being led out of the slavery of Egypt and into the freedom of the Promised Land. In Exodus 10, the darkness conveys the sense of judgment, doom, and confusion in Egypt before the Children of Israel left:

Then the LORD said to Moses, Stretch out your hand toward heaven so that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was a dense darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days they could not move from where they were; but all the Israelites had light where they lived.

(Exodus 10:21–23)

The word does not convey the sense of death here, however, which is associated with the death of the firstborn in Exodus 12, although it is worth noting that the wording of Exodus 12 does carry the sense of night repeatedly, and therefore re-enforces this sense of connection between darkness, death, despair, confusion, and loss.³ The word is then used repeatedly across the Old Testament to denote death, sorrow, judgment, or the sense of God’s absence – particularly in the book of Job, where it is used twenty-four times.⁴ The mentions in Job account for more than one third of its occurrences in the Old Testament. The concept of darkness also carries the idea of the presence of God though – His holy, inviolable, and mysterious presence. When God spoke to the Israelites through Moses, God’s presence was shrouded in darkness:

When you heard the voice out of the darkness, while the mountain was burning with fire, you approached me, all the heads of your tribes and your elders; and you said, Look, the LORD our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the fire. Today we have seen that God may speak to someone and the person may still live.

(Deuteronomy 5:23–24)

In David’s song of thanksgiving to God recorded in 2 Samuel 22 we read that God has created the darkness as a canopy.⁵ Later in the song, David indicates that God is present with him in the darkness.⁶

He made darkness around him a canopy,

thick clouds, a gathering of water.

(2 Samuel 22:12)

Indeed, you are my lamp, O LORD,

the LORD lightens my darkness.

(2 Samuel 22:29)

It is perhaps in Psalm 107 that the link that had been established in my head between death and darkness is most clearly articulated in the Old Testament. In both that Psalm and Psalm 139, the sense of God being present in darkness was most clear to me:

Some sat in darkness and in gloom,

prisoners in misery and in irons,

for they had rebelled against the words of God,

and spurned the counsel of the Most High.

Their hearts were bowed down with hard labor;

they fell down, with no one to help.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,

and he saved them from their distress;

he brought them out of darkness and gloom,

and broke their bonds asunder.

(Psalm 107:10–14)

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night,"

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

(Psalm 139:11–12)

So, as I began to explore the concepts and pictures of darkness in the Old Testament, a picture began to emerge of more than one idea. The darkness was a place of mystery, despair, sadness, death, and loss – but it was also a place where God could meet me, guide me, strengthen me, and give me courage. In fact, it was a place where God could do something in me that was normally hidden or avoided. The despair, sadness, gloom, fear, and sense of death and isolation that rose in me in my times of darkness were the very things that God could begin to work in and release me from. In order to overcome my despair, I realized I had to face it. In order to be wrestled free from the grip of the terror of death, I had to be confronted by it. Then I discovered what God says about darkness in Isaiah.

The word for darkness is mentioned seventeen times by the prophet.⁷ Once again, as I read through the book, I was confronted with the fact that darkness is a metaphor for fear, uncertainty, sorrow, despair, and judgment.⁸ But it is also a sphere where God promises to meet His people.⁹ I realized that the overarching sense of darkness in Isaiah was not simply one of despair, forsakenness, fear, and isolation, but rather that darkness was a sphere in which God could meet me. He could bring hope there in a way that He could not bring me hope elsewhere. I am not suggesting for a moment that the picture of darkness is easy. My reflections on it raised as many questions as it did answers.¹⁰ Was God sovereignly smiling at the deaths and losses I had endured over the years? Did He cause them or permit them? If He