Making Room For Grief and Easter

I am a constipated griever.

Historically, I either grieve something well after the fact or never quite figure out how to do so. This in spite of the fact that I'm an "F" (for Feeling, versus Thinking) on my Myers-Briggs. I've definitely grieved this week. But I'm doing so primarily as a dad, thinking about how the parents must feel to lose their little boy as I look at my little boy. If this had happened five years ago, I'd probably just be in "go" mode.

A big part of my job this week is to free students up to grieve however they might be inclined to do so. I'm constantly surprised by who's deeply affected (and who's not) by tragedy. Some of my students feel like they should be feeling more than they are. Others are deeply disturbed and they barely knew the guy. For some of them, it won't hit them for another week or two or three.

College is a strange time relationally. You can make your best friend for life in one semester. Other people pass through your life, are significant for a time, and then they pass on to other circles of friends. Jason had tons of friends. He knew a zillion people. He was a senior, getting ready to move on. Many had already more or less "said good-bye" to him as they have to so many other second-semester seniors as they prepare to leave.

It's interesting doing grief counseling in the midst of this, or at least to think about doing grief counseling. I was e-mailing a friend yesterday and confessed that I was exhausted physically and emotionally, but all that I had done was deal with logistics (if I watched the local news, I might know who these people are who are calling my cell phone and could at least feel cool) and grieve personally.

Thursday night we're doing our second large group in preparation for Easter: the resurrection. We asked our original speaker to bow out so that we could invite a local pastor to come speak, Scott Vermillion, who had my position before me and who knew Jason very well.

My prayer is that the hope of Easter really will be clear--that we'll make room for Easter in the midst of this immediate, urgent, felt need. My hope is that Easter will be center-stage, the Big Story, and that we'll understand Jason's story in light of that, understand all our stories in light of that. And that as we do so, we'll leave lots of room for people to be wherever they are, wherever they need to be, in processing all the events of the past five days.