Queering Grief
“April is the cruelest month” –TS Eliot, to which I respond, “October is the holiest.”
Grief is a queer thing. It occupies a liminal space, transgressing the boundaries of life and death; of joy and sorrow. It disrupts the fabric of our daily lives, its effervescent presence bubbling up unexpectedly. It changes us, transforms us. It breaks us, heals us. It empties us. It fills us.
Ten years ago, today, my brother died unexpectedly. I was a senior in college. I had just returned from fall break, visiting my family. Justin was not home — it was my first fall break without him — as he was a freshman in college and our fall breaks did not align. I went to sleep on October 16th, having just arrived back at school after the long car trip. I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing just a few hours later. It had to have been around 2 or 3 am but I don’t remember now. It was my mom.
“Josh, please pray for your brother. The doctors are trying to resuscitate him.” At the time, we thought it was alcohol poisoning. It turned out to be heroin that was injected into him by a friend of his; questions of motive would haunt us (and still do to this day), both his motive and his friend’s motive. But in the moment, all I could do after I got off the phone was pace across my room, pleading with God, the universe, anyone who would listen: “Don’t let it be like this. Don’t let him die. I’ll do anything. Don’t take my brother.”
After what was probably only 20 or 30 minutes, but felt like hours, the phone rang again. “Josh, your brother is dead.”
John 11 tells the story of Lazarus’ death and resurrection. Martha and Mary sent a message to Jesus telling him that their brother, Lazarus, was ill, saying, “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.” Jesus says something cryptic and altogether unhelpful: “The illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Then he purposefully stays two days longer where he is. Was he avoiding the reality of death? Was he avoiding having to see a loved one wither and suffer?
Lazarus dies. Jesus tells his disciples that Lazarus has fallen asleep, and his disciples take this as good news, before Jesus explains that sleep was a metaphor. “Lazarus is dead.”
Then he finally goes to Bethany to visit the grieving sisters, and Thomas, one of the disciples, says, “Let us also go, that we might die with him.”
When they arrive, Martha says, and I imagine her saying this accusingly, “Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died.” Then she adds, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus proclaims that he is the resurrection and the life and that all who believe in him, even though they die, will live. Martha says she believes in all of this and says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. Then Martha goes to get Mary.
Mary goes to meet Jesus and says the same thing Martha said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But, she says this through tears, weeping, and weeping to the point that the text says when Jesus saw her weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Note that Mary did not add a statement of faith, like Martha did. And perhaps it was this hopeless moment of grief tied with the accusation that if Jesus had only been there, none of this would have happened, that breaks through Jesus’ smug talk of being the resurrection and the life and proclaiming pithy platitudes about belief. Perhaps it is Mary’s broken heart that pierces Jesus’ side, right to his heart. And Jesus wept. He wept to the point that everyone around was amazed and astonished, saying to each other “See how he loved him!”
Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Ten years ago, perhaps I was Martha. Today, if I am anyone in this story, I am Mary.
“Lord, if you had been here…”
Everyone talks about being queer at Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or other family gatherings. How it’s a constant internal battle between how much of yourself you can be without offending family members. I want to talk about being queer at a wake.
Listen: I was dressed in clothes that I did not feel comfortable in that did not match who I really was so I could look respectable and play the performance of the grieving older brother. As a pastor’s kid, I knew how to play the part well; I had seen so many others play it, and I, myself, had already had a few trial runs at the deaths of grandparents. My brother’s deceased body that smelled heavily of embalming fluids lay behind me, surrounded by flowers to help mask the scent with their own stench of death. Friend and family member alike came up to me: “I’m sorry for your loss.” “You’ve got to be strong for your mother.” “God needed another angel in heaven.” They were performing the roles of grieving friends, saying the well-worn lines of grief. “Your brother died for a reason.”
Many have spoken about how unhelpful these lines are, I won’t repeat that here, but offer only this: these were the lines given to them, the roles assigned the moment they marked on the calendars the date of the viewing. I don’t blame them for acting in character, for their acting, no matter how sincere, showed the truth: it was an act, it was roles assigned around death by a society incapable of dealing with death. “The world moves on, you’ve got to be strong.” That was what was really being said. Our capitalist world, where productivity is key, can’t manage interruption, it requires us to go back to the world as soon as possible, and these words were carefully constructed over generations of performances to minimize the queerness and interrupting nature of grief. The sheloshim — thirty days of mourning — shortened to just the shiva — seven days of mourning — shortened even further to a day or two of family leave. Ecclesiastes’ promise of a time for mourning reinterpreted to emphasize the productivity of planting and gathering, a time to break down, sure, but let’s focus on the time to build up.
And listen: here I was, still in grief, mourning the death of my brother, yet being told to be strong, that I am the man of the household, that I needed to carry the weight of not just my own, but bear the weight of my mother’s and sister’s grief on my broad shoulders, because that’s what broad shoulders are there for, anyway. That’s the role assigned for the oldest male child. My performance of it was less than stellar; I would not have won an academy award. But maybe I would have won an award for effort.
Being queer at a funeral often requires one to reenter the closet to protect the elderly relatives, because they are grieving. You may also reenter the closet to protect yourself. I did. I stayed in that closet again for almost the entire duration of my master’s degree program, even though I was open in undergrad. It’s easy to hide being queer behind a mask of grief.
And what if I was in a relationship at the time? Would my boyfriend have been welcome at the funeral? Would he have had to stand off to the side and watch his beloved from afar? And if anyone asked who he was, would he have to say “Oh, I’m Josh’s friend from college.” I tell you this: my husband was at my side during my uncle’s funeral a few years ago, and that’s exactly what happened.
There are such clear gender roles around grief: the sobbing mother, the stoic father who sheds a single tear, but that’s it. Seeing relatives and acquaintances come out of the woodwork to pretend that they were closer to my brother than they were in order to gain access to… what? Being included? Our sympathy? Other’s sympathy?
Grief does funny things.
It caused Mary to yell at Jesus through her tears, accusing him of not being there, telling him that he could have prevented this whole ordeal. It caused Jesus to hide behind a mask of his glory and divinity until Mary pierced through it and his humanity poured out in tears, wailing, and heaving sobs.
Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?
Maybe so. And Jesus makes a big show of going to the grave, having it opened, and calling for Lazarus to come out. And Lazarus does come out. He is unbound from the burial clothes and “let go.” For what? To die again, right? To die a second time? Maybe it was a few days later, maybe it was years or decades later, but Lazarus died again. Perhaps that’s what Jesus was saying, perhaps his reluctance to visit Lazarus was because he knew that Lazarus’ death was inevitable, that Lazarus would die again and this time stay dead. So what was up with this performance with raising Lazarus from the dead? Just to prove a point? Why put the family through grief and mourning twice? Maybe it’s because Jesus felt that human longing for the first time that comes after grief — the longing for that which is gone, that which will never return, at least, not in the same way — and Jesus couldn’t bear that grief — he couldn’t bear the grief of Mary and Martha, of the community, of his disciples, he couldn’t bear his own grief, on his broad shoulders. The same broad shoulders that bore a cross couldn’t bear the death of his beloved.
Grief does funny things.
Ten years ago, my brother died. Memories of him poke through my consciousness like cloud bursts at the most unexpected and uninvited times. A song pops up on my playlist and I’m reminded of his mischievous grin. The sun reflecting on a babbling brook catches me off guard, reminding me of the sun reflecting off of his golden curls. Or I dream — -
The dreams, oh my God, the dreams. For a long time after he died (and still to this day, but to a lesser extent), I would have a reoccurring dream. The details in the first half of the dream would change — our family would go on a long vacation, or perhaps we moved, or something of that nature — but the second half was always the same. We would come home after a long time of being away, and my brother would be waiting at home, that dimple on his cheek and glimmer in his eyes: “Where have you been,” he would say. “What took you so long?” he would ask.
I’d wake up from these dreams in a liminal space, where the dream was so strong that I was convinced Justin was still alive, or I had forgotten he was dead. That space was liminal because the reality between waking life and sleeping life is always blurry, and as much as one impacts the other, the dream fades, and reality sets in. And in reality, Justin is dead.
“Where have you been?” he asks, his eyes sparkling.
Right here, right where you left us. In the in-between space.
“What took you so long?” he says this, smiling. He’s in on the joke, but we’re not.
Grief is a queer thing. It interrupts. It forces memories on us. It breaks us out of our patterns. We have set up such elaborate performances around grief, yet grief always has a way of breaking the fourth wall, of reminding us that it is all just a performance. A few years before my brother died, he was in a car accident. While he was undergoing emergency care, my family was put into a side room at the hospital for some privacy. The hospital chaplain was with us, providing presence and reassurance. The family in the next room over was just given some bad news: their loved one was dead. Our loved one was still alive (for now). The family next to us broke into hopeless sobs. And I mean hopeless. Wails, weeping, gnashing of teeth, the whole deal. I don’t think that was a performance. And the fact that it was some authenticity breaking through unnerved us, and unnerved the chaplain. He probably was needed over there, but he was staying with us. We were following the scripts of concerned family, praying for their loved one’s recovery.
(But even in our performance back then, grief broke through. Like when the cops came to tell my mom that my brother was in a car accident, and she shrieked. Shrieked. The cops looked nervously at each other. “Is there a pastor we can call?” they asked, quick to shrug the responsibility of the moment onto someone else. “I am the pastor!” my mother, a pastor, shrieked. The cops might have shit themselves in that moment. The script was interrupted, their faces showed it.)
And about four years later his full recovery from the accident became a sick joke; what felt like answered prayers became a slap of inevitability.
And then. The queerest thing about grief: there will be a day when I know Justin more deeply than I could ever imagine, and he will know me to the depths of my soul. I think of the four days that Lazarus lay in that tomb, four days that stretched into ten years for me, that will likely stretch on for many more years to come, that seem to stretch into an eternity. And in my dreams of grief, a mirror darkly, a promise. “What dreams may come?” Hamlet asks. Dreams of coming home to find a loved one sitting at the kitchen table.
The queerest thing: There will be a day when I will come home and open the door to that old house. He will be sitting by the kitchen table. The house is different, like it used to be, without the fancy addition. The table is worn, bearing scars of its life carved into its glossy wood. Justin is at the table, a bowl of rice pudding at his place setting. My place setting is made, too, but perhaps instead of rice pudding, there is a bowl of his mint peach ice cream beginning to melt (it tasted as gross as it sounds). He smiles. “Where have you been?” this time, I am the one to ask. “Right here,” he says. His eyes glimmer. He asks: “What took you so long?”
In the meantime, grief straddles that queer, liminal space between remembering the past and remembering — yes, remembering — the future. My brother died in October, ten years ago. April is the cruelest month, yes, but October… October is the holiest.
This blog was crossposted on my website, www.coffeeshopsermons.com .
