Small Sadnesses
Lament in the COVID-19 era.
“I miss my husband in long term care.”
“I’m sad because my parents and nephew cancelled their trip to come and see me.”
“I miss the library.”
In a global pandemic, there are plenty of large things to mourn. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost and the livelihoods of many more endangered. When a person reflects on the global scale of loss, it feels silly and even wrong to mourn small things. One can think that their own losses and hardships so pale in comparison to the losses of others, that they are not worth mentioning.
But that’s not true.
Our church recently tried an experiment. We erected a billboard in front of our office and asked people to post messages of mourning for things that have been lost during the COVID-19 era. We included some prompts and a brief Q and A.
Here is what we learned:
Many people feel guilty for being sad about cancelled vacations, closed coffee shops and schools being closed. They didn’t want to post messages about these ‘small’ things because it seems to make light of other people’s suffering. “After all,” they say, “people are dying and essential workers are in danger and businesses are going under.”
However, why does a comparative approach to grief have to be normal? Why do we have to rank griefs? Why, if you have not experienced the worst or most terrible thing, do you feel bad about saying something? Why can’t there be room for small sadnesses?
There seems to be something built into Canadian culture that insists on putting a happy face on things. Or at least, seeks to minimize bad feelings. We don’t want to dwell on sadness, we don’t want to deal with our bad feelings. If we haven’t lost a business while also getting a cancer diagnosis, do we really have a right to be sad?
Yet, the Scriptures teach us there are seasons to mourn. The Scriptures insist that there are many sad things in the world and to be a Christian is to pour out our hearts and complaints before the Lord. Scripturally speaking there is no such thing as large or small sadnesses, there is just honesty. There are levels of grief to be sure, but lament and mourning is for any and all.
There is room for sadnesses of all sizes. We are freed to name our experiences as good or bad, happy or sad without worrying if it will overshadow the experience of another. We mourn with the mourners without worrying about the size of their sadness.
We also learned through our experiment that many people are interested in sharing the grief of others. The “grief billboard” was easily visible from our office windows and as I would sit and work, or have a meeting, person after person would stop and read what was written. As we filmed church services for online streaming, the tech person doing the recording would often comment on how many had stopped at the billboard to see the grief notes. Our local donut place posted a long video that zoomed in on each note in turn.
Many think their small notes of loss are insignificant, yet the billboard proved otherwise. Perhaps everyone had run out of things to watch on Netflix, but it seems that the small sadnesses of children and adults were helpful and interesting. Not interesting in the creepy sense, but in seeing where a community was grieving together.
Lament is a process. The first step is to be willing to admit that a thing is sad. You can’t move on until you have acknowledged that something has gone wrong. In Christianity, once we have acknowledged it, we can take it to our communities and take it to God.
But the steady gaze of the Scriptures, to call one thing joyful and another sad, is not just helpful to Christians but is a gift we can offer our neighbours.
