When the Bereavement Coordinator Calls

“Hello is Justin there?”

“This is Justin.”

“Hi Justin this is Crystal Elie, I am the bereavement coordinator for Integim Hospice. We reach out to families. I'm calling to find out how you're doing with the death of your fatherand whether you you might need our bereavement services.”

A thought goes through my head: “Can I talk with her about anything, or does it need to be to grieve the particular event about which she’s called?” If you have basic cable and you somehow jigger it to get HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax I know that is “theft of services” and you can get in a lot of trouble. There are criminal penalties and civil liability. Would it be the same thing here if I were to take advantage of her bereavement services but use them to deal with a different crisis? Is it possible that I wouldn’t get caught? Perhaps she would just naturally assume my grief is the one she called about and would never ask for the particulars.

But what kind of grief counseling with that be? What kind of palliative could there that doesn't care about the source of the grief but works on all of them? “Surely there is nothing like that” I tell myself, “ . . . except alcohol, opioids, . . . meth.” All things that will replace any grief with a whole set of new ones. Isn't each grief its own thing? Isn't that why it is so hard, because there isn’t just one. Because there are thousands? I realize that I grieve everything. I grieve the very nature of time and space. I grieve every impossibility in the world, everything crushed thing, each bit of brokenness--everywhere. I grieve the very existence of bereavement counselors and coordinators.

What would she say if I were to tell what is in my heart? What would your reaction be? “You must find a way to live,” I imagine her beginning.

“No,” I imagine myself responding in cold truth, “I will live until I die whether I ‘find a way’ or not.”

On the other end of the phone my bereavement coordinator would cry, because she would know that she has nothing to say. That there is nothing to say. That all she offers are distractions. That my problem with grief is not that I am seeing the world too narrowly, but that I am seeing too much. A pause, and she would say "lean into the pain.” She would tell me “the pain the only real thing you have, so absorb it completely. Lean with all your weight against its jagged edges. Let them pierce your heart and tear it to shreds. Lean into the pain and let it be what it is. Let it destroy you.”

But as she cried on the other end of the phone I would be thinking about words she said. I'd be thinking about what it means to lean into those stone-solid, blade-sharp points of pain. I would think about how concrete, real, inflexible and unmoving this grief left behind is. A thought would snap into my mind. A thought about how for a building to stand it must be built by placing all of the weight against the spot on ground. Something unmovable, unbreakable, unburnable and solid—in must lean with all of its weight against what? A foundation. I would think about how the bigger that foundation is, the deeper it goes, the bigger the building that can be made. I would think about how a foundation on which nothing is built, or upon which stands only the smallest tent, is waste. I would think about how whatever is built on a foundation of grief is a monument to that grief. And I would think about how it is that the grandest things deserve the grandest monuments.

So I would ask her, in her tears and mine, “do you think that it is possible to make a mockery of grief? To to lean so hard into the pain and with such weight that there arises a monument? A monument that not only lasts beyond the lives that it commemorates but also touchs more people than those lives alone could have ever done?”

This is what goes through my mind during an awkwardly long silence yesterday while the hospice bereavement coordinator waited for my response about whether I could use their services. I say only “Thank you for your call. Thank you. The call itself is a bereavement service. But I know what you have to say, to teach me. It is still too early for me to hear it. It is too optimistic for me. But I will come back to it, I can promise you this. I can promise this because I sense its truth somewhere deep in my surviving heart.”