My grandparents were north stars in my life. They lived across the street from my family through junior high and high school. My friends knew them well. My grandma let me sit at her grand piano and practice before we had one of our own. The morning I woke up to a phone call from my mom telling me the news of my grandpa’s death, I lay in bed for a few quiet minutes, then got up, brushed my teeth, and went directly to a full day of college classes. Before grief even came knocking at the door, I had girded myself with a thousand reasons why I didn’t need to answer it. I had an armory of phrases I’d learned at church that impeded me from grieving.
Many Mormon wards have a large population of older people who are at the end of their lives. Growing up in a tight-knit community like a ward allowed me to know about death in a more personal way because I had known the people who died at church for my whole life. There is a stockpile of responses Mormonism taught me to use, beliefs I was intent on stretching my mind around. “She had work to do on the other side,” when a friend lost a baby at birth. “You will have eternity together,” when my Mom cried at losing her own Mother when my Mom was a teen. And, “God must have orchestrated this for our learning,” when the three little kids I babysat for lost their dad in a car accident. “They were called on a mission,” when a friend from high school died of leukemia.
Of course, I was in a bit of shock the day my grandpa died. Beneath that lay my denial of the vital teaching role grief can play in a life. I set my grief down before it could fully touch me, laying it on the altar of Mormonism. My grandparents died ten days apart from each other a couple of months before I went on my mission. I told sorrow that I did not have much time for it, because there is joy in Mormon death. At one level, there is something to be admired about that insistence on positivity, even in the darkest moments. But the platitudes that flooded their death robbed me of grieving their existence. I will never be able to go back to that time and fully plumb the depths of what it meant to a young me to lose two people who were knit so thoroughly into my world.
Up until last year, I knew death only in ways that were somewhat separated from my immediate reality. Even when my grandparents died it was not completely unexpected, as both of them had been sick with Alzheimer’s for many years. I’d had time to mourn them before they were gone. A friend died by suicide when my children were small and we were living in Sweden at the time, so my own grief was very quiet and personal, and again, so wrapped in Mormon theology that its extent was never laid bare for me.
Difficulty and denial around grieving are not relegated to Mormonism. My mom grew up Catholic and it wasn’t until a few years ago that she and her three siblings even compared notes about losing their mother when my mom was fourteen. After my grandma died, a cousin sent my mom and her siblings to a beach house for a week and when they came back, there was no trace of their mom in the house. The jewelry on the wooden vanity where she put her makeup on each morning was replaced with emptiness and the smell of wood polish.
Last year, I finally met death head-on. The morning one of my closest friends sent a text to our group text thread saying that she had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, I should have heard the whistle of the unstoppable train heading straight for us, but I did not. In my panic, I got to organizing meals for her family. After a whirlwind, devastating three months following that first text, we lost one of our best friends. Coming as it did after I left religion, her death is the first time I’ve understood grief as a portal, not a hole in the road to be patched over with words, reasons, or certainty about an afterlife.
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