Grief and Healing - A Bishop's Perspective

A blog I latched onto a few months ago is that of Bishop Alan Wilson, the Bishop of Buckingham in the Diocese of Oxford in England. Bishop Alan does a wonderful job of just being a regular blogger, describing the life of a bishop in his diocese. He has a pretty decent sense of humour and can also get quite serious. On Sunday he posted a sermon he gave at a service for survivors of bereavement by suicide. I can hardly imagine how to approach such a subject, never mind do it with tact and grace, but he apparently does. His sermon is posted in full on his blog.

One might not think that there would be huge parallels with my situation, but really, there are certain characteristics of having someone taken from you suddenly that are universal. In the case of suicide, Bishop Alan writes:

I went to see Father Tom, my Roman Catholic colleague. He said to me,

"the hardest thing in some ways is to stop trying to renegotiate the outcome with the person we loved, and respect their decision. Only then can you leave God to sort out the big stuff."

Fr Tom’s wise words reflect another problem, tied up in being human. When somebody we love dies, there’s a powerful instinct find out why and fix responsibility. It quickly becomes a tortuous game of “if only...”

This is the one area that doesn't really apply to me, and I will admit I'm in a tiny minority of the bereaved here. In Sue's case, there was not really anything rational that would have indicated a problem. As such, it's really hard to point a finger at anyone or anything that would have helped or changed the course of what happened. In an odd way I'm grateful, because the "what if" or "if only" game is nothing but torture. I can't even imagine how hard it must be for the friends of relatives who are survivors of bereavement by suicide (an oddly tortured phrase, but appropriate).

My thanks to Bishop Alan for his kind, encouraging, compassionate sermon and for blogging his work so transparently. "If only" there were more bishops like him...