Path of grief leads us to strength

‘What a sad waste!”

This statement and its underlying passion have been in my heart and occasionally on my lips since two Saturdays ago, when I heard of the tragic accidental death of Jamie Packer, a good friend and head professional golfer at the Hidden Lakes Golf Resort (just east of Sandpoint).

Just 34 years old, Jamie was a very special young man to his wife, three children and his family. The exceptional turnout at his memorial service in Sandpoint attests to his specialness for hundreds of golfers and nongolfers alike in our area.

My feelings for Jamie were quite paternal. But I know I was just one of many parents or grandparents Jamie had at Hidden Lakes. Our hearts continue to break for Sheila and her family.

When I’m faced with an experience that is shocking and difficult, I try to work through my own feelings and deeper understandings of that experience by looking at what it fits into a “bigger picture.” I have to do that with Jamie’s death. My tears and deep sadness demand it of me.

So I reflect on the uneven path we all walk during our lives. It is a path called grief.

Perhaps the most important gift that grief offers us is a deeper, long-view perspective on life. Yet it’s a gift none of us really wants to accept, because to accept it means we must go through the death of someone we love.

So we postpone accepting that gift as long as we can.

The atmosphere at Hidden Lakes is, to the uninformed eye, pretty much “business as usual.” But for those who call it their golf home, there is a heaviness in our hearts that we can’t escape.

We only pretend we’ve escaped it. Or we spend a few minutes with another griever and try to make sense of an outrageously nonsensical assault on our greatest expectations.

Grief, you see, is about more than just not being able to see or talk to the person who has died. It is also so much about the death of our expectations about that person.

I would relish still seeing Jamie’s smile and joyful presence at Hidden Lakes. But more than that, I am deeply sad because his potential as a very loving husband and a deliriously happy father has been cut short.

He loved his family more than he loved golf. And that’s saying a whole lot!

We all expected his roles as father and husband would continue for many wonderful years. So our destroyed expectations trigger a large part of our grief.

In recent years, Jamie and Sheila had discovered a new depth of God in their lives. So the memorial service was filled with words of spiritual hope, and rightly so.

But all of the music and all of the words of “celebration” (which really means “a time of honoring”) do not wash away the path of grief. We still must walk that path.

Those times of faith-lifting can soften the shock and fears so that grief can do its inner work in us and through us. But while grief can be postponed, it cannot be avoided.

Each person’s grief path is unique as to where the potholes and severe upslopes and steep downslopes are.

Every grief path has to be traveled in the time each person needs in order to travel it. I can almost guarantee that Sheila Packer’s grief path will be longer than those of her children, ages 6 years, 3 years and 10 months.

Jamie’s parents will stay on their grief paths for the remainder of their own years. Grief cannot be rushed.

A grief survivor taught me a valuable lesson a few years ago. I was helping lead a hospice volunteer training session on spirituality. One lady had lost her husband a year or so before.

She related how, after a few months, one friend encouraged her (in kinder words than these I’m sure) to “get over it.” To which the wise woman said: “I’m grieving as fast as I can.”

Her fingerprint-unique grief would resolve when she was farther down the path.

We cannot accept the multiple – but very difficult – gifts that grief will offer us until we are inwardly ready to accept them. Most of us find those gifts intrusive, because the death of a loved one is a very intrusive event that changes our lives forever.

We don’t want that change, so we don’t want the grief.

But we’re on its path. We can choose to walk “in place,” to not allow our feelings to interfere with what we think is our normal routine of life. And for a while, that approach to grief can be helpful to us.

It can allow us to get our balance, or to build a network of support so we can take a few more steps down the grief path.

But sooner or later, the need to move farther down what we see as the dangerous twists and turns of that path pulls us out of our self-protecting routines. With each step, we find that living with grief brings more strength than we thought possible.

I pray that for Jamie Packer’s family. I pray it for all of his friends and for myself.

And I also pray that for you, if for some reason you are on your own grief path.