As somebody who trades in words I’ve grown to have a deep appreciation for the precision of the English language. English has a word for everything and when we don’t we just steal one from another language. The flexibility of English is what makes it such a powerful language, and the hardest to learn. But words are like scalpels and we should learn to be selective in our choices.
And so I have found myself sorting out the difference between “mourning” and “grieving”. They seem like the same thing and indeed even the dictionary gives them similar definitions, but the subtlety of these words has been all I can think about lately.
My father died in 2019. He was 82. He suffered from congestive heart failure for close to five years and the last couple were particularly hard. We sat bedside with him and had many chances to say goodbye. When he died I was sad (and still have moments of deep sadness) but his passing was natural and the conclusion of a life well-lived. I have mourned the loss of my father. I have felt his absence and longed for him to be one phone call away on many occasions, but I don’t think I have ever grieved him.
Grieving implies an active state of loss while mourning is the act of wishing for something that is no longer there. The truth is that my father was gone long before he was gone. I mourn not his life, but the man he was before he was sick, the man of my memories.
Up until two days ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between “mourning” and “grieving” but then my friend, Sarah Smith, of 30+ years died of breast cancer. She was 49, and the grief is palpable. I wake up and I can feel it pressing on my chest, a rock that I cannot set down. This is not an absence, but a violent ripping of someone who should still be here. This is a sadness not born of resignation and the course of natural events, but of interruption. This is not the pain of fairy-tale wishes from a grown woman who wants her Daddy to live forever, but from a friend who has been wounded by an unjust loss.
I now recognize how much harder grieving is than mourning.
I could tell you a thousand stories about Sarah and fill a hundred pages about what an amazing woman she was, and there will be a time for that. Indeed others have already started sharing stories of her dancing and smiling and laughing (Sarah was always the right kind of silly — didn’t take herself too seriously and always willing to try something new). Her children, Harper and Dayla, are a testimony to her work as a mother. These are all things that will be shared and honored.
But for now, I grieve, and like thunderclouds on the horizon, it builds and rumbles and threatens to encompass me. Tears are not enough. Songs and stories and even this essay are not enough. There is only grief now. The mourning, when it comes, will be the bruise that reveals itself after a wound has begun to heal; tender, painful but tolerable. I will not welcome it.
