Sideshow: Living With Loss and Moving Forward With FaithSample

Day 2: Where Is God in My Grief? He’s Helping You Hold Both Joy and Grief.

I’ve witnessed the healing effect laughter can have on the human spirit, and I believe God created us to be able to hold both grief and joy at the same time. What many people forget, especially Black folks, is that as a collective, we’ve held both pain and laughter for generations, so we certainly have the capacity to do it for ourselves individually. But some of us have forgotten that, I think. Some of us believe that if we are grieving, we should not experience joy. Ecclesiastes 3:4 teaches that there is a time to laugh and a time to cry. But that does not mean that to honor our lost loved ones, we cannot allow ourselves to be happy at all. In fact, it’s in the moments of laughter and joy that we find solace and healing.

As a matter of fact, if we’re truly trying to heal from the pain of our grief, we are going to have to open ourselves up to joy. We’re going to have to find time to feel the full gamut of emotions, not just sorrow or rage. I’ve watched people throughout my life do exactly that. I mean, think about it: When you go to a homegoing service, there is plenty of sorrow to go around. But there’s also laughter. There are people sharing stories of the good times when the deceased made them laugh or was happy. There is lots of love permeating the space even when great grief is present.

So when we try to formalize our grief and make it so that we can’t feel anything else, it’s not honoring. In fact, by clinging to the notion that to laugh in the face of death is somehow disrespectful or dishonorable, we might be narrowing our loved one’s legacy, their memory, because we are focusing only on the fact that they died and not on the fact that they lived. We are disregarding what their life brought to their community and maybe even the world. In the midst of the darkness of grief, there can be glimmers of light—a light born from the memories of joy and laughter shared with those we’ve lost.

Reflect: Are you allowing yourself to hold both grief and laughter, joy and sadness? If not, how can you work toward giving yourself the grace to do so in the future?