Grief…And Gratitude
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 2, 2025
Often when I am leading a memorial service, I tell the people gathered that “it is hard and important work” that we are doing together as we prepare to say goodbye to someone we love. In those moments, I say that we gather to offer one another our support, and also to confront the reality of mortality itself.
It is hard work indeed, and it is properly the work of the community. But all too often it is work that our culture tries to avoid. Too often, people are left trying to come to terms with their grief alone, and can end up isolated and depressed.
Our theme for the month of November is Gratitude. It might have been easier to stand here and assert that we should be grateful for the love that has been lost. There is truth in that sentiment. But as one of our authors, Jan Richardson, wrote,
“Let us agree for now
that we will not say
the breaking makes us stronger
or that it is better to have this pain
than to have done without this love.” (Jan Richardson, Blessing for the Broken-Hearted)
Author and psychotherapist Francis Weller notes that “we live in a grief-phobic and death-denying society.” He reminds us that the renowned psychologist Carl Jung believed that we relegate grief to the shadow side of life; where we try to repress and hide all that we fear we cannot bear. But there is a price to be paid for this suppression, and Jung believed that the shadow emerges to haunt us in acts of violence, in war, in violence committed against nature. (in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller, p. xxx.). It is our work, according to Weller, to bring grief and sorrow out of the shadows, to name and to hold it and learn how to accept it. He describes grief as a skill. I liken it to resilience; like our physical muscles, something to be exercised.
Weller wrote a beautiful book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. In it he creates what I would call a ‘geography of grief’, a landscape for us to traverse. During our lifetimes, Weller tells us, we navigate through five different gates of grief; five doorways, perhaps, that lead us toward acknowledging many sources of sorrow in our lives. In recognizing these gates, we can bring them forward out of the shadows, confront them, and move toward acceptance and understanding.
The first gate is the most obvious one: the acknowledgement that everything we love, we will lose. We are forced to confront and to accept impermanence. We all understand this gate. Robert Frost said it best:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. (Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay)
The second gate into grief is different and less obvious: a place within ourselves that has not known love. Are there parts of you that have not been shown tenderness or compassion, places that you were taught to be ashamed of? This lack of love and warmth is experienced as a loss. We try to hide it: that shame, we try to mask a sense of unworthiness. But this is a loss that causes us grief. How can we reach this place and accept it?
A third gate is named the sorrows of the world. Perhaps you are avoiding thinking about the damage to our beloved Earth. And many people experience a loss of connection with nature. We are often weighed down by grief caused by inhumanity, by oppression of others, and by war and violence. This is a loss almost too large for us to carry, and certainly we cannot carry it alone.
Fourth, Francis Weller names a loss as ‘what we expected and did not receive.’ This, to me, could be much like the second gate, the expectation of love that was withheld. But Weller sees this as more of a primal expectation, an instinctive, evolutionary sense of how humans interact and what we can expect from each other; our communal life. Our society has traveled far from our origins. This gate offers an opening into a form of loss that most of us would be unable to identify and name; a deeply shadowed form of loss.
Finally, the fifth gate of grief is named ancestral loss. This might be likened to generational trauma: the cumulative losses our ancestors have experienced over millenia: losses of homes, identity, traditions, culture. Again, this form of loss might be shadowy: it might be felt as a weight that we can never access fully, cannot articulate.
The question we can ask now, then, is: is there room for gratitude in this landscape of grief? Here is where I am finding comfort. These five types of grief are utterly universal. They are experienced by everyone. There is comfort in understanding the sources of grief we carry, and realizing that we are not alone in carrying them.
Trauma specialist Thomas Huebl wrote: “The deepest healing occurs in relationships. People heal in the company of others who see and feel them, and who are willing to be seen and felt by them.” Huebl goes on to say, “The true language of humanity is not spoken or written; it is the universal language of resonance and emotion.” (Ibid., xii) Shared grief, then, draws us together, and together we can find healing, and meaning, and love. For this, for this shared humanity, for the caring and resonance and emotion, yes, we can be truly be grateful.
