Love's Labor

To love—even when that love is breaking our heart—means something. Holiness happens there.

Walking through the halls of a skilled care facility, I passed by a man and a woman huddled close together at the edge of a common area. The woman sat serenely in a wheelchair, smiling vacantly at the man.

The man—her husband I assumed—had placed a small tape player on an adjacent table. Big Band tunes drifted from the tiny speaker. I heard him say to her tenderly, “You remember this one. Don’t you?” Then he sang wistfully along for a couple of bars. “You remember. This was our song.”

When we think about grief, the death of a loved one usually comes to mind. Some of us also rightly associate grief with other kinds of loss. Relationships dissolve, health fails, careers flounder. With each loss we mourn a life that was. A life that we shared. A life that was ours.

In each of these experiences of grief, something or someone is gone. Absence gnaws a ragged hole in our souls. But there is another kind of grief. I have recently heard it called unconventional grief.

Unconventional grief occurs …