Touched by Grief

Today I am very sad, but life moves forward and in my sadness I have to celebrate being alive. Yesterday at a very late breakfast we listened to English hymns and it brought a kind of inner peace and calm over our household. Little were we to know that during that day we will learn about the accidental death of two children. Their drowning (in two separate incidents) is once again a stark reminder of the tenuous nature of life. I seek inspiration to deal with this tragedy for the two families. Both are closely connected to my daughter -- the first (on Saturday) a cousin to her best friend and then next even much closer, the grandson to her most favourite uncle. We weep together for their loss.

Of course, listening the classic hymns from Ancient and Modern took me back to the many mornings in the Chapel at Bishopscourt. Everyone I met during this time (especially Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and amongst the many clergy the late Fr Francis Cull) touched my life in a very special way. Today I share two quotes from Baba. To me it brings a way to contextualize this kind of loss.

"A person is a person through other persons.
None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family."
— Desmond Tutu

"Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end. I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed. There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case. Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine. God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now--in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally. ... Indeed, God is transforming the world now--through us--because God loves us."
— Desmond Tutu (God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time)
From: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5943.Desmond_Tutu

We live
I am alive
But it does not
Make me
Think less of you
Because
You are not any longer

We are alive
Connected through our grief
Emotional seas apart
Etched in my soul
Your loss
Makes me
Less whole

By Simone Beatrice Naik Noemdoe, March 28, 2011