Comfort and Letting Go

Photo by Emily Turner, Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens

By Wendy Fenn

Reflecting on my days working in hospice, which is where I felt immersed in a sea of learning to provide comfort, I discovered that to hear a person’s stories in their own voice can free them to tap their own sources of comfort. To do so for a person who is dying takes that to an even deeper level. And to do so for the family who loves them is different, still.

So often, approaching death, patients and families avoid “giving up” like the plague, and for good reason. Giving up is a passive move, giving away our power to others. It feels like allowing others to push you to do something that you have not agreed to do. It goes against the grain for so many of us who have lived our lives as ones who are going somewhere. It robs us of our autonomy and dignity. Religious truisms like “let Go and let God” don’t ring true when they come as urgings from others. True letting go comes from the inside.

Letting go takes a wholly different mentality than giving up. Letting go is an active, intentional move. It is freeing, in a strange way - letting go unbinds our bodies and spirits to welcome whatever type of healing is to come. I have seen people who lived with this mindset in hospice, as their bodies relaxed, they began to heal and get better. I have seen others who suddenly made a turn in attitude and became able to die the gentlest, most painless death imaginable. Such a death contains an element of healing as well. And the whole environment embraces a new kind of comfort and peace when all parties present have accepted such letting go and found a way to live with it.

I have come to believe that letting go brings comfort and healing in other settings as well. Letting go is actually a process - one we practice all our lives even when we may not recognize it as such. Every little death in life becomes an opportunity to let go, willingly. When a child goes to kindergarten, we surrender the level of influence we once had over them. When we marry, we let go (well, some do) of the family in which we were reared in order to form a new family. When we change jobs, move, divorce, or get a new degree, we must give up what used to give us comfort, and, over time, discover new ways to find comfort. For comfort is not static. Comfort doesn’t last forever. Comfort is not the ultimate goal in life.

And yet, comfort provides a cushioned place which can enable us to grow into who we will become, when the inevitable changes of life disrupt the way things were. How can we still be parents to one who is growing up? How can I learn to be an adult children with the ones who raised me? How can I embrace who I really am, amidst all of the cultural forces which tell me to be different? How can I learn to live in a world I cannot fathom after someone I love has died?

This is where the relationship between letting go and comfort get quite interesting. To let go in the face of a deep grief is never a matter of letting go of the person or of that person’s importance in our lives. Getting through such grief requires looking directly at it, letting i infuse and live in us. We must allow our old concepts of a narrow God to be challenged. We must allow others who “get it” to speak their stories so that we can find our own. The letting go which I see in grief is letting go of attachment to the grief reactions in me which keep alive the pain of loss of the one I have loved. We need comfort desperately at such times, but comfort must come in small doses at first.

Learning to “dose the pain” of grief by intentionally sitting with it and in it for short periods of time can help. Initially, the comfort is found in keeping our memories close, if we can stand the pain of early-stage remembrance. But, over time, as we let go of the need to embrace the pain in order to hold on as tightly as possible to what was, we discover a new level of comfort: the ability to hear others’ stories of grief and let them release our own stories. As we let go of the belief that no one has ever experienced as deep as grief as our own - or that mind shouldn’t hurt this much, because it is not as bad as another’s - we settle into the comfort and solace of feeling less alone in this new world. As we let go of the need to hold onto that pain, we may come to believe that our loved one is still with us, albeit in a new way. We begin to embrace a new way of being. Not the one we would have chosen, but the one we have.

Letting go of grief comes in waves and is never fully done. Letting go of grief, as with end of life, does not “solve a problem,” but it does retain autonomy. In my experience, the letting go is not essentially a willful act but an experiential one. For example, a deep grief in my life kept me rather paralyzed, and in my head. Rather than engage with my emotions, I read all I could get my hands on about grief, a normal response for me. So letting go, for me, entailed doing something different. Instead of thinking about grief, I needed to DO something, to get it out of my head and into my heart. I this case, that meant planting my grandmother’s iris. The doing led me to remembering more fully and allowing the tears to fall freely in frustration and release, in sadness and in anger.

And such a release, such letting go, gave me a cushion of comfort, which enabled me to re-envision my view of God in a the context of unexpected death. That small changed made all the difference, shaping the direction of my life through parenting to seminary to church. The hardest times in our lives are those with much potential to bring blessings of lasting comfort, comfort open to change.

This essay was originally published in House of Comfort, a publication of Retreat House Spirituality Center. You can purchase a hard copy or ebook version here.

Rev. Wendy Fenn is a founding partner of Dallas-based Faith & Grief Ministries, a formal partner of Retreat House. She enjoyed various careers before becoming ordained as a PCUSA minister. She worked as an IBM Systems Engineer, a computer consultant, and a parent educator. She is a mom who raised three boys.

After seminary, she served at Faith Presbyterian Hospice, work which feeds the soul of the one who serves. Now, in retirement, her passions include grandchildren, travel, gardening, hiking, racial equity, truth and climate change as well as her work with Faith & Grief Ministries. Learn more about Wendy.