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Coping with Loss: Depression and Acceptance
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Roger Fritts
on February 27, 2000
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
The last three Sundays, as some of you may recall, the sermons
have been devoted to discussing the reactions we humans have to
the experience of loss. To summarize: when we suffer a great loss
in our lives our first reaction is often denial, we say that "It can't
be true that we are losing our job, or that our spouse wants to
divorce us, or that we are seriously ill." As time passes and the
reality sinks in, we often feel anger, rage, envy, resentment, even
hatred. After denial is no longer possible, anger provides a release
of tension. When our tension has been released, we bargain. In a
job dismissal we bargain for severance pay. In a divorce we try
couples therapy as a way of holding the marriage together and if
that fails we try mediation. With a serious illness we try to gain
more time by looking for possible cures and by setting goals for
which to live.
Depending on our background, we may rely more heavily, or even
get stuck in one or another reaction to loss. However, after
interviewing hundreds of seriously ill persons, Dr. Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross, found that for almost everyone, at some point
depression replaces our denial, anger and bargaining. With a loss
of a job, or with a divorce, depression is the sadness and sorrow
that most of us go through before we can accept the loss and move
on. For seriously ill persons, depression is the gloom and despondency that people often go through to prepare themselves for their
final separation from this world.
Much of the American religious tradition is devoted to trying to
avoid depression by cheering people up. For example, one
enormously popular California minister, Robert Schuller, owes his
success to his theology of optimism. He tells us:
Turn your scars into stars.
Bloom where you are planted.
There is no gain without pain.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Look at what you have left, not at what you have lost.
Robert Schuller believes that no matter what happens in our lives,
we should try, through sheer will power, to maintain a positive
attitude. Even in the face of death, Schuller believes we should
maintain a positive, cheerful attitude because he believes that those
of us who are not sinners will go to heaven at the moment of
death. Suffering for Schuller is a test sent to us by God. He
believes we will pass the test if we maintain a courageous outlook
on life no matter what God throws at us. He believes that we
should even be positive, cheerful and brave in the face of death,
because he believes death is the gateway to heaven. Courage,
bravery, and positive thinking are Schuller's answer to the problem
of human suffering.
Schuller's beliefs are only one example of this theology of positive
thinking. This position is the basis of the Unity Church, with its
enormously popular "Course in Miracles." It is the basis of the
Christian Scientist religion. It is the theology behind ten thousand
member mega-churches such as the Willow Creek Community
Church outside of Chicago, and the Saddleback Community Church
outside of Los Angeles. No minister in one of these popular
churches would ever consider doing a series of four sermons on the
stages of dying. The road to popularity is a positive theology that
says to a depressed person "Cheer Up!"
After interviewing hundreds of seriously ill persons, Dr. Kubler-Ross came to a different conclusion. She wrote that when depression is a tool to prepare for impending loss, encouragements and
reassurances do not help. A seriously ill person should not be
encouraged to look at the sunny side of things, because this will
discourage that person from contemplating their impending death.
It is not helpful to tell someone that they should not be sad since
all of us are tremendously sad when we are faced with a great loss.
Dr. Kubler-Ross found that, if we are allowed to express our
sorrow we find acceptance of our loss much easier. In her work she
found that seriously ill persons were grateful to those who could sit
with them during their depression, without constantly telling them
not to be sad.
This depression in the face of great loss is often marked by a great
deal of silence. There is often little or no need for words to be
exchanged. We simply need the presence of others, just silently
sitting together, perhaps with a simple touching of one hand resting
on the arm or the head of another. This is a time for simple prayers
and simple expressions of love and caring. Interference from people
who try to cheer up a depressed person, hinders their emotional
process instead of helping it. Dr. Kubler-Ross observed that this
experience of depression is often necessary and beneficial if a
person who has experienced the loss is to reach a stage of acceptance and peace.
When I first studied Kubler-Ross's book On Death and Dying,
nearly thirty years ago, I found it very comforting to read that most
people who experience a great loss, most persons, before they die,
reach a stage of acceptance. She wrote that acceptance is not
happiness. It is almost void of feelings. When we reach a stage of
acceptance it is as if the pain had gone, the struggle is over. For
seriously ill persons, when they reach the stage of acceptance their
circle of interest diminishes. They wish to be left alone or at least
not stirred up by news and problems of the outside world. The
television is off. Visitors are often not desired and, if they come,
they find that the ill person is no longer in a talkative mood.
Communications become more non verbal than verbal. A seriously
ill person may just make a gesture of the hand to invite a visitor to
sit down for a time. Sitting in silence may be the most meaningful
experience if we are not uncomfortable in the presence of a person
going through loss.
Eric Erickson in his book Vital Involvement in Old Age, describes
this stage of acceptance this way:
One is reminded here of the image Hindu philosophy uses
to describe the final letting go -- that of
merely being. The mother cat picks up in her mouth
the kitten, which completely collapses every tension
and hangs limp and infinitely trusting in the maternal benevolence. The kitten responds instinctively.
We human beings require at least a whole lifetime
of practice to do this.
Acceptance of loss is like a relaxed kitten being carried by the
mother cat.
The theologian Paul Tillich's definition of grace is a wonderful
description of people who have reach acceptance at the end of a
great loss. Tillich wrote:
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and
restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the
dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It
strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper
than usual, because we have violated another life, a
life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own
being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility,
and our lack of direction and composure have
become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year
after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not
appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as
they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy
and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of
light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a
voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are
accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you,
and the name of which you do not know. Do not
ask for the name now; perhaps later you will find
it . . . Do not seek for anything; do not perform
anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the
fact that you are accepted!" If this happens to us
we experience grace.
(1)
In Dr. Kubler-Ross's words:
. . . at the end of our days, when we have worked
and given, enjoyed ourselves and suffered, we are
going back to the stage that we started out with and
the circle of life is closed.
In the thirty-one years since Dr. Kubler-Ross published her ground
breaking work, she has led an active and extremely controversial
life. In the 1970s and the 1980s she lectured and led workshops on
death and dying to an estimated 250,000 people. She published a
dozen books on the topic. Some of the people who participated in
her lectures and workshops are here in this congregation. In the
1970s she lived for a time in California. In the mid 1980s she
bought a farm near Head Waters, Virginia. There she planned to
use the income from her book sales to build an AIDS hospice for
babies dying of AIDS. This effort was stopped by local residences
who feared that she would bring this disease into their homes. In
October of 1994, while Dr. Kubler-Ross was away, someone
burned her home to the ground. She lost everything in the fire,
including her father's diaries, all her personal papers and journals,
some 20,000 case histories pertaining to her research into life after
death, her collection of Native American art, photos and clothing,
everything.
After the fire, she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona to be near her son.
Today she lives in an adobe house in the desert. Seventy-four years
old and a heavy smoker, she has suffered a series of serious
strokes. She does not believe in suicide or assisted suicide, but she
is ready to die. She says that being close to death because of the
strokes is like having your bags packed for an exciting trip, but
never arriving at the airport in time to catch the airplane.
Through her experiences working with seriously ill persons,
Dr. Kubler-Ross became convinced that our consciousness, our
spirit, our soul survives after death. She has also written about her
experiences with fairies and guardian angels. Because these ideas
are not supported by any reliable scientific evidence, many who
admire her early work believe that much of Dr. Kubler-Ross's
work since 1969 is delusional. Her response is simply to say, "In
a few years I will be dead and the people who attack my teachings
will die. When they do pass on to the spiritual world, I am going
to be there and I am going to shake my finger at them and say
'See, I told you so.' "
Personally, I take all of her work very seriously. I agree with the
experts at the New York Public Library who listed her book On
Death and Dying as one of the most important books of the 20th-century. This Swiss psychiatrist challenged many taboos and
attitudes associated with death and loss. Reacting to the estrangement and alienation from death she encountered in the hospitals she
worked in, Dr. Kubler-Ross helped the medical establishment and
society pay attention to the physical and psychological needs of the
dying. Her work has resulted in a more dignified and humane
approach to the end of human life, so that we can move more
easily from denial, anger, bargaining and depression to acceptance
and peace.
On the final page of her book she concludes :
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with
a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond
words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, . . . Watching a peaceful death of
a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of
a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a
brief moment only to disappear into the endless
night . . . To be with a dying person makes us
aware of the uniqueness of each individual in this
vast sea of humanity. It makes us aware of our
finiteness, our limited life span. Few of us live
beyond our three score and ten years and yet in that
brief time most of us create and live a unique
biography and weave ourselves into the fabric of
human history.
1. Tillich, Paul, The Shaking of the Foundations, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1948, p. 161-2
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