I Am Grieving Somebody Who Is Upstairs

He is fine. That is what makes this impossible to say.

He is alive, he is well, he is thirty feet above your head, and he is going to come down at some point this evening and get something out of the fridge and say hello to you in an ordinary voice.

And you are grieving him. Have been for about a year.

And there is nowhere to put that. If somebody had died, there would be a word for what you are doing, and people would bring things, and nobody would ask you to explain yourself. Instead you have a boy upstairs, and a feeling that behaves exactly like grief, and no permission at all to call it that.

So you carry it around unnamed, which is the heaviest way to carry anything.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line in Psalm 56 that is one of the strangest and most careful images in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Put thou my tears into thy bottle.

Notice what that assumes. It assumes tears are worth keeping. Not resolving, not explaining, not justifying. Collecting, the way somebody collects something valuable, into a container kept for that purpose.

You are not being asked to account for anything, and it was never an explanation that had to come before the tears were taken seriously. Psalm 56:8 asks for the tears to be kept rather than for the grief to be justified, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as being received rather than as being consoled.

And then: are they not in thy book. Written down. Counted. There is a record, and it does not require anybody else to have understood what happened.

You have a grief that is being counted somewhere, and it was never required that anybody around you recognize it. The written word puts the tears in a bottle and in a book without one word of qualification, and the Spirit of God is what makes that land on somebody grieving a person who is thirty feet away.

A grief with nobody dead in it

Now let me name the thing properly, because a name for it has been refused all year.

What has gone is not the boy. It is the version of him who used to come and find you.

There was a child who came into your kitchen without being asked. Who wanted to be taken places. Who talked to you at length about things nobody else had any patience for. And that child has gone, and been replaced by somebody perfectly pleasant who says hello in an ordinary voice.

That is a real loss and it has a real absence in it, and the fact that a body is still in the house does not undo any of it. A grief with nobody dead in it is still a grief, and it is being counted whether or not anybody else can see it.

You are grieving something that genuinely went, and it was never sentimentality that made this heavy. Psalm 56 collects tears without asking what they are for, which is exactly why the Spirit of God does not require a bereavement before a grief is allowed to be one.

And here is why naming it matters practically. An unnamed grief gets acted out. It comes out as a slightly sharper tone, or an extra invitation with need in it, or a comment at dinner that lands wrong. Once it is named, it can be carried instead, and carried is much less expensive than leaked.

Say it once, then go out

So the practical part, and it has two halves, and the first is one sentence said out loud to somebody who is not him.

Say it once: I am grieving my grandson and he is upstairs.

You are able to say a sentence that sounds ridiculous and is entirely true, and it has never once been self indulgence to name something accurately. The passage asks for tears to be put in a bottle rather than explained, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman saying an impossible sentence out loud to a friend.

And then go out for twenty minutes. On your own, or with somebody else, but go, because a named grief walked is a different thing from a named grief sat with.

And keep asking him. Once a week, briefly, with nothing in it. Let the no stand every time without any weight added, because the weight is exactly what a grieving person accidentally adds, and it is what makes the next no more likely.

You are able to keep the invitation open without leaning on it, and that has never once been the same thing as pretending you are fine. Psalm 56:8 keeps the tears and the record together, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a street with somebody carrying something nobody else can see.