Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), 17 November 2024
Revd Rob Miners
As has been advertised, today I'm speaking on grief. Many people think that grief comes about when we lose a person whom we love, parents, a spouse, a sibling, a child. However, it is much wider than that. It involves divorce, separation rejection, jobs, ageing, all sorts of things, dozens of things you could fit under that heading.
When Andrew Denton interviewed Rosie Batty on his TV show back in 2018, she made the point that grief is something which is rarely discussed. In 39 years of ministry, I've seen grief up close and personal, where I've conducted funeral services for murder victims, suicide victims, road accident victims, deaths where medical intervention couldn't assist, drug overdoses, the lot. And I will never forget doing a marriage service with the bride aged 23 years, sitting on the edge of her hospital bed in skeletal form in the final stages of cancer, dressed in what was to be her beautiful bridal gown. The grief at what was supposed to be a joyous occasion was palpable in the ward. I did the funeral service for her a fortnight later.
We've all lost parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, etc. Today I'm speaking from a very personal and pastoral perspective on grief, hence the title of the address is A Grief Observed, and I'm sure that no one will recognise that I pinched the title from C.S. Lewis! Maybe today the sermon doesn't have much scriptural base and speaks more from an emotional level, but that's okay. I'm talking with people pastorally. Grief is a subject which must come to us all at some point in our life. I pray this sermon speaks to you and is of help, if that's where you are at present. Anyone who has had any major loss should be able to identify with some part of what I say today, and if it raises issues, please speak to me.
Around 1992, five other clergy and I were having a peer group support day at Berridale Parish. That's where we sit around for the day, gazing at our navels, and examining the lint that gets trapped there, and pondering on the deeper questions of life like "Why is the colour of lint always grey, even from a white singlet?"
After afternoon tea, we were about to depart when I remarked on the beautiful deep red rose which was in a vase on the mantelpiece. The rector said, yes, the family always have one in memory of their stillborn daughter, Rose. That touched off a reaction, and we all sat down again and shared our stories. All present had either lost a child through stillbirth or close to full-term miscarriage. It was amazing to me that all present had had the experience, and it was amazing the desire of these guys (and in those days it was all guys) to want to share deeply their feelings. And so I share my story with you.
In 1966, Mark Gregory Miners was born at the Lithgow Hospital. Full-term, no complications, eagerly anticipated, and much love. Normal labour and delivery, stillborn. Sylvia had been to the doctors the day before. Everything okay, all fine.
Things are done so differently these days, with the possibility of the parents bathing and dressing the stillborn child. Photographs are often taken, and existing children are able to have a nurse of the stillborn baby. Perhaps to some that may sound macabre, but my experience with families in such lost situations indicates that, within reason, some of those practices can be very therapeutic and beneficial in aiding the grieving process. All Sylvia heard were the doctor's words to the nurses, "Quick, knock her out," as she was plunged into blackness by way of a needle. Sylvia had a very quick glimpse of Mark as he was taken away. I never saw Mark.
Over the years, I acquired the ability to go back in time to analyse and observe my emotional and spiritual reactions to that situation, which I share with you today. Emotions which I observed were anger, enormous anger: anger with doctors, hospital, nursing staff, and with God. Oh, especially with God. After all, hadn't I attended church my entire life, from the age of a fortnight, attended Sunday school from the age of four until confirmed at 14, then taught Sunday school for eight years, sung in the church choir for 14 years, member of CEBS, leader of the youth group, member of parish council, server for eight years? I had a lot of brownie points up with God, and he failed to honour our relationship. I was furious with God. If that's how he looked after one of his own, pity the rest.
So I gave church a miss for a long time. There were the emotions of total devastation, desolation, hopelessness, helplessness, and fear. The ability to focus and think clearly deserted me. There seemed a lack of reward for doing everything properly from a dietary and rest point of view on Sylvia's part. There was also a strong sense of guilt on my part. What for? I know not.
All jumbled thinking, but emotions don't necessarily have a lot of logic applied. Then came the inevitable task of ringing my parents, Sylvia's mum and her sisters, and some close friends. Hearing the happy, "What did she have?" turned into a stunned silence as I struggled to give a brief explanation through the choking tears.
Neither of us ever really saw Mark. We were advised not to attend the funeral. So being two naïve and compliant 23-year-olds, we didn't. On reflection, wrong advice. Sylvia was put into a room by herself way up the other end of the maternity ward. Don't go near the nursery, she was told. But she could still hear the other babies crying. The young, inexperienced rector from St Paul's called and some church visiting ladies who didn't know what to say and fled at the first opportunity. But perhaps I sell them short. Perhaps we wouldn't have heard anything they said. Or maybe they could not have given us what we most needed.
In time, I brought Sylvia home to our empty house, alone. A house with the nursery door locked. Good idea, I thought, shielded from seeing all the things she'd set up for our now non-existent baby. Good intentions, wrong call on my part. It seemed best not to talk about our loss because I thought I might upset Sylvia. So emotions, even though they were red raw and aching below the surface, weren't talked about and were buried.
Shortly after, we went away for a few weeks holiday to Jarawa on the south coast. A break. To get over. To get away from. To recuperate. To rest. But the unexpressed emotions went on our holiday in our suitcases with us. We were there together being happy with and for each other, recognising that each were in a black hole of grief. And our unexpected emotions came home with us still in our suitcases.
Everyone we spoke to had a very simple solution to the problem: have another one. As if it's possible to replace one unique individual baby with another one. We talked about our emotions very occasionally, but sad emotions got replaced with joyful emotions with the subsequent birth of three beautiful, healthy baby girls over the next six years. Although you can imagine my fear when the doctor ordered me out of the delivery room at Taree Hospital just at the point of delivery of our firstborn daughter, Heidi. "Oh no, here we go again." However, my girls have the Miners' square wide shoulders—and you've all seen the towering height of Sylvia.
Perhaps I didn't recognise it back then, but emotional hurts leave unfinished business until they are dealt with properly. They just sort of hang out there in cyberspace like messages on the email until they're brought up on your computer screen and dealt with. Then in 1983 I went to St Mark's College, Canberra, to train for the ordained ministry. While I was there, I started to have troubling thoughts, fearful thoughts, like, "What if I get a funeral for a stillborn baby? Will I be able to handle it?" God wanted me to make a start on finishing my unfinished business.
Unbelievably, one of my first funerals after ordination was for a sixteen-year-old who'd given birth to a stillborn baby boy. "Gee, thanks Lord, just what I needed." The girl's parents were worshipping members of our congregation at St Mary's, so they asked me to officiate at the service in the funeral director's chapel. The young mum was there in her PJs and dressing gown having come directly from hospital. I said towards the end of the address that I understood a little of her pain having been in a similar situation some nineteen years earlier. She was heavily sedated but, as I said that, her glazed eyes instantly focused and she listened intently—because I understood her that day. Her feelings were acknowledged and validated. But remember that individual people experience individual emotions. There's not a one size fits all.
However, more was to come for me. At the end of the service the girl's mother said she'd asked the funeral director for us to go to the cemetery to bury the baby and they would come out at 3pm to the gravesite after we'd finished. The funeral director and I drove out to the cemetery with a little white coffin on the back seat of the morning car in seat belts rather than using the hearse. After I'd said the usual prayers of committal, I suddenly realised that I was going to be the other person lowering the coffin with tapes seeing that there were only the two of us there. It was a strange feeling because, as I started to lower the coffin, that child became my child. I was lowering my child. Through the coming together of circumstances God had brought a large healing to me that day.
Further on in 1996 I had a restlessness again about unfinished business still needing closure. I obtained a death certificate, something which I'd never had. I phoned the council to find out the gravesite number and Sylvia and I went to Lithgow and visited the gravesite. All stillbirths and miscarriages are buried in the one large area enclosed by a high roll top mesh fence. On the fence were numerous plaques in memory of children lost. Sylvia and I wanted a plaque to commemorate the birth and death of Mark, to say that that such a person had lived even if only in the mother's womb, to mark the event, to recognise him as a unique person whose birth was awaited with joyous anticipation. We'd seen photos of the plaque taken by friends in Lithgow but on Monday the 6th of October 2003 we went back. For us it's now okay but it took 39 years.
Now either for yourself or friends, recognise that people grieve differently, experience different emotions and time frames are different for closure. But always, even though we may not be able to see it or feel it, at the time, God is in there, in it all.