To Grieve or Not to Grieve

Losing someone I really love is my greatest fear in life. I have reached my mid-twenties and still I cannot relate to those distressing stories regarding death of a loved one. Until one morning (September 20th), I was awakened by the alarming voice of my mother while she talked with someone over the telephone. It was my uncle telling the heartbreaking news that my beloved grandmother passed away.

Tears just flowed right through my eyes without warning, and thoughts of my Lola during our precious moments together flashed before me. While I hugged my grieving mother, I instantly told her I want to go home with her.

We all went home to attend the wake even though we knew it would be very difficult for us emotionally to arrive in our ancestral home in Bulacan in this kind of scenario. I didn’t see my Lola for one year and never had the chance to talk to her for quite some time, and these made everything much more difficult to bear.

You cannot imagine how much tears I have shed because of what happened, but as I’ve learned from my aunt that my Lola passed away peacefully and without having to experience painful death, that she has chosen to leave us just because she feels its her time, that she has prepared for it and even visited her sons and daughters before the day she died… I was somehow relieved to hear all these and was grateful to the Lord that He willed my Lola’s passing in this manner.

So, instead of questioning God about why did he let my Lola passed away, which I am about to do because of the pain, I rightfully thanked the Lord and offered every single moment in giving Him thanks and praises. And through the power of prayers of our family, friends and our Christian communities, God has granted us with the strength to accept Lola’s death and God even graced us with a positive outlook of what happened.

Through faith, the fear I was so scared to face all my life turned out to be just like one of the many ordeals that I can handle with God’s help.

To grieve or not to grieve, that is the question? Of course, to grieve is just but natural because we will miss the temporal body of our loved one and we can only keep the memories they have left behind, but we should also take into account that God has built a Kingdom as foretold by the Holy Scriptures and emphasized in our Salvation history, how can we grieve over something so great and promising, knowing that our beloved has crossed over to spend eternal life with the Lord.