Grief Is a Mystery, Not a Problem

By Eddie Eccker

We are a people of solutions. Give an American a problem, and we will engineer it, optimize it, medicate it, or outwork it. Our whole culture is built on the confidence that anything difficult can be finished. Handle it, close it out, move on to the pleasant. It is a real strength. It builds bridges and cures diseases.

And it fails completely at a graveside.

I recently sat down with Dr. Thomas Attig for The Voyage Cast. He is eighty years old. He has spent fifty of those years thinking, writing, and teaching about death, dying, and grief, first as a philosophy professor and now as one of the most respected voices in the field. Sitting with him felt like something we have almost lost as a culture: going to an elder and asking for wisdom about the things that haunt every one of us.

Problems and mysteries

Dr. Attig draws a line through human experience that I think every person of faith should sit with. Life hands us two kinds of challenges. Problems and mysteries.

Problems are finite. You can get your hands around them. You can fix them, shrink them, or make them go away, and when you do, you move on. Our egos love problems. Egos are built for control, and problems submit to control.

Mysteries are different. Death is a mystery. So is suffering. So is love. Mysteries do not submit to control, and they cannot be eliminated or even modified in any significant way. No amount of effort makes death optional. The only thing within our power is how we live toward them. Mysteries do not ask to be solved. They ask us to be transformed.

This is why so much grief advice fails. It treats a mystery like a problem. Get closure. Let go. Get back to normal. Put it behind you. Every one of those phrases assumes grief can be finished the way a project can be finished. It cannot, because the death of someone you love is not a task on your list. It is a change in your world.

Scripture has always known this. The psalmists do not solve their anguish. They bring it into the presence of God and are changed there. Job's friends treat his suffering as a problem with a cause to be identified, and God rebukes them for it. Job himself meets a mystery, and he comes out the other side transformed, not answered.

We are not sealed containers

Dr. Attig offered an image I cannot stop thinking about. Our culture pictures the self as a sealed capsule. Self-contained, self-sufficient, bumping against other capsules but never truly joined to them. If that picture were true, then when someone dies, nothing in you would actually break. You would still be intact in your little container, and grief would just be a feeling to discharge.

But that picture is false, and everything in us knows it. From the moment of birth, lifelines reach toward us from every direction. Hands that feed us, voices that teach us our first words, sun and water and bread, mothers and fathers and grandparents and teachers. We are woven into a web of connections, and every thread is joined to other threads. This is not a poetic flourish. It is what we are.

It is also exactly what the Christian story claims about us. It is not good for man to be alone. We were made from communion, for communion, in the image of a God who is himself a communion of Persons. Paul does not describe the church as a collection of individuals but as a body, where if one member suffers, all suffer together.

So when someone you love dies, something real breaks. Threads are torn from the web that is you. That is why grief hurts the way it does. The pain is not a malfunction. The pain is the evidence. You cannot lose what you were never joined to.

But here is the hope inside the same image. When the blow strikes the web, most of the web holds. The love, the memory, the formation they worked into you, the connections they gave you to other people, the recipes and the stories and the thousand small competencies you carry because they taught you. Torn threads can be rewoven. Grieving, Dr. Attig says, is the slow work of weaving again.

Love in separation

The most freeing thing he told me is this. We already know how to love people who are not in the room. You do it every day. Right now there are people you love whom you cannot see, touch, or hear, and you have no doubt that the love is real. You think about them. You tell their stories. You feel yourself to be someone's son, someone's father, someone's friend, even in their absence.

Death takes presence. It does not take love.

Everything you could do at a distance while they lived, you can still do now. Remember. Give thanks. Tell the stories. Keep what they gave you. Sort through their advice, keep the good, and lay down the rest. Freud told a whole century that healthy mourning meant cutting every tie to the dead. Fifty years of evidence and every instinct of the human heart say otherwise. And the Christian hope says more still. We grieve, but not as those who have no hope. The separation is real, and it is not permanent.

Dr. Attig calls the destination a fullness of love wrapped in gratitude. The privilege of having known them when they lived, and a lasting love that survives the darkness of early grief. That is not getting over someone. That is honoring them with the rest of your life.

Go find your elders

One more thing. I am forty-five. Dr. Attig is eighty. For most of human history, that conversation would have been ordinary. The young went to the old to ask about the mysteries, because the old had lived further into them. We have traded that away for a culture that hides death, hushes grief, and scrolls past wisdom.

Do not settle for that. Find the people who have walked further down the road than you have. Ask them what they know about the things that cannot be solved. Sit still long enough to hear the answer. The mysteries are coming for all of us. It is worth learning, while there is time, how to meet them.

My full conversation with Dr. Thomas Attig is on The Voyage Cast on Apple Podcasts (or anywhere you can find a podcast), or on YouTube. His new book, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, the collected work of fifty years, is available from Oxford University Press.