By Rev. Axel Schwaigert, Stuttgart, Germany

 

To grieve. That pain in our very soul, this deep inner feeling of despair. One should think that it is something that happens automatically. Once a person experiences loss, once a person loses a loved one, grieving comes naturally. Nothing could be more wrong than this assumption. To grieve is something we have to learn, something we have to teach each other. To grieve is more than a feeling; it is a situation we live in, it is something we have to do to live.

 

I experienced this first hand a few weeks ago: with 71 years my mother went to bed one evening and did not wake up the next morning. Suddenly I was without my mother. And everybody thought and expected that I, the pastor, counselor and student, writing about grief, should be an expert in grieving.

 

The reality is, that I have no idea, how “to do grieving”. I know how to arrange a funeral; I know how to be with people in their loss; I know a thousand poems and have even more ideas about rituals. But how should I “do grief”? I did not know. And there were questions: whom did I lose? What did I lose? “I lost my mother.” What a meaningless sentence! Whole books could not describe who and what she was for me. But I know that part of me is gone.

 

Today, 6 weeks after the funeral, I was sitting in my office, working on my emails, drinking my cup of coffee, I caught myself reaching for the telephone, to call my mum, as I have done a thousand times before. And then it hit me: she is not there anymore! No more telephone calls during a quiet morning in the office! Never again to hear her voice, to feel her love! Suddenly I understood, perhaps better than all the 6 weeks before: She is not here anymore. Now I cry, now I grieve.

 

And now this grief goes deeper, is more than death. This grief has something do with life; my mother’s life and mine. Grief is more than pain, it is life and love and more.

 

To grieve about HIV and AIDS seems to be the same. Many of us have lost loved ones and friends. For many of us, AIDS has the face of a lover, a brother, a sister, a friend. For all of us, HIV-positive and HIV-negative alike, our whole life has changed. Some of us have those moments when we want to reach for the telephone, when our grief is close; for others it is not so clear. But to grieve for loved ones and about the situation we are in, is nothing that just happens to us. It is something we have to do.

 

I therefore invite us all to remember who we are grieving for and become aware, what we are grieving.

 

To share the stories of our loved ones, again and again. So that they are not lost, that their memory lives on. And that we know, that HIV and AIDS has a name, has face.

 

To teach each other, what we have lost, what we fear, what we long for.

 

To face our fears: the fear to lose others, loved ones, people we know and people we have not met yet.

 

To communicate what HIV and AIDS means for us: lost life, lost freedom, lost possibilities.

 

To remind ourselves to celebrate: The love, the strength, and the good times.

 

We should not think that grieving HIV and AIDS is simple and that we just know how to do it.

 

We have to relearn to grieve again and again, every one of us and us all together. And we can help each other.

 

Grief and HIV and AIDS has something to do with life, has all to do with love. If we don’t find our grief, it will find us. We have to grieve, for those we lost, for those we love and for our life.

 

We have to grieve, until that glorious day, when we know, what we have lost, and know, that no more loss will come.

 

© 2008 Metropolitan Community Churches Global HIV/AIDS Ministry

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