I have a friend. She's a friend of a friend, really. But now I have started claiming her as mine. She just had her first baby, and that's pretty amazing considering just last year her uterus was housing a tumor. She had a miscarriage, but instead of grieving over her lost child she had to immediately start fighting for her health. Sound familiar? Her story has been much more dramatic than mine, with multiple rounds of chemo and surgeries and uncertainty, but in many ways we are the same--we wanted to have a baby and instead we had a growth. She's kind of a rock to me these days. We email quite often, usually with me saying overly-grumpy things about the state of my body and her totally understanding and agreeing. I feel safe to mourn, and she mourns with me.
I have another friend who doesn't "understand" what I'm going through, in that she's never lived it, but she might as well have with all the love and support she offers. She cried when I told her we were expecting another heart baby--real, sincere, heart-sick tears. I know those tears were real because I had seen them on her very cheeks when Everett, who is just a week younger than her baby boy, had his surgery last year. And on the day I miscarried, with no insight but what the Spirit must have given, she was at my door with cupcakes and flowers. Gosh I love her. For the last 15 weeks she has cried with me, offered service, and shared sacred nuggets that have given me strength to hope. I feel safe to mourn, and she mourns with me.
This idea of mourning for and with others has been on the forefront of my mind lately. I've been on both sides you know--I've wept in the arms of strangers, and also held up a weeping new friend. The last four years I have intimately learned about empathy and mourning and compassion. It's been a journey but I'm a better person today than I was then, that's for sure.
Jesus commands us to mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort--possibly the hardest lot we have to bear, because in this law He asks us to trade the Golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated, for what a book I recently read called the Platinum rule: treat others the way they want to be treated.
Mourning with people the way I like to mourn? Easy. But I think He's asking us for something more. He's asking us to be for them what they need from us, not what we would want if we were in their shoes. Mourning with those that mourn does not mean fixing the problems of those that mourn, or attempting to. It's not done by ignoring the mourners, or pitying them. He surely doesn't want us judging the mourner, or judging the way they mourn. He asks us to mourn with them, to grieve with them, to weep with them. He asks us to feel their pain as if it's our own, and love them through it.
A family friend gave me a priesthood blessing a few months ago, and a few of his words have been repeating in my mind ever since. "The God who weeps, weeps for you," is one of the phrases constantly circling my brain. The image of my Heavenly Father, strong and mighty as He is, mourning with me as I walk through struggle is almost unbearably beautiful. He is, as always, the perfect example of how we can live our lives.
As I gaze at the last six months of my life through my rear-view mirror, I am overwhelmed with the goodness of my friends and with my gratitude for Him--for I see His face in theirs. Suffering is hard, and oftentimes unattractive, but they have provided such beauty and my heart is so full.
I'm crossing my fingers extra tight that I am just a few weeks away from being "not pregnant" again. But while I wait, I'm choosing to marvel at the artistry of a gospel that allows us to be woven together with mourning, joy and love.
