Guidance Through the Grief

The call that Episcopal priest Lynn Bowdish had dreaded but trained 20 years for finally came about 6 p.m. Monday. An automated message from San Francisco International Airport’s emergency response team informed her of an “incident” and requested her immediate presence.

Bowdish was led by a police escort to an airport room sequestering the friends and family members of passengers on an Alaska Airlines jetliner that had just crashed into the Pacific Ocean with 88 people aboard. Suddenly, she was faced with the excruciating task that confronts clergy of every faith: What to say to someone whose loved one has just perished.

Inside the room, those gathered sat mostly in stunned silence. Some wept. Some wanted prayers. And some, Bowdish said, wanted to talk. One man who lost his mother on the flight told her how his baby had inexplicably started crying earlier that day and wouldn’t stop. Perhaps the baby somehow sensed the impending doom, the man tearfully told Bowdish.

“Words literally fail,” said Bowdish, one of more than 100 interdenominational clergy members of San Francisco’s emergency response team. “There is nothing you can say that will take away the fear or pain. The most valuable gift you can give is the gift of your presence.”

In the days following a disaster such as the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, families of the victims pass through the well-documented hallmarks of the grieving process--denial, depression, anger, bargaining with God and, finally, acceptance. Each stage brings a different need for support.

“There is no one way people respond,” said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark of Temple Beth Orr, who was the first rabbi on the scene at the North Valley Jewish Community Center shooting last year. “When dealing with grief counseling, you have to be very, very alert to people and where they’re at.”

Particularly in the early hours of tragedy, clergy say, the most important words are often those not said.

People in shock, reeling from monumental and incomprehensible loss, usually do not want idle chatter, religious platitudes or theological explanations for the tragedies, clergy say. They seem most to need a loving touch, sympathetic ear or quiet, supportive presence.

On that first long night at the San Francisco airport, Bowdish said, it hardly mattered whether the clergy were Lutheran, Catholic or Jewish--although one man did ask Rabbi Yosef Langer to recite a kaddish, or Jewish mourning prayer, for his longtime friend and business partner.

“The worst thing you can do is say too much,” Goldmark said. “To try to explain [the tragedy] is folly.” After the North Valley shooting, Goldmark said, one woman needed reassurance that the person who terrorized the center with gunfire, killing a mail carrier, would not track her down and kill her. In other cases, Goldmark has offered a hug and a simple, “I’m sorry.” Or he has allowed himself to be used as a target for the inevitable anger people feel.

In the immediate stages after a tragedy, people also need help getting routine tasks accomplished because of the haze they are in, said Anne Hansen, a Catholic who has trained hundreds of lay “bereavement ministers” in a Los Angeles Archdiocese program she helped start a decade ago. The ministers help with hospital documents, child care, cooking, funeral arrangements and other immediate needs. Eventually, Hansen says, she hopes to expand the program from immediate help to the continuing support people need weeks or months later when the hubbub has died down and the pain, loneliness and grief start to sink in.

Dealing With the Questions

Inevitably, however, the questions come. Why did it happen? What does it mean? Where was God? In dealing with such questions, religious differences do come into play.

Jan Diwan, who helps arrange funerals and burials for Muslims around Southern California, will often answer such questions with a story from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. When his 18-month-old son died, Muhammad is reported to have kissed his forehead, and spoken of the pain in his heart and the tears in his eyes. Then he recited the words of the Koran: “To God we belong and to him we return.”

Diwan has his own stories, too. Three of them, in fact--one for each of his children who died, from a 15-year-old son to a 27-year-old daughter, all of them unexpectedly, at separate times, for no apparent reason.

“I tell people, I had no choice but to submit to the will of God. To God we belong, and to him we return,” Diwan said.

Buddhism has no God or heaven with which to console the bereaved, resulting in explanations of death that can seem a bit harsh, said the Rev. Noriaki Ito of Higashi Hongwanji Temple in Little Tokyo. Buddhists would not say the cause of someone’s death was a malfunctioning plane, God’s will or other explanations that can work to shift the responsibility for it to other parties, he said.

To Buddhists, Ito said, the cause of death is birth.

“That’s to say that each person must take responsibility for their life and come to the understanding that with birth, there is death,” Ito said.

He encourages the bereaved to see their lost loved ones as buddhas, or teachers, from whom life lessons can be learned--”first and foremost, the lesson of impermanence, that life can be taken away at any time.”

Many of those who believe in God, however, also shy away from attributing deaths to “divine will” or claiming to know the mind of God. When a youth in Goldmark’s congregation died in an auto accident some years ago, a Christian minister wrote the family a note that God, for whatever reason, had chosen to take him at this young age. To the rabbi, however, the well-meaning words of comfort essentially held God responsible for what was later found to have been the youth’s drunk driving.

“What Judaism emphasizes in grief is to cherish the gifts the loved one gave you while he or she was alive,” Goldmark said. “What Judaism doesn’t say is ‘God wanted it this way so he could get you to heaven faster.’ ”

Catholic bereavement ministers are encouraged to avoid such explanations, too, in their eight-week training course that also encompasses an examination of their own views on death and a review of current Catholic dogma (cremation is now acceptable; suicide is no longer regarded as an automatic route to hell).

Other responses the ministers avoid: It was his time to go. He’s with God now. (“How do we know that?” Hansen said.) She lived a full life. You have other children. (“It doesn’t make a difference. You still feel the pain.”)

“We want to make people feel better but we can’t do that,” Hansen said. “They have to go through the grieving process before they can feel good again.”

Hansen speaks from experience. Ten years ago, her brother died of AIDS. She went through the classic stages of grief. First disbelief. Then anger at him for doing this to himself and their large family. She bargained with God, vowing to be “the best person ever” if her brother recovered. Slowly, finally, she came to a place of acceptance.

Then she turned her painful personal experience into a positive contribution in bereavement ministry. Over the years, she has comforted countless people through the program--not the least of whom has been herself.

“Now I realize that life is precious,” Hansen said. “I don’t waste my time on silliness--worrying about whether my house is perfect or what kind of car I drive.”