Mourning
Trigger Warning: Mentions of Death, Dying, and Suicide.
In graduate school I learned about the stages of grief and loss by Kubler-Ross. These are not frequently known to the general public. In the United States, we typically do not accept the idea of loss well. We protest when our political candidates lose. When we lose we protest the conditions of the lost. Rather, we embrace denial with an almost salient delusion of grandeur: this cannot happen to me!
Mourning is a difficult business. We have a Lincoln Memorial, however the memorializing gets dwarfed by the monument. We have gravestones in cemeteries, yet little actions to process the actual grief get performed. Mourning needs to be planful, intentional, and meaningful.
My first serious brush with death was when a friend of mine: Spc. Kristopher died in Taji, Iraq while serving with the 10th Cavalry. Upon hearing the news, my grandfather told me: “Let’s light a candle for him.” My late grandfather was a USAF Staff Sergeant who served stateside in the Korean Conflict. His act of mourning at the funeral was to salute the closed casket.
When my grandfather passed, my acts of mourning were light a candle, and enjoy some southern comfort food. I lost count of how many orders of biscuits and gravy and chicken fried steaks I consumed in 2022. For me the foods he loved to eat, and share in those morsels of flavor or ‘gravy trains’ of flavor was an avenue to embrace mourning.
Today, on 12.02.2025, I learned Pastor David Bucknam, MA, MDiv, LCPC passed. Dave was one of my favorite colleagues at The Antioch Group Incorporated. Dave was a individual who left a valuable and lasting legacy for all he came into contact with! Dave was a dual citizen of the United States and the Dominion of Canada. To engage in mourning his passing I drank a Tim Horton’s Medium Roast in my keurig instead of my standard Green Mountain/Starbucks/Lavazza rotation.
Mourning is an action. It is a part of life that frequently we do not wish to visit. Like Sassoon’s poem: “No one spoke of him again.” Instead, we need to take into consideration the following words: “Do this in remembrance of me.” That was on my church’s altar as a little boy. We just experienced the month of November, fall is ending, winter’s arrival is premature in Peoria with the ice storms and snow. The Polish people call November: Listopada. Listopada means the falling of the leaves. Watch the leaves fall, and think of them.
