A Grief Observed

A friend, someone who I had mentored in the early to mid-90’s, recently died. In many ways it was a tragic death. After a long wait to find the right woman and then a long engagement, he finally married his sweetheart this past May. Sadly, while on a vacation at the Outer Banks, with members of his church and his new wife, he died in the morning surf. The particulars are unclear, but there was nothing anyone could do. God took him.

Back in 1993, I wrote a poem for a friend who had lost her young son suddenly and unexpectedly. Over the years I have tried to refine it and have made a number of changes to it. It has become my offering to friends who have lost loved ones. So for Donna Givens, wife of Vance, I offer you these words of consolation.

A Grief Observed
Copyright 1993-2005
William G. Meisheid

Underneath the pain of death
Beyond the shock of loss
For those left to stay behind
Lie boundaries yet uncrossed

We sit in empty corridors
With hearts severely broken
Hearing echoes within our mind
Of the words left unspoken

To bar the ache of our distress
We wall around the pain
Woven within our very soul
The anguish yet remains

Can anyone heal the hurt within
And remove the deadly thorn?
Impotent, themselves not whole
Are the efforts of Adam born

The answer some say is close at hand
Within the sacred rhyme
Able to touch the suffering core
Across the span of time

God does see the needful things
And feels our deep distress
Granting from his bounteous store
The love that offers rest

From the tools of cross and blood
God makes for us a way
To drain the gulf of pain that hurts
To the core of our every day

The only thing required of us
Is to let our struggles cease
And He will fill the place that waits
With life and love and peace