My father was thirty years of age when he died suddenly. The end of his life, for my mother, was the end of era that may have felt at the time like the end of the world. With his passing went the passing of her marriage. What followed was the advent of a solitude that became the paradigm of her life. It was the solitude of lone parenthood, the solitude of being a single woman among married friends, the solitude of days and nights, largely in her own company. Frantic with grief in the aftermath of his death, my mother struggled into that new paradigm.

The years that followed were not kind to her, and she had to become tough. As Northern Ireland disintegrated further into mayhem, ideological contortion, and the threat of random, explosive violence haunted every town, she moved us away, taking us far from her own family and friends. By then, she really had become tough enough to start again.

The years went by. She fended for us, she disciplined and consoled, she brooked no nonsense from anyone. What she gave, she gave from all she had, unknowingly demonstrating for us and all the world what self-sacrificial love requires. The bills came in, the money ran short. Once I found her weeping in despair one afternoon when the electricity had been switched off by the utility company. It was not clear how it would ever be switched back on again. She carried the weight of our lives on her shoulders alone. Life demanded nothing less, and love was the only force strong enough to lift her and carry her.

Off and on, there were men. Then along came a daughter, our sister. Through it all, my mother remained in her solitude, increasingly comfortable to be there alone.

In the end, we, her children, grew up, molded by the years and the places and the people that were consequent upon the choices she made after the death of my father. It all seems so long ago, as though it were always set in stone.

Along has come a new generation. These grandchildren, these particular, new, unique, irreplaceable people were loved in their turn from nothingness into existence; and whose very existence is also consequent upon that moment of ground zero: the event that was my father’s death.

Can it be said that the death of my father was an evil?

Surely too much goodness has flowed from that seismic event to conclude so simply. On the other hand, the thick grief that flattened the soul of my mother in those times and that broke my father’s parents until their own passing surely forbids any rationalization might trivialize the pain of loss. But it would be wrong to dismiss the fact that goodness has germinated in that rough ground, and that the shoots of life that could only have emerged there are a limitless source of joy. Neither the evil of pain nor the joy of children can cancel the other out, no matter how organically or spiritually they are connected. To do so would be to mock the gravity of both.[i]

What are we left with? How can we make sense of the evil of suffering and the good of future life in a way that takes the dignity of both seriously?

In between evil and goodness, love and grief remain as the tension, the grappling, the wrestling with the Mystery of existence. From the Book of Genesis, Jacob literally wrestles with God all through the night:

Jacob was left there alone. Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.

When the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him.

The man then said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”

“What is your name?” the man asked. He answered, “Jacob.”

Then the man said, “You shall no longer be named Jacob, but Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed.”

Jacob then asked him, “Please tell me your name.” He answered, “Why do you ask for my name?” With that, he blessed him.

Jacob named the place Peniel,

“Because I have seen God face to face,” he said, “yet my life has been spared.”[ii]

Jacob wrestled with God, and lived. His had become a life of abundance, transformed beyond the limits of his own soul. The wrestling not only resulted in a blessing and a recognition, it not only left him alive and well, but made him who he was to be. He had become the one who contended with the more-than-merely-mortal humanity of persons, but also with the transcendent-divine mystery of God.

Those who grieve, who pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and find some way to go forward are also wrestling in the most profoundly existential sense. They are wrestling with the God who came to them in their nighttime, and continues to wrestle until “the break of dawn.”

Neither reducible to a simple good confronting a simple evil, the occasion for grief precipitates a suffering, raw and brutal. But like Jacob—who is now renamed “Israel” in recognition of his transformative encounter with the divine ground of being—can it be true that our grief is actually our wrestling with God, and that grief becomes transformative of our very identity? Like Job who comes to accept that the answer to suffering lies in another realm of meaning entirely from the question of suffering, our grief has no simple answers.

In grief, what am I wrestling with God about? I am wrestling over my beloved, whom I cannot let go of.

The moments of grief that shred the soul are the desperate moments when I cling to her, when I refuse to her go. In the beginning, God gave her and now God has taken her back again.[iii] God is name of the divine, sacred Mystery, of the alpha and omega of existence in the cosmos, of the lasting that abides through our passing.

I have loved her, but love was always a wrestling with God. “To will the good” of the beloved, to love her, was always to recognize that she belongs in the encompassing cosmos; and that, in life and death, it is the cosmos that holds us all.

Ultimately to love is to offer the beloved to the cosmos. Love was always self-sacrificial, it always asked me to give from what I had, and from more than what I had. I became who I am in love, because I became the one who loved in a love that was more than me. Now in grief, my love for my beloved asks me to give from more than I can give. To offer her to the Mystery that takes her is also, then, to offer myself.My grief is love that wrestles with God.

In life, we prepared one another for our days: in sickness, we healed each other; in loss, we mourned with one another; and in joy, we rejoiced with one another. In all things, we were present to each other. That is to say, in a lifetime of love, we were offering each other to the reality of a cosmos in which life and death, order and chaos, good and evil flow mysteriously.

In death, love asks no less: I must offer her to the Mystery that always held her. I am wrestling with God because I am being asked to let her pass away into that Mystery to which she has always belonged. In between refusing to let her go and refusing to mourn and remember, there is the space of love, saturated with grief.

But I must offer her. In so doing, my grief may become lamentation, and the veil of loss may one day be punctured by a hope beyond all telling.