Anger as lament: Five-Minute Stories
Sharing a draft of an essay I’m working on for a current writing course. Thank you for welcoming my unedited reflection into this gracious, safe space.
p.s. You can read previous Five-Minute Stories here.
Hospital visits looked like this in 2020.
In April 2020 I tacked a hand-scribbled index card to the wall over my desk. In uneven ink, the handwriting directs me: “Learn to articulate your outrage. April 16, 2020.”
I’d written the statement - a direct quote from author Marilyn McEntyre - on a day the exhaustion of chronic indignation felt fearfully close to hatred. I’d confessed to my spiritual director that morning. That word, hatred, slipped out of my mouth. It shocked me. As I sat in silence with my hatred, I remembered the advice and scribbled it on the 3x5 card as a prayer: Learn to articulate your outrage. Amen.
In April 2020 the whole world was getting a crash course in infectious disease. My grandmother died in March, and we were forced to ask the same question that families of millions would face in 2020: How do we grieve when we can’t be together?
At the same time, I was googling “How to postpone a wedding because of the pandemic?” My daughter’s April 25th celebration could not happen as planned and we added another layer of unexpected grief (who expects to postpone a wedding?) formed by the question: How do we celebrate when we can’t be together?
In May 2020, a 12:30 am phone call triggered a frantic drive to the airport and a flight across the country in the middle of a pandemic so that we could stand outside a psychiatric hospital to show our loved one we were there. We couldn’t hug her but she could see our faces and we could see hers - at least the outline of her beautiful, curly hair three-stories up silhouetted by the glare of late-spring Texas sun. She was alive and we needed to see it with our own eyes.
Anger is the stage of grief I got stuck in for most of 2020. My friends and children seemed to ricochet between denial and depression. Folks in the congregation my husband pastors demonstrated a solid penchant for bargaining and a few beautiful people embodied a beautiful acceptance.
I, however, was mad as hell. Occasionally I stomped around my house, yelling prayers to God. Other times, I privately cursed the most mundane inconveniences. I needed to find a way to articulate the outrage rather than be ground up in a wake of unsatisfactory social media outbursts or sulky episodes of self-loathing. I needed to get a good night’s sleep.
As I look back, the most fruitful expressions of anger took the form of embodied gestures - nine of us sitting in an empty sanctuary to watch my daughter and new son-in-law say vows in April, and then twenty of us, masked and six-feet apart, circling my Grandma’s casket at a delayed burial service in early June. The next week, we wore those same masks to kneel in the grass of our neighborhood park for eight minutes and forty-six seconds with our community, silently cursing systems of oppression.
In May, we stood with our sons and daughter-in-law outside the psychiatric hospital and protested death by lifting a heart-shaped balloon into the sky outside our loved one’s hospital window. In November, I added a visual to my thumb-tacked index card. Next to the sentence “Learn to articulate your outrage” I placed the sticker I proudly earned. It says “I Voted”.
I need words now. I need the embodied gestures to form into sentences and paragraphs. I need this anger to be transformed into a cleansing, redemptive grief. Once again, I find that articulating outrage requires a physical, embodied posture.
I sit at the keyboard and I write.
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Friends, as you look back at the past year, what moments or personal experiences come to mind? What do you feel as you remember them? What does your body feel?
I welcome you to join me each day during Lent as I offer simple daily encouragement to retrieve the language of lament that will point us toward resurrection hope. See details below.
In the meantime, I’m listening. Share your thoughts in the comment section.
Hosanna, Jesus, save us now!
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