Sideways Grief and Smells You Can’t Ignore
Photo by Inés Castellano on Unsplash
When I was five years old, my grandfather died unexpectedly. He was so young, and the grief my family felt at his loss was so big. Being so young, I barely remember anything from that time, but whenever I smell a yellow rose, which were everywhere at the funeral home, I can see, with almost film-reel-like clarity, my mother trying to smile at me through her tears so I wouldn't be scared at something I didn’t fully understand. After I shared this story in a recent sermon, my sister sent a text to say that she has always associated the smell of roses with sorrow, for the same reason, even though she was only a little older than me.
Smells are more than just a scent.
In John's Gospel, right on the cusp of what we know as Holy Week, we hear the story of Mary of Bethany. How she takes expensive oil and anoints the feet of Jesus. (John 12:1-8)
While reading it, I kept coming back to one verse over and over again: “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
Smell is the sense most closely tied to our memory and emotion centers of the brain. So smells are rarely just smells. They are so often attached to feelings and times and people and places.
In the Gospel story, the ointment/oil that Mary used to anoint the feet of Jesus was an oil used for burial anointing, so it had the same scent connotations as roses do for me and my sister.
It smelled like sadness. It smelled like sorrow. It smelled like death.
The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
Maybe another way to say this: the smell of death, grief, and loss filled the room where they were gathered.
This smell, combined with the conversations the disciples had been having with Jesus about his impending death, well, they were all a little hard to ignore at this moment.
So the disciples did what - dare I say - most of us do when confronted with a hard truth we don’t want to face, they found an easy target and let their grief out sideways.
In a lovely children’s book by Kelly Rhoades-Dumler called “Quilly’s sideways grief,” a little porcupine (Quilly) loses a loved one but doesn’t want to talk about it. He keeps feeling angry and doesn’t know why. He tells a friend that his quills feel heavy, and his friend replies: “Sideways grief, that’s what you have … It happens when your feelings try to find a way out even if you don’t want them to.”
Your feelings will find a way out.
I think this definition of sideways grief is perfect to describe a lot of our life right now, as we continue to slowly emerge from our deeply isolated pandemic life.
We are surrounded, absolutely surrounded by loss.
People we love have died.
A way of life we loved has died.
The way we interact with others has changed.
Church has changed.
We don’t like any of it.
And our feelings are finding a way out.
We complain about how things don't look like they used to, we get mad at the wrong people and find easy targets for our feelings, but it doesn’t remove the smell that has filled the room.
The disciples got mad about money. How wasteful Mary was acting.
But Jesus reminded them that Mary was doing the right thing. “Leave her alone,” he said. “She is preparing me for burial.”
Mary did what so many of us do not want to do.
She was looking death right in the face and not pretending it away.
She was preparing for it, even.
Because she knew that death didn't have the last word.
This moment happened at a celebration for her resurrected brother, after all.
She knew.
Jesus doesn’t join the disciples in their fear and anger and sideways grief because he too knows that on the other side of death is resurrection. This doesn’t mean he isn’t also feeling his own fear and anguish over what is to come. He’ll go and pray pleading prayers in the garden in just a few short days, but he also knows that his death is not the end of the story.
Death is real.
It’s impossibly hard.
But the only things that resurrect are things that have died first.
We can’t have one without the other.
The house is filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
We are entering Holy Week in the church.
Maybe this week, more than any other, can we do what Mary did?
Can we look death right in the face and even prepare for it?
Can we be honest about what is happening, and let it actually happen?
Can we stop holding onto what is dying in order to let something new rise?
Resurrection is real.
We watch it in real time every spring here in Minnesota.
Everything that has died comes to life again.
It is harder when the things that have died are ways of life we’re used to, or people we love.
But the most difficult death doesn’t make resurrection less real.
It means we need it more.
I keep thinking about Lazarus sitting there while this is happening.
I like to think that even before Mary poured that whole bottle of perfume on Jesus he still smelled like the same anointing oil. It lingers, after all. I like to think that those sitting next to him had the uncomfortable reminder that just a few days earlier he had been laying in a tomb.
I wonder if for him, even more than for Mary, that smell meant something different.
If he didn’t fear death anymore.
If his own resurrection had changed how he saw death, how he smelled death.
I wonder if we too might be able to see the things around us that cause our fear and anxiety to come out sideways in a different light today.
I wonder if we too might open our eyes to see the death that is in front of us, and also the resurrection that is close behind.
A resurrection that is yet to come, yes, but coming all the same.
