Rev. James Gilkey sighed as he put down the letter. It was the second such letter in a week. This one was from a girl whose fiance, a naval officer in the Pacific, had been killed in action; and she was anguished and bitter, her faith shaken. She had lost everything, she wrote. Life no longer had any meaning for her. How could she go on when the person she loved and needed most was gone? How could she ever have faith in anything any more? This letter touched him profoundly. “Please help me!” the girl had begged. “Tell me what to do…” He wrote to her the following:
Misfortune cannot be conquered by furious and continuing resentment. It can be conquered only by quiet acquiescence. We win victory over bereavement only when we face our loss, accept our loss, and then make our way through and beyond our loss. You ask how we make our way through it and beyond it? We do so by deliberately re-entering the world of daily activity – the busy world of problems, duties, friendships, opportunities, satisfactions. An immolated, resentful, self-pitying life is a doomed life. Only the life which deliberately picks up and starts again is victorious.
In New York Harbor, between Manhattan Island and Staten Island, is a sunken shoal called Robbins Reef. A small lighthouse stands there, and for many years the keeper was an elderly widow, Mrs. Jacob Walker. One day she told her story to a reporter, who gave it to the world.
“I was a young girl living at Sandy Hook, New Jersey,” she said, “when I first met my husband. He was keeper of the Sandy Hook Light, and took me there as his bride. I was happy there, for the lighthouse was on land and I could have a garden and raise flowers. Then one day we were transferred here -to Robbins Reef. As soon as we arrived I said to my husband, ‘I can’t stay here! The sight of water wherever I look makes me too lonesome. I won’t unpack….’ But somehow all the trunks and boxes got unpacked.
“Four years later my husband caught cold while tending the light. The cold turned to pneumonia, and they took him to the infirmary on Staten Island.
“I stayed behind to tend the light. A few nights later I saw a rowboat coming through the darkness. Something told me the message it was bringing. The man in the boat said, ‘We’re sorry, Mrs. Walker, but your husband’s worse.’ ‘You mean he’s dead,” I answered; and there was no reply.
“We buried my husband on a hillside on Staten Island. Every morning when the sun comes up I stand at a porthole and look across the water toward his grave. Sometimes the hill is green, sometimes it is brown, sometimes it is white with snow. But it always brings a message form him – something I heard him say more often than anything else. Just three words – ‘Mind the light!’”
Facing a loss, accepting a loss, then re-entering life and so moving through and beyond the loss – there is the first secret of managing bereavement. A SELF-PITYING LIFE IS A DOOMED LIFE. ONLY THE LIFE WHICH DELIBERATELY PICKS UP AND STARTS OVER AGAIN IS VICTORIOUS.