 The underlying premise of my sermon last week is that these are anxious times. There have no doubt been other times in history where there's even more anxiety, more things to worry about than today. But it's hard to think of a point, at least during my lifetime, where there was such widespread anxiety across our country and the world. The same thing could be said about grief. Grief is always present. Losing loved ones, losing parts of our lives that we love, that's part of the human condition. But we are in a season of more widespread grief. For starters, so far this year, there's something like around 300,000 excess deaths in the United States above the norm. Most of these deaths, presumably, are directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. These deaths have directly touched many of us, me included, and sadly will touch many more in the coming months. And there are the grief journeys this year that are not about deaths, to name a few. High school seniors last spring, and maybe this coming spring, who lost most of the rituals and the markers of that important transition in their lives. Families who cannot physically see each other, especially loved ones who are in nursing homes or assisted care facilities. Black Americans and other marginalized people who feel even more unsafe outside, and even in their homes. Grief is also palpable here at First Unitarian Society. So much has changed over the last three years. This is the nature of ministerial transition. And then the pandemic hit, that changed just about everything for the moment. And there's no doubt that some things here and everywhere will never return back to the old normal. With all of this going on in our lives, in our society, so much has been lost. So much will be lost. There is so much to grieve. This morning I'll focus on grieving the death of a loved one, but I wanna create space this morning for those other kinds of grief. I think what I say applies to them as well. The first and foremost thing to know about grief is that there is no way around it. The only way to journey through grief is to feel it, to process it, to sit with it. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know, Pema Shodran wrote. In truth, grief never completely goes away because it always has more to teach us. We frequently circle back to older griefs and learn new lessons. But we can get to the point where we accommodate a particular loss and are able to move forward wiser, emotionally and spiritually deeper. When I encounter life's biggest challenges like grief, I find that I turn for meaning and guidance to mythology. And the myth that often accompanies me on the grief journey is the story of Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice. So just before they were to be married, Eurydice is attacked by a satyr. In the scuffle, in the struggle, she falls into a nest of vipers and gets a fatal bite in her heel. Orpheus discovers her body, an exquisite musician he pours out his bottomless grief in beautiful songs of lamentation. He decides to travel to the underworld in hopes of seeing Eurydice again. His mournful music softens the hearts of Hades and Persephone. They offer him a deal. He and Eurydice can return to the realm of the living and live there forever together. But Persephone and Hades put one condition on this, that as Orpheus and Eurydice walk toward the gates between the underworld and our world, Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus and he must not turn back to look at her. If he does, the deal's off. For whatever reason, Orpheus looks back and loses Eurydice for a second time, forever. How often during my grief journeys do I, like Orpheus, want my loved one back? I think about my beloved and perfect mom who died 10 minutes into the new year back in 2011. Especially during that first year, I desperately wanted to see her once more. I wanted to see that twinkle in her eye, that smile that told me that everything was fine in the world. If I knew how, I just might have gone to the underworld to fetch her. I might have tried. Grief makes us think these magical absurd thoughts as Joan Didion captured so beautifully in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. And there's another way that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice speaks to me. Meghan O'Rourke captures this well when she writes, the story of Orpheus is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead, but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. That's how I felt about my mom for a while. For about a year, I was roaming in the realm of the dead. I was just not ready to let her go. Well, I've learned some things from walking through the underworld and grief. I've learned how much it matters to create time and space to absorb the physical reality of a loved one's death. Most Americans today and even more Unitarian Universalists have banished the dead from our proximity. Someone dies, the undertaker comes, whisks them away, and the next thing we know, they're in a cardboard box or an urn. One writer likens how we deal with dead bodies to the flush toilet. We just flush it away and it gets removed. Well, my mom died early on a Saturday morning. One of my brothers was not able to get there before she died and he thought it was important to see her body before she was cremated. But we couldn't arrange for that to happen until Monday morning, a couple days later. I accompanied him to the mortuary to look and pay his respects. My mom did not want to be in bombs, so she looked like she had been dead for a couple days, which is not a favorite moment of my life. And yet, I swear, that moment was a valuable part of my own grief journey. The fact of her death was pretty hard to deny standing next to her body. That thought, that picture in my mind, went through my mind when I had those bouts of magical thinking that maybe somehow she wasn't gone or could come back. I've also learned in grief that it's easy to get tired, distracted, and disoriented. This makes sense. It's exhausting to trudge in the underworld. I'm sure Orpheus was exhausted too. And of course, trying to be in two worlds simultaneously, the world of the living and the world of the dead is enormously disorienting. Life goes on when we grieve we have to work or go to school, do the chores, shovel the snow, do the laundry, pay our taxes. We can't take a time out from this world so we can concentrate fully on the underworld. I've learned in grief that self-pity is pretty easy to fall into. Joan Didion writes, when we mourn our losses, we also mourn for better or for worse ourselves. As we were, as we are no longer, as we one day will not be at all. So suddenly, I imagine my daughter and my son lowering and earned with my ashes into the earth. And man, I feel pretty pitiful. I've also learned more deeply that I need community. I need family. I need friends. I need congregation. Community is my lifeblood. My kids and wife's loving support, friends driving seven hours to come to my mother's memorial service, a congregant sending me an email that said, welcome to the club of sons who have lost mothers. All those things were so important to me. They mattered immensely. And so even though there was a sense my journey in the underworld was solitary, I never felt alone. And finally, I've learned to treasure more deeply life's sweetness. Lost teaches us not to take for granted those sweet things in life. Every day a loved one graces our life is a blessing. Now it's easy to forget this truth when we emerge from the underworld of grief. And I try really hard to remember it each and every day. There can come a time when we stop searching for our loved one in the underworld. A day can come where we turn back and rejoin fully the world of the living. Even then the remnants of grief can pull us back into the underworld, but then only briefly. The trajectory of our lives is above the ground on top of the earth, not in the realm of the dead. Looking back on my grief around my mom's death, a particular dream I had was a marker for me in this journey from the underworld back to the world of the living. In this dream, I was communicating with my mother. She was dead, but like in the magical world of Harry Potter, she was alive in a portrait. Like Harry's mom and dad who were dead, she could interact with me. She couldn't talk, but she could sign. And though I never, I don't think she ever knew sign language. In this dream, she signed to me, I love you. That it turns out was all I needed to know. I could let her go. I could make my way back to the gates from the underworld to the world of the living. And so I came back forever changed.