March 2026

"Grief? What is grief? One morning when Jiayu opened her eyes she said to the ceiling, ‘Grief, I don’t know who you are, so don’t pretend you know who I am.’”

In her short story “When We Were Happy, We had Other Names,” novelist Yiyun Li takes us into the life of a woman who is grieving her son’s death by suicide. In real life, Li’s two sons both died by suicide, and her writing often explores the dimensions of grief, from get-on-with-it stoicism to existentialist questions about life’s unexpected turns.

As much as I love and have studied Li’s beautifully defiant paragraph, I don’t understand it. Grief knows me. I know grief and its schizophrenic patterns. And, if you’re living a life of love, you also, or will, know grief. It sets up a place in the living room, makes itself at home, an ever-changing swirl of flight and fury, bittersweet tenderness. It blocks the front door. Hands you a hairbrush. It sits quietly as you watch the news. Grief has wound itself around my body, and the grief that my grandmothers, and their grandmothers, long gone, both caresses and crushes me.

In 2022, a voice whispered to me, and I began grieving my mother a full three months before she even felt ill, four months before her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, eight months before she died. It was a gift, this anticipatory grief, because it allowed me to be fully present and to attend to her differently. This early grief steadied me for the holy work that accompanies death.

The Lenten season ends with the promise of renewed life, but to reach it, we travel together through the throes of grief on that painful walk to the cross. In this issue of the Outlook, we invite you into the space that culminates inresurrection, salvation, and the good news of God’s unending love.