The words by the 17th century poet-pastor John Donne were familiar—“No man is an island.” I first read this poem at the suggestion of my college English professor. Since then I’ve read the book by Thomas Merton with that title, and listened to a number of songs based on Donne’s words—a folk version by Joan Baez, a choral piece sung in church, even a reggae version by Dennis Brown.
On September 11, 2001, the words came back.
A few months earlier, I spotted my father-in-law’s copy of Donne’s collected works on the bookshelf and began reading in an effort to get a handle on my grief. I discovered that Donne’s wife Anne died after sixteen years of marriage when he was forty-five. Evelyn died after eighteen years when I was forty-seven, so we had a bond.
I pulled back, though, when I read that Donne believed the death of a loved one was not a breach between two people, but an expansion, like gold that is beaten into airy thinness. It’s a lovely image, but I don’t understand what he means. I’m miserable, and there’s a rhino sitting on my couch. There is nothing golden or airy about this.
One illuminating grace was finding two poems that Donne wrote after Anne died. “Holy Sonnet 17” expressed his gratitude that she was now in joyous heaven where it was always autumn with its warm, rich colors. Then he wrote about his despair in “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day,” feeling like he was every dead thing, a carcass, the grave. This was my reality, trying to hold two different emotions that didn’t go well together. For Donne, sorrow was a deep, human response to something tragic, and it was as much a natural part of life as was love.
He wrote that we should not idealize faith and neglect the human. We should not follow faith blindly like automatons (he didn’t use that word), because when tragedy strikes, the wheels come off the bus of lofty ideals and we’re left with a gritty mess. Jesus came down to earth because there is something important about being human. To deny our humanity, to deny love, grief, or any of our emotions, is to ignore them as sources of insight, wisdom, and strength. Jesus may have been fully divine, but he was also fully human.
Donne’s words gave me permission to grieve. They opened a door and, finally, I could hear what those in my congregation had been saying—I needed to allow myself to feel whatever I was feeling, and let the emotions guide me through. Grief is also communal. In the Jewish tradition, a group of people gather after worship and says Kaddish as a community, a prayer of remembering to praise God when you have suffered a tragedy and want to curse, with people praying for those too grief-stricken, or too angry, to pray:
Yitgadal ve’yit kadash sh’mei raba.
Exalted and hallowed be God’s greatness
In this world of Your creation.
When the day of September 11 came, I was still lost in the dust and lingering numbness of my personal collapse and felt nothing. Cynically I thought, “Welcome to my world.” But the starkness of my reaction told me how far I had disengaged from the world. A day later, the images on television of the destruction and of people in shock and despair broke through my defenses, and I cried for the newly dead, feeling the enormity of Donne’s words that every person’s death diminishes me, and now thousands more were gone.
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The full version of my essay was originally published by Antler Journal.
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