Notes from Retirement: On Grief and Closure

“I miss Bill.” As Kathy and I awoke to another day, I told her so. “I really loved that guy.”

“I know you did,” she said.

Announcements come from me unbidden, dregs from a retired pastor’s heart. Parish ministry has been rich with lovable souls. Bill happened to be on my mind lately. He died three years ago, one organ tanking after another. 81.

Just now I looked up his obituary, enjoyed his grin and recalled details. Small business owner, enviable domestic travels with wife Judie, who survives. Nowhere does it say that Bill was a mischievous character, but those words cover as much territory as Bill’s Fine Foods and St. John’s Lutheran Church.

If a bear were within reach, Bill would poke it. A fellow parishioner, Rusty, relished remembering a dinner at St. John’s during which Bill held forth with embarrassing abandon. He never mentioned about what exactly, only that Judie was working her jaw and pursing her lips.

By coincidence, Rusty followed Bill and Judie on the drive home. Through the darkness, he could see a silhouette of the long-married couple, wife leaning toward husband and wagging her finger at his face, husband absorbing a first-string, All-American scolding. The account took a while, as the stout Rusty growled with laughter every sentence or two.

Bill and Rusty sat together for decades of Church Council meetings and were more brothers than brothers. The latter beat the former to the grave by a few years. As Bill neared his end, we sipped lemonade at his dining room table. Lower and lower he sank into his wheelchair, gravity itself having its way with his spent body.

He said something commonplace: “I miss Rusty.” His simple resignation and vulnerability move me still. That mischievous character’s eyes may as well have whispered, “It won’t be long now, Pastor.”

“I miss Bill.” “I miss Rusty.” Words better wept than spoken.

Since hanging up my Roman collar in April of 2025, I’ve settled into the silence of my backyard hut and let my ideas roam. Thanks to a dark turn of mind, I’ve thought a lot about grief: mine, Bill’s, people I love whose loss is devastating. I’ve reckoned anew the truth that mourning is a law unto itself. You can’t escape it. For a “little day”* you might be in the clear, but eventually the bone-sadness will administer its punishment. If you’ve kept bedside vigil, kissed a forehead, begged for a reprieve, watched a chest cease its rising and falling, you know. Tears are only the beginning. Nausea, fog, chest pain, you name it. Hearts do break. You can feel it.

Closure supposedly awaits those who work for it, but I wonder. In a 2011 CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, the late Christopher Hitchens said this of his mother’s passing: “There’s no such thing [as closure] and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available because all it would mean is that some quite important part of you had gone numb. ‘Oh, how nice, I don’t feel anything about her anymore.’ No!”

If Hitchens was right, then it’s also daft when news reporters hope a disaster victim’s survivors can start finding closure before the funeral begins. This is boilerplate vocabulary used to put sad stories to bed and tuck them in tight. Think thoughts and prayers.

Again, no. When mindful folks say closure, they mean the ability to carry on, at last finding that joy in those of blessed memory keeps pace with the suffocation of their absence. The image of turning a page or closing a door is wrong. Heaven forbid the typeface ever lacks Mom or Bill or the lock clicks shut.

Breathing is closer to the truth. Parishioners in raw grief have told me they forget to breathe. They rest a hand on their chest, signaling that the involuntary act of taking air in and letting it out requires startling effort. Maybe mourning should be understood breath by breath. Maybe progress means that your lungs can fill with ease.

I hadn’t figured on my pension including such reminders of what I already knew well. I had Kahlil Gibran’s wisdom memorized, but it now returns to my hut’s sanctuary, more dregs from a pastor’s heart: “Together [joy and sorrow] come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”

And missing Bill, why here, why now? He mostly visits as a cardinal at my feeders. A friend once claimed that a cardinal’s arrival announces God’s presence. I don’t believe this, but imagine that if Bill had permission, he would send a bird to say, “All is well, Pastor. I miss you, too.”

I breathe in and out, grateful that neither Bill nor I want closure. Carrying on will do.

*From the hymn “Abide with Me”: “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; / Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away; / Change and decay in all around I see; / O thou who changest not, abide with me.”

And P. S. “Rusty” is a made-up name.