What We Can Hold
On letting go of what was never ours to carry
I had a quick trip to Sudbury last week for Karis Connected, a conference pulling together direct support professionals, family members, and people who use our services to learn from each other and enjoy each other’s company. The kinds of connections and conversations that take place at these gatherings aren’t possible any other way. It’s a great time.
I led a workshop on grief and loss. Which isn’t exactly a riot, but I promised those who joined it wouldn’t be a downer, either. I called the session “Grief, Gratitude, and the Gifts We Share,” because in my experience grief and loss is as much about the gifts we each bring and our gratitude for one another as it is about the pain of loss.
At the start, I gave everyone two flowers: one to keep, and one to give to someone else who wasn’t a part of the session.
The premise was that the losses we carry don’t simply disappear. We don’t grow out of grief so much as we grow through it. The person who has carried loss — who knows at close range what they couldn’t control, fix, or hold on to — often has something to give others that no amount of training or technique can replicate.
We don’t grow out of grief so much as we grow through it.
It’s never simple or straightforward, but it tends to be true that our grief grows into something we can share with others. And the beautiful brevity of flowers reminds us that we, too, have but a moment to bloom and enjoy these passing encounters we have with one another (Psalm 103:15-16).
Michael (not his real name) was in his early forties when I became his support coordinator with Karis. He had a mild intellectual disability, wrestled with depression, and wore oversized square-frame glasses he was always pushing back up his nose. He loved to joke around — he would sidle up beside you, jostle your elbow, and wisecrack about the day in his Ottawa Senators T-shirt. His way of connecting with people. I grew to care about him.
He also struggled. Impulse control around food and money was genuinely hard. People took advantage of his generosity. And he had a complicated relationship with receiving support at all. Every so often he would move out, convinced he could manage on his own, then return a few months later. There were close to twenty thousand people in our province waiting for the kinds of support he was receiving (a number now over 50,000). The organization couldn’t hold his apartment indefinitely. He understood that if he left again, it was for good. A few months later, he was gone.
We heard updates over the years. He moved frequently, lived on the street, and struggled with the kinds of decisions that his support had helped him make. And then one day I heard the news that Michael had died of a heart attack.
I wrestled with it for a long time. There were things I wonder if we could have done differently. I’ve written about this in Formed Together — the grief, the what-ifs, the persistent effort to not letting that weight crush the calling entirely. What I eventually came to was not a resolution so much as a reorientation: I was not responsible for controlling Michael’s life, or the service system we were both part of. My “higher obligation was to God, to whom I was ultimately accountable” (29). That didn’t take away the loss. But it located my accountability in the right place, and I released the rest to God.
This “turning-over” must be intrinsic to vocation from the beginning. To have a calling is “to receive something from outside of yourself, to have your life profoundly shaped and directed by forces beyond your own control and comprehension” (18). The calling arrives from somewhere we did not generate, and it places us in situations we did not entirely choose. The control was never fully ours to begin with.
There is a kind of leadership anxiety that wears the costume of conscientiousness. We revisit decisions. We build contingency policies. We monitor the metrics because at least they feel solid. What that activity often conceals is a refusal to identify what is not ours to carry, to acknowledge the forces outside of our control.
Or perhaps the weight of responsibility causes us freeze or withdraw. How can we ever live up to God’s calling? How can we ever serve people the way they deserve to be served and supported, or lead in the ways we know we aught to? Grief support can feel this way, too. I’ve often said the support I provide feels like “a drop in the bucket” compared to the layers of grief that people experience.
Kierkegaard confronts this desire to withdraw, to throw up our hands and walk away or retreat to a cloister, directly: “Consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility before God does not demand that you withdraw from life, from an honourable calling, from a happy domestic life. On the contrary, it is precisely that consciousness which will sustain and clarify and illuminate what you are to do in the relations of life” (29-30).
The eternal lens does not pull us out of the responsibilities of ordinary life. It cuts through them, clarifying what is ours to carry and what lies outside our control.
All we can do is release the rest.
The Serenity Prayer (which I found out today was originally composed by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr!) sounds like a platitude until you have cared for others:
“God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
We cannot control funding cycles, government policy, generational trauma, or the particular sorrows of the people we serve. Those are the terms of the work, whether we accept it or not. What we influence is specific and closer at hand: whether we show up genuinely, whether our attention is real or feigned, whether the people we support know they are known and cared about and not simply tolerated. In this work, it functions less like inspiration and more like a recipe for resilience.
The two flowers I handed out in Sudbury were a gesture at what I’ve seen enough times in grief workshops and in organizational life to take seriously. Those who are still able to be fully present with others are usually the ones who have held on with one hand and let go with the other, not simply as a posture but as a capacity their losses have forged in them. What we carry and what we’ve had to set down are not separate from care we offer. This give-and-take is essential to caring well.
I often point caregivers and those who lead them to these profound words by Rachen Naomi Remen in Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal:
The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet. This sort of denial is no small matter. The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life and help. We burn out not because we don’t care but because we don’t grieve. We burn out because we’ve allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.
Kierkegaard’s claim is that clarity about one’s eternal responsibility coram Deo or “before God” clarifies rather than minimizes the work we put our hands to. Honest conversations, patient attention, and presence that costs something (like productivity, at times!) will yield eternal rewards. We were never meant to see the full extent of what we give. We let go of the pain, and we let go of the glory.
So we do what is ours to do, and we trust that what was given well doesn’t simply disappear, even when we need to let go, even when those we care about make tragic life choices or end up in dark places.
As I head into a new chapter, I’m challenged to consider what it is I’m holding so tightly to that I can no longer reach out to others.
There is a quote my mom, who died in 2018, impressed on me during our homeschooling years. It comes from the 19th‑century clergyman Edward Everett Hale:
"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."
I cannot hold everything, but I hold the small, specific work that is before me, and pray for the courage to trust God with the rest.