Grief and Gratitude (Meredith Liu)
My contribution to the Missouri Historical Society’s April 2019 fashion exhibition
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:17 (ESV))
Two weeks ago, many of us at Washington University received the news that our spring semester had been canceled. At first, I found it very difficult to acknowledge the implications. What does it mean to shut down a campus? As a second-semester senior, I simply felt a sweeping numbness and shock. Everything I had been preparing for over the last three and a half years suddenly ceased to exist.
The weight of the news finally hit me when I begrudgingly deleted one important item after another from my beloved Google calendar: my final choir concert, my senior-sendoff with my a cappella group, my fashion design capstone runway show, graduation itself. With rapid acceleration, the life that I was expecting to live came thoroughly unraveled before my eyes.
Suddenly, within a weekend, I had packed up all of my belongings and made the eighteen-hour drive across the country to be back home with my parents on the east coast. I barely said goodbye to the city and the people that had been my home for almost four years.
On my drive home, I had a lot of time to think and pray. Yet even with no one to interrupt my thoughts or my conversations with God, I struggled to face my emotions. In fact, I actively tried not to feel anything at all. It was easier to resign myself to apathy. The loss of my life in St. Louis felt almost too great to bear.
But somewhere in the middle of northeastern Ohio, the halfway point of my two-day journey, I forced myself to contemplate my newfound loss and loneliness. I thought about the friends I might never see again and my empty apartment. I thought about my senior capstone—a 6-piece eveningwear collection designed to embody brokenness and healing—the product of over a year of diligent late nights and pin-pricked fingers, that would never walk on a runway. I mourned never singing with my choirs again.
Yet as I walked through these losses, one by one, something in my heart was stirred to gratitude, remembering all of these good things I had before the COVID-19 crisis. I think that remarkable feeling of thanksgiving had to be, in that moment, a product of God’s mercy, because truth be told I can’t imagine how I could summon it of my own capacity or will.
It dawned on me then that God had never promised me a happy college career. I certainly hadn’t done anything to “deserve” one in God’s eyes. But despite it all, while college was at times incredibly difficult and acutely painful, God still blessed me with some incredible friends, a whole host of invaluable resources, a beautiful apartment, and many wonderful memories that will live in my heart forever. He blessed me with His steadfast presence in both my darkest hours and my easiest days.
Through the losses that I have confronted this month, I have begun to appreciate more fully all of the gifts, material and otherwise, that I have received from God. And remembering them as gifts, my heart shifts. Grief is certainly appropriate for loss, and mourning the loss of my last two months of college does not separate me from God. But mourning what is lost also reminds me of what has been given.
And the paramount gift God has given us – the gift of eternal life in Heaven through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – still remains. Nothing can take it away. In reflecting on that gift, we can truly begin to experience the elusive peace that surpasses all understanding.
Meredith Liu is a student staff with The Carver Project and an undergraduate senior in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Additional Resources:
Corrie Ten Boom, Each New Day
For Meredith Liu’s fashion and designs, see https://www.meredithliu.com/
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