Holding the Rope: Reflections on Grief  

Grief has no sense of propriety or manners. It doesn’t knock, it doesn’t wait for a convenient moment or respect the walls you have carefully built around yourself. It simply barges in. Without warning, it breaks down the front door of your carefully erected emotions, delivering a gut punch before you realize what is happening. 

In the last few years, I have known this kind of grief repeatedly: the loss of my mother, my father, my childhood home, my place in a church where I pastored for over three decades, close friendships that quietly faded or ended suddenly, and the particular ache of watching my kids step into a world that no longer includes our home as their center. Taken alone, each loss would be enough to undo a person. Taken together, they do not simply wound – they rearrange you.  

Grief has a way of finding me at night. The house goes quiet; the day releases its grip, and that is when it comes. As I lie down to sleep, my mind begins to wander: down old paths and winding memories, through the rooms of a childhood home that no longer stands, reviewing bygone days when life felt full and certain and…joyful.  

The temptation in those moments is to linger there too long, letting nostalgia become a place of residence rather than a place of passing through. But I have learned that lingering too long in those corridors pulls me somewhere I did not intend to go – into caverns that echo and deepen, where the light from the entrance grows small and far away. 

The image that best captures my grief is a well. Deep, dark, and cold. There are days when I feel myself swinging from a rope inside it, suspended between the world above and the darkness below. I could let go. The fall would be easy, even tempting in its finality. And if I am honest, I have let go before; I have fallen. I have felt the rope slip through my hands and the darkness rise to receive me, and finding my way back out was neither easy nor swift.  

There were long seasons spent at the bottom of that well, searching for the rope in the dark, wondering if I still had the strength to climb, wondering – more than once – whether I would find my way out at all. I did, but I carry the memory of that bottom with me. It is part of why I hold on so carefully now. 

The well is real. The darkness is real. But so is the rope. And so are my hands. And I have discovered that the well, as terrifying as it is, has given me something unexpected: a way to see my grief, and in seeing it, to hold some small measure of control over it. I do not have to fall. I can choose to descend. Slowly, deliberately, both hands wrapped around the rope. When grief comes, as it always does, I lower myself into it with intention. I stay for a moment. I let it be what it is. And then I climb back out. I decide when I go in; I decide when I return. That agency, small as it may seem, has been the difference. 

In the early months, I did not need this kind of discipline. Numbness arrived like a first responder. Merciful, efficient, doing what I could not do for myself. It carried me through the shock, the arrangements, the condolences, the strange and relentless busyness that trails in the wake of death like a shadow. But numbness should be a visitor, not a permanent resident. It is a bridge, not a home. 

Now, on the other side of it, I am meeting the grief properly for the first time. Feeling its full weight, looking at it without the cushion of shock between us. Now I find myself truly reckoning with the absence of all I’ve lost, feeling its weight. 

It is heavier than I expected. It is also more honest. 

I am learning, too, to stop treating the past as the only place where joy lives. For a time, I moved through my days as though happiness was something that had already happened to me. Stored in rooms I could no longer enter, in voices I could no longer hear. But I am slowly beginning to believe something different: that life is still full, that the future is not a lesser thing, that joy is not behind me but ahead. There is the promise of it coming yet in the morning, in forms I cannot yet imagine. 

And through all of it, beneath all of it, I am learning the weight of a promise I have carried for years without fully understanding it: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt 5:4 NIV). It is no longer a verse, but a reality I am living inside of. The comfort is not loud or dramatic. It comes quietly, the way dawn comes, gradually and then all at once. 

The faithfulness of God is real. And in the end, when the darkness of the well presses close and my arms are tired and the bottom feels nearer than the top… 

…that faithfulness is the rope I am holding on to. 

About the Author

Gary Khan was born in Trinidad and moved to the United States at age twenty to pursue his calling to ministry, primarily serving at Desert Streams Church in Santa Clarita, California. After more than thirty years in pastoral leadership, Gary now serves as Executive Director of Operations for Marketplace Chaplains, where he helps provide care and support to employees and their families in the workplace. Gary is the author of the devotionals Reset and Greater, as well as That Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Thought and his upcoming book, Father Stories. Gary and his wife, DeLaine, have three children and live in Southern California.