The Subtle Art of Life
November 1, 2025The Subtle Art
of Grief
by Charles Efiong
"Why her? Why me? Why now? If You are who You say You are, how could You let this happen?"
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a tragedy. It is not the absence of sound. The world is loud enough. It is the silence of a question that has no answer, hanging in the air like smoke that will not clear. I was twelve years old when I first heard that silence, and for a while, I did not know what to do with it.
My mother died and took with her the version of me that had never known loss. What remained was a boy, an only child suddenly disconnected, I was sent to live with cousins on my grandfather's farm while my dad figured out what came next. The farm was vast and living in the way that only farms can be. Poultries, piggeries, trees of all types, fish ponds, crops of all types as well. It was, in every sense, a whole ‘new’ world.
I had been raised a Christian, but somehow this faith had handed me certain unspoken rules. Among them was that you do not question God. To question was to doubt. To doubt was to sin. And so, when my mother died, when the God I had been taught loved me allowed someone I loved so much to be taken, I did not know where to put the feelings that rose up in me. I had no language for it that was safe. I had no emotions that were both honest and holy.
So, I held it. And holding it was its own kind of violence.
The farm gave me the one thing grief desperately needs and rarely gets, space. Physical, unhurried, uncrowded space. I began to sneak away. Past the pens, past the ponds, past the palm trees to wherever the land thinned out into something quieter. And there, alone, with no congregation to perform composure for, no elder to reassure, the words began to come.
They were not prayers. Not at first. They were arguments.
Why her? Why me? Why now? If You are who You say You are, how could You let this happen?
I said things to God in those fields that I would never have said inside a church. I was angry in a way that felt dangerous, desperate, reckless. There were days I wept so hard the ground felt wet beneath me. Days I shouted. Days I sat in silence. Days.
And God, this is the part I am still learning how to say, did not leave.
There is a theology I was not taught as a child but have since found everywhere in scripture: that God is large enough to hold our fury. That the Psalms are full of men and women who came to God not with polished gratitude but with bleeding, bewildered honesty. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I like to think that these are not the words of doubt. These are the words of someone who believed enough to bring their devastation directly to the source.
I did not know that then. I only knew that when I ran out of arguments, something remained. A presence. Not an explanation (I want to be honest that no explanation ever came), but a presence, patient, unhurried, familiar, even, in a way I had not expected.
He was not offended. That was the first thing I understood. I had come blinded in rage, I was ready to be struck down, at the very least expecting to be rebuked for my honesty and instead found that my honesty had opened a door I had not known was closed. He was not cold or distant or wounded by my questions. If anything, and this still moves me till today, He seemed to have been waiting for me to stop performing and simply come.
And then, this I cannot fully explain, I began to sense that He, too, was grieving. Not in a way that made the loss smaller, but in a way that made me feel less alone inside it. That the love He had for my mother, my father and for me had not made Him indifferent to the cost of her absence. That He was, in some way I could only feel, emotional about us.
The arguments did not end so much as they transitioned. Over weeks, they grew longer, slower, the heat left them and something more sustainable took its place. I would walk the perimeter of the farm in the evenings and I would talk. About her, about what I missed, about what I was afraid of, about what I hoped, about nothing in particular and about everything.
The farm helped. I think my grief needed a landscape that could absorb it, something bigger than four walls, something indifferent to my dignity, something that did not ask me to be fine.
I am not going to tell you that I resolved the question of why. I did not. I do not think I am supposed to. What I will tell you is that the question stopped being a wall and became a room, a room where I was allowed to live, to grow, to eventually find furniture that fit.
I lost my mother at twelve. I found in the grief that followed, a God I had not known before. Not the God of correct posture and unbroken composure, but the God of the long walk, the God of deep emotions, the God that doesn’t let the argument end the relationship but deepens it.
My faith today is not smaller for having been broken open. It is, I think, the only kind of faith that lasts, the kind that has been tested, shaped by honest hands, and found, in the end, to be larger than the loss that first demanded it.
Some things, it turns out, you can only learn in the field. And some conversations with God can only begin when you stop being polite and start being real.
