Abstract: Contemporary pastoral responses to grief often rely upon theological language shaped by deterministic assumptions, cure-oriented frameworks, or emotionally reductive platitudes that may intensify spiritual fragmentation during experiences of death and loss. In Can We Talk About Death?: An Open and Relational Vision, hospice chaplain Tracy Tucker draws upon pastoral experience, grief care, and a framework centered on divine love to propose a more relational framework for engaging suffering, lament, and mortality. Engaging Tucker alongside Alan Wolfelt’s concept of companioning, as well as broader conversations in pastoral theology, grief studies, and embodiment, this essay argues that theological language surrounding death carries profound relational, ethical, and physiological consequences that pastoral theology cannot responsibly ignore. Mourning is made easier through practices of accompaniment, honest questioning, communal suffering, and divine solidarity. Inherited theological frameworks sometimes collapse under the weight of lived grief. Ultimately, this essay suggests that Open and Relational Theology offers pastoral theology constructive resources for addressing death and suffering in ways that cohere more fully with lament traditions, embodied grief, and the relational character of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Death Becomes Us: Grief, Companioning, and Open and Relational Theology in Tracy Tucker’s Can We Talk About Death?

Michael Joseph Brennan

The language spoken at bedsides tends to outlast the theology that generated it. Caregivers arrive in hospice rooms, hospital corridors, and funeral parlors equipped with inherited vocabularies—“God needed another angel,” “everything happens for a reason,” “at least they’re no longer suffering”—and deploy them with the best intentions, often producing what Tucker calls a betrayal of “our inability to experience the pain of loss.”[1] In Can We Talk About Death?: An Open and Relational Vision, hospice chaplain Tracy Tucker examines how theological frameworks surrounding death shape not only doctrinal imagination but the embodied, relational, and emotional terrain of grief itself, and argues that deterministic or overly providential assumptions embedded in much pastoral language may deepen spiritual fragmentation precisely when mourners are most vulnerable. Engaging Tucker alongside Alan Wolfelt’s critique of cure-oriented grief models and broader conversations in pastoral and practical theology, this essay argues that theological language surrounding death carries profound relational, ethical, and physiological consequences that pastoral theology cannot responsibly ignore. Rather than treating grief as a problem requiring theological resolution, Tucker’s open and relational framework emphasizes divine solidarity, noncoercive love, and communal accompaniment. He reframes mourning as a relational process requiring honest presence more than confident explanation.

For many grieving people, the most devastating losses are not limited to deaths alone, but all relational ruptures: divorce, estrangement, communal betrayal, and institutional disappointment. It is precisely here that inherited pastoral language most consistently fails, reaching for platitudes where presence was required. Tucker’s project addresses this broader landscape of loss, and this essay suggests that Tucker’s framework founded on Open and Relational Theology offers pastoral theology constructive resources for accompanying grief in ways that cohere more fully with Scripture’s own lament traditions, the embodied realities of bereavement, and the relational character of God most fully disclosed in the crucified and risen Christ.

I. Mortality, Literature, and the Failure of Inherited Language

Human beings have always needed language for death before theology arrived to provide it. Tracy Tucker points The Epic of Gilgamesh, among the oldest sustained narratives in the human literary record, does not open with a cosmology or a doctrine of the afterlife. It opens with friendship, and then with its destruction. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh sits beside the body for seven days, refusing to relinquish it, until a worm falls from his companion’s nose and the fact of death becomes undeniable.[2] The poem does not attempt to resolve his grief. Through wilderness and futile quest and final exhaustion, the reader is invited to accompany death, honestly and without consolation. Whatever else the Gilgamesh tradition preserves, it preserves this: the human animal has always known that grief resists explanation and that presence, even futile presence, matters more than answers.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet inherits a different problem. He is not without language for death. He is drowning in it: his culture’s inherited scripts for mourning, his uncle’s efficient theological closure, his mother’s pragmatic remarriage. None of it fits the weight of what he actually carries. “But I have that within which passes show,” he says, and the line locates precisely what pastoral theology has often failed to honor: that grief has an interior life that inherited religious performance cannot fully reach or represent.[3] Hamlet’s famous paralysis is as much psychological as it is linguistic. He cannot act because no available language tells the truth about what he has lost.

The open and relational theological imagination makes room for doubt and questions. A God that doesn’t control the future works with creatures toward the best possible outcomes moment to moment.

II. Companioning, Cure, and the Medical Model of Grief

The dominant framework through which twentieth-century Western culture understood grief was fundamentally clinical. Grief was a condition with identifiable stages, measurable progress, and an implied endpoint called recovery. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model, whatever its original descriptive intent, became prescriptive in popular and pastoral application, generating what Alan Wolfelt would later identify as a deeply problematic assumption: that mourning is an illness and the caregiver’s primary task is its treatment.[4] Wolfelt, a grief counselor and educator whose work has significantly shaped contemporary bereavement theory, reflects candidly on his own formation: “Much of what was taught about grief while I was earning my doctorate in psychology was too rooted in the medical model of caregiving. Like [him], many mental health caregivers were trained in this model. They were taught that grief, like other psychological troubles, could be considered an illness that needs proper assessment and diagnosis and, with treatment, can be ‘cured.’”[5]

The consequences of this framework extend well beyond clinical settings. When cure becomes the governing metaphor for grief, caregivers (including pastors, chaplains, and lay ministers) unconsciously orient their presence around resolution. The goal becomes emotional restoration rather than honest accompaniment. Mourners who fail to progress, who circle back into acute grief months or years after a loss, who refuse the available consolations, begin to seem like treatment failures rather than human beings living truthfully inside an irreversible reality. Wolfelt’s corrective is lexical before it is methodological. He proposes replacing the language of treatment with the language of companioning, describing the grief companion not as a guide leading mourners toward recovery but as a fellow traveler willing to enter the wilderness of loss without a predetermined map or destination.[6]

This reorientation carries significant implications for pastoral theology. If grief is not a problem requiring solution but a relational process requiring presence, then the caregiver’s primary qualification is not theological competence or psychological expertise but a willingness to remain. Henri Nouwen, writing from within a different but adjacent tradition, identified this posture as the wounded healer’s essential discipline: the capacity to make one’s own vulnerability a resource for genuine presence rather than a liability to be managed.[7] The caregiver who has not made peace with their own mortality, Nouwen suggests, will unconsciously work to resolve the dying person’s distress in order to manage their own.

Wolfelt and Nouwen offer theology based on divine solidarity. Alfred North Whitehead’s description of God as “the fellow sufferer who understands” functions as a model for what faithful human presence might look like when explanation fails and presence is all that remains as well as a metaphysical claim in pastoral contexts.[8] Tucker’s project draws precisely on this convergence, arguing that a theology capable of imagining a God who genuinely suffers with creation is also capable of forming caregivers who genuinely suffer with the bereaved, rather than caregivers who manage grief from a position of theological safety.

III. Tucker’s Open and Relational Vision: Pastoral Theology After Determinism

Open and Relational Theology is not a single confessional tradition but a contemporary theological stream drawing on process philosophy, Wesleyan-Arminian inheritance, and relational biblical interpretation to emphasize divine love as genuinely noncoercive, the future as genuinely open, and creaturely agency as genuinely meaningful.[9] Its conversation partners range from Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne in philosophical theology to Thomas Jay Oord, Marjorie Suchocki, and John B. Cobb Jr. in constructive theology, and its central intuition is that God’s power is better understood as the power of persuasive love than as unilateral control. For readers unfamiliar with the movement, this distinction matters both pastorally and metaphysically: a God who controls all things is a God implicated in every death, every diagnosis, every loss, while a God whose power operates through relational presence and creaturely collaboration is a God who can be trusted precisely because divine love is not the hidden cause of suffering.

Suffering and loss have immediate implications for a person’s faith, and pastors need to be adequately equipped to help people cope with their grief and offer more than empty platitudes. When Tucker writes that “when the emphasis is placed on a self-giving and others-empowering God rather than controlling and unaffected, that God seems more relatable and trustworthy,” he is making a claim that is simultaneously theological and clinical.[10] The image of God operative in a grieving person’s imagination does not remain abstract during bereavement. It becomes viscerally present, shaping whether grief can be brought honestly before God or must be managed, suppressed, or performed in ways that protect a particular doctrine of divine sovereignty.

This is Tucker’s most important diagnostic contribution. Deterministic theological frameworks do not merely offer inadequate comfort in pastoral contexts. They actively shape the emotional and spiritual possibilities available to mourners. When a bereaved parent is told that God chose to take their child, or that suffering serves a divine purpose not yet visible, the implicit message is that honest grief, protest, and lament are forms of theological resistance rather than legitimate spiritual response. As one contributor Tucker draws upon asks pointedly: “What if God doesn’t control all things? What if he doesn’t ‘allow’ suffering?”[11] These are not merely rhetorical provocations. They are pastoral questions with consequences for whether grieving people feel permission to tell the truth about their experience inside faith communities.

The question of pastoral neutrality surfaces here with particular urgency. Tucker engages the work of Victor Gabriel and Dwayne Bidwell, who argue that chaplains “facilitate reflection by drawing on a person’s spirituality rather than providing or prescribing specific religious content.”[12] This is a principled and widely held position in clinical chaplaincy, and Tucker largely affirms it. Yet his own project raises an honest tension that deserves acknowledgment: no pastoral framework is fully neutral. The decision to accompany rather than explain, to ask open questions rather than offer doctrinal reassurance, to legitimate lament rather than redirect mourners toward resolution—these are themselves theological choices, shaped by prior commitments about the nature of God, the purpose of suffering, and the shape of faithful presence. Emmanuel Lartey’s work in intercultural pastoral theology is instructive here, reminding practical theologians that the frameworks caregivers bring to grief encounters are always already embedded in cultural, theological, and institutional assumptions that require ongoing critical reflection.[13]

A candid assessment of Tucker’s project also requires acknowledging its intended audience and the boundaries that audience imposes. Tucker’s opening claim that “we all approach the language of death within our theological framework” establishes his readership implicitly, and his sustained engagement with Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller’s God After Deconstruction clarifies it further: his primary interlocutors are people whose inherited theological frameworks have already begun to fracture under the weight of suffering, doubt, or institutional disappointment.[14] This is a coherent and pastorally significant audience, representing a growing demographic in contemporary American Christianity, and Tucker serves them with genuine skill and compassion. It does not, however, fully encompass either the confidently orthodox mourner whose deterministic framework Tucker critiques, or the secular and non-affiliated individual for whom theological language of any kind has become inaccessible. Whether those boundaries represent a deliberate and honest scoping of the project or an opportunity for future development is a question Tucker’s readers will answer differently depending on their own vocational contexts, but naming the audience clearly is itself a form of intellectual honesty the book’s ambitions require.

Tucker’s argument moves through three largely implicit phases: diagnostic, historical, and constructive. His engagement with Bruce Epperly’s critique of Greek philosophical influence on Christian theology provides the historical grounding for his constructive claims about love, agency, and scriptural interpretation.[15] The connective tissue between these phases sometimes requires more work from the reader than the text explicitly provides. Tucker’s most concrete engagement with harmful death language, including his analysis of public discourse surrounding politically traumatic deaths, appears in Chapter 8 rather than at the book’s opening.[16] Initially, this seemed a weakness of the structure of the book, but that sequencing serves readers already oriented toward his theological framework and may delay the persuasive stakes for those arriving without prior ORT sympathies. These are not failures of argument so much as honest reflections of a book written for a specific pastoral moment and a specific community of readers.

IV. Determinism, Lament, and the Embodied Reality of Grief

The pastoral inadequacy of deterministic grief language is theological problem and physiological one. Contemporary bereavement research increasingly confirms what hospice workers have long observed experientially: grief is not a primarily cognitive or spiritual event that happens to have emotional symptoms. It is a whole-body experience, registered neurologically, immunologically, and somatically in ways that resist the clean categories of doctrinal reassurance.[17] Mourners report exhaustion that sleep does not resolve, cognitive disruption that mimics neurological injury, digestive dysregulation, immune suppression, and physical pain that has no identifiable organic cause. When pastoral caregivers arrive in these embodied landscapes equipped primarily with theological explanations, they are, however unintentionally, addressing the wrong register of human experience. Explanation operates cognitively. Grief, at its most acute, operates below cognition entirely.

This embodied reality matters theologically because it challenges any pastoral framework that locates grief primarily in the domain of belief, interpretation, or spiritual attitude. The grieving body does not wait for doctrinal resolution before it begins to suffer, and it does not recover simply because a satisfying theological explanation has been provided. Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s insistence that practical theology must attend to bodies, not merely to beliefs, is directly relevant here: a pastoral theology of grief that cannot account for the somatic dimensions of bereavement is operating with a truncated anthropology that Scripture itself does not support.[18] The biblical tradition is remarkably attentive to the body in grief. Job scrapes his sores with broken pottery and sits in ashes. David fasts and lies on the ground. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus before he does anything else. The crucifixion narratives do not spiritualize suffering away from the body. They locate God precisely within it.

It is here that the lament tradition of Scripture becomes a genuine pastoral resource rather than merely a literary observation. The lament psalms do not model grief management. They model grief expression, often in language of protest, accusation, and unresolved anguish directed at God without apology. Psalm 88 is the most unrelenting example in the canonical tradition, ending not in resolution or praise but in darkness, with no consolation offered and none claimed.[19] What the lament tradition authorizes pastorally is precisely what deterministic frameworks often suppress: the legitimacy of bringing unfiltered grief, anger, and confusion into the presence of God without first resolving it into theologically acceptable form. Tucker’s observation that “religious systems that are closed to honest questions and existentially painful searching will quench the emotional healing process and discourage honest spiritual reflection” names this suppression accurately and with pastoral precision.[20]

The theological logic underlying lament is relational rather than doctrinal. One protests to a God believed capable of hearing, responding, and being genuinely affected by human suffering. Lament presupposes relationship precisely because it risks honest speech within it. This is why Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of the crucified God remains such a significant conversation partner for any pastoral theology of grief. Moltmann argues that the cross is not a transaction conducted at a safe distance from divine suffering but the site of God’s most complete solidarity with human abandonment and death.[21] The cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” is not a theological problem to be explained away. It is the lament tradition’s most radical utterance, placed in the mouth of the Son of God, authorizing every subsequent cry of anguish that faith has been tempted to suppress.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, writing from inside acute personal grief after the death of his son, arrives at a similar place from a very different angle. In Lament for a Son he resists the consolations offered by well-meaning friends and theological traditions alike, not because he has abandoned faith but because he refuses to let faith become a mechanism for avoiding the full weight of loss. “I shall look at the world through tears,” he writes. “Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”[22] That sentence does not resolve grief. It redeems the posture of grief itself, suggesting that lamentation is not a detour around truthful perception but a mode of it. For Tucker’s project, Wolterstorff’s witness matters because it demonstrates from inside lived experience what ORT argues theologically: that a God who genuinely suffers with creation does not ask mourners to grieve less honestly in order to protect divine sovereignty.

The pastoral consequence of this convergence is significant. If God is genuinely present within suffering rather than orchestrating it from outside, and if lament is a legitimate and even scripturally mandated mode of faithful engagement with loss, then the caregiver’s task is not to redirect mourners away from their grief toward consolation but to accompany them more deeply into it, trusting that honest relational presence—human and divine—is itself the ground of whatever healing remains possible.

V. Divine Accompaniment and Communal Becoming

If the preceding sections have argued that deterministic theological language often intensifies grief rather than accompanying it, and that lament traditions offer a more honest and pastorally sustainable posture toward suffering, the question that remains is constructive: what does faithful accompaniment actually look like, theologically and communally, when explanation has been set aside? Tucker’s answer is fundamentally relational, and it draws on the central intuition that God’s presence within suffering is not the presence of a sovereign administrator managing outcomes from outside the process but the presence of a genuinely affected companion working within creaturely experience toward whatever healing, beauty, and love remain possible.

Whitehead’s description of God as “the fellow sufferer who understands” has already appeared in this essay as a model for human caregiving presence.[23] It deserves further examination here as a theological claim in its own right. Within process theology’s broader metaphysical framework, it expresses the conviction that God genuinely receives creaturely experience, that human suffering is not external to divine awareness but interior to it, and that the divine response to suffering is not unilateral intervention but what Whitehead calls “tender care that nothing be lost.”[24] For pastoral theology, the significance of this claim is not its metaphysical precision but its imaginative and relational consequences. A God who genuinely receives suffering can be addressed honestly. A God who genuinely suffers with creation authorizes human companions to do the same.

Thomas Jay Oord’s development of divine self-emptied or essentially kenotic theology extends this intuition in directions particularly relevant to grief accompaniment. Oord argues that God’s love is essentially self-giving and others-empowering rather than self-retaining and controlling, and that this is not a temporary divine strategy but a reflection of God’s essential nature.[25] The pastoral consequence is significant: if divine love is inherently noncoercive, then suffering is not secretly willed by God and grief is not a test of faith requiring stoic endurance. It is instead an experience within which God is genuinely present, genuinely pained, and genuinely working, not to explain the loss but to sustain the mourner within it. Tucker’s claim that a self-giving and others-empowering God “seems more relatable and trustworthy” than a controlling and unaffected one is not merely an emotional preference.[26] It is a theological judgment about what kind of God is actually capable of being trusted inside the hospice room, where controlling providence offers comfort only until it doesn’t. Tucker’s notion of amipotence, drawn from Oord, is suggestive here: beauty stops us in our tracks without coercing us, and a God whose power operates like beauty: persuasive, relational, overwhelming in its own register.

The binary of life and death, so clean in doctrinal formulation, dissolves at the bedside into something more ambiguous: a middle space where the dying are simultaneously present and departing, where mourners are simultaneously intact and broken, and where resurrection hope functions not as a solution to grief but as a horizon that makes honest suffering bearable without requiring its premature resolution. This middle space is where genuine pastoral accompaniment actually occurs, and it is a space that triumphalist theological language tends to collapse too quickly into Easter. Humans need time to grieve, otherwise the pain of loss increases and pervades.

The communal dimension of this argument is equally important and somewhat underexplored in Tucker’s text, though the instinct is present throughout. Grief is not only a transaction between an individual mourner and God. It is a communal event, and communities of faith bear significant responsibility for the theological atmosphere within which mourning occurs. When congregations model lament, practice honest presence, and resist the pressure toward premature consolation and emotional resolution, they participate in what might be described as communal becoming: the shared process by which a faith community is formed, and reformed, through honest engagement with suffering and loss. Marjorie Suchocki’s relational theology is suggestive here, particularly her emphasis on the communal dimensions of sin, grace, and transformation as processes that are never merely individual but always embedded in relational networks that shape and are shaped by every member’s experience.[27]

Shelly Rambo’s theology of remaining offers a final constructive resource here. Writing at the intersection of trauma theology and pneumatology, Rambo argues that the Spirit’s work in the aftermath of devastating loss is not primarily the work of resurrection triumph but the work of remaining: staying present within the middle space between death and new life, witnessing without resolving, accompanying without arriving prematurely at Easter.[28] That theological posture coheres deeply with both Wolfelt’s companioning model and Tucker’s ORT framework, and it suggests that the pneumatological resources of the Christian tradition may have more to offer grief accompaniment than pastoral theology has yet fully recognized. The Spirit who groans with creation in Romans 8 is not a Spirit managing suffering toward a predetermined outcome. It is a Spirit present within the groan itself, interceding with sighs too deep for words, which is perhaps the most honest description of faithful accompaniment that Christian theology possesses.

VI. Pastoral Honesty, and the Future of Grief Accompaniment

Any serious engagement with Tucker’s Can We Talk About Death? must eventually reckon with a productive tension the book does not fully resolve. Tucker draws approvingly on Victor Gabriel and Dwayne Bidwell’s clinical chaplaincy principle that chaplains “facilitate reflection by drawing on a person’s spirituality rather than providing or prescribing specific religious content.”[29] The principle is sound, and it reflects hard-won wisdom in clinical pastoral education about the difference between accompaniment and imposition. Yet the book in which this principle appears is not a neutral facilitation guide. It is a theologically argued, pastorally directed, framework-shaping proposal rooted in specific convictions about divine relationality, creaturely agency, and the inadequacy of deterministic grief language. Tucker’s pulse checks invite reflection, but they invite it in particular directions. His critique of providential platitudes assumes particular theological commitments. His portrait of a self-giving, others-empowering God is a theological claim, not merely a facilitative posture. The honest question this raises is not whether Tucker should have written a different book, but whether the book he wrote would be strengthened by naming its own theological formation more explicitly rather than sheltering partially behind the language of neutral facilitation.

This is not a criticism of Tucker’s project. It is an observation about the nature of pastoral care itself. No caregiving framework is fully neutral, and the pretense of neutrality may be its own form of theological formation, quietly shaping mourners’ imaginations while claiming only to accompany them. The chaplain who asks open questions rather than offering doctrinal reassurance has already made a theological decision. The pastor who legitimates lament rather than redirecting grief toward consolation has already communicated something about the character of God. Lartey’s insistence that pastoral caregivers engage in sustained critical reflection on the cultural and theological assumptions embedded in their frameworks is not optional professional development. It is an ethical requirement of honest ministry.[30] Tucker’s book would be strengthened by a more explicit acknowledgment of this, not because transparency undermines his argument but because it would model the very intellectual honesty he asks of grieving people and their caregivers.

Perhaps the most honest assessment of Tucker’s question sections is also the most generous one. His responses to pastoral questions ranging from divine foreknowledge to the mechanics of prayer to the geography of the afterlife are deliberately threshold engagements rather than definitive theological resolutions. Tucker is not finally interested in providing answers that foreclose further reflection. He is interested in creating enough theological safety that grieving persons feel permission to continue the conversation on their own terms, bringing their particular losses, their specific doubts, and their individual relationships with God into a framework spacious enough to hold honest questioning without requiring premature resolution. In this sense, the book functions less as a systematic pastoral theology of death and more as a relational threshold: an invitation into the kind of intimate, unscripted, and genuinely open encounter with God that Tucker’s primacy-of-divine-love framework insists is both possible and necessary. Readers who arrive expecting complete answers will find the responses suggestive rather than exhaustive. Readers who arrive needing permission to ask the questions at all may find the book quietly transformative.

Tucker’s use of Jonathan Foster’s poetry in Chapter 8 is worth noting here as a moment where the book’s deepest pastoral instincts surface most clearly. Foster’s verse accomplishes in a few lines what Tucker’s theological prose sometimes labors toward across several pages, and that disproportion is itself a kind of argument: that the language grief actually requires is often closer to poetry than to doctrine, closer to lament than to systematic reassurance.[31] Tucker seems to know this. The pulse checks, the poetry, the questions without tidy answers: these are the marks of a writer who understands that grief’s real grammar is relational and improvisational, not propositional.

What Tucker’s project offers, at its best, is not a solution to the pastoral challenges surrounding death and grief but a more honest set of resources for engaging them. His central diagnostic contribution demonstrates that theological language surrounding death carries profound embodied, relational, and ethical consequences that pastoral theology cannot responsibly ignore. This book deserves sustained attention in practical theology and pastoral care literature. The convergence he draws between Open and Relational Theology’s emphasis on divine solidarity and Wolfelt’s companioning model is genuinely illuminating, suggesting that the movement from cure-oriented to presence-oriented grief care has theological as well as clinical dimensions. A God who genuinely suffers with creation forms caregivers capable of genuinely suffering with the bereaved, which is a different and more demanding pastoral formation than a God who superintends suffering from a position of sovereign remove.

The lament traditions of Scripture, the embodied realities of bereavement, and the witness of theologians from Moltmann to Wolterstorff to Rambo all suggest that grief accompanied honestly is not grief resolved prematurely. Tucker’s hospice experience gives this conviction its pastoral texture, and his ORT framework gives it theological coherence. The book’s occasional movement between registers, from theological argument to pastoral guide to formation resource, reflects the genuine complexity of its subject matter more than any structural failure of authorship. Death does not stay in one register either.

Pastoral theology has long known that the words spoken in hospital rooms outlast the theologies that generated them. What Tucker’s work ultimately argues, and what this essay has attempted to develop, is that the reverse is also true: the theologies we carry into grief encounters shape the words available to us, and those words shape whether mourning people find in faith communities a space capacious enough for honest suffering or a space that requires them to grieve more tidily than grief allows. Open and Relational Theology does not resolve that challenge. But in Tucker’s capable hands it raises the right questions, offers constructive resources, and refuses the pastoral shortcuts that have cost grieving people too much for too long. In the end, that refusal may be its most important contribution.

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End Notes

[1]Tracy Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?: An Open and Relational Vision (SacraSage Press, 2025), 129.

[2]The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (Penguin Classics, 1999), Tablet VIII.

[3]William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2.85.

[4]Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (Macmillan, 1969). For critique of the prescriptive application of stage theory, see George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (Basic Books, 2009), 6–12.

[5]Alan D. Wolfelt, Understanding Your Grief Support Group Guide (Companion Press, 2004), 1.

[6]Alan Wolfelt, Companioning the Bereaved: A Soulful Guide for Caregivers (Companion Press, 2006), 15–17.

[7]Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Doubleday, 1972), 87–90.

[8]Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978), 351.

[9]For accessible overviews of Open and Relational Theology, see Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (IVP Academic, 2015), 13–35; and John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Westminster Press, 1976), 41–62.

[10]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 160.

[11]Angela, “Sorry, That Won’t Work for Me,” in Love Does Not Control: Therapists, Psychologists, and Counselors Explore Uncontrolling Love, eds. Annie L. DeRolf et al. (SacraSage Press, 2023), 251, cited in Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 60. The author chose not to publish her last name.

[12]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 59, citing Victor Gabriel and Dwayne Bidwell.

[13]Emmanuel Lartey, In Living Color: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counseling, 2nd ed. (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003), 33–38.

[14]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 1; cf. Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller, God After Deconstruction (SacraSage Press, 2024.

[15]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 95, engaging Bruce Epperly.

[16]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 120–122.

[17]See Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (HarperOne, 2022), 45–72, for an accessible summary of current neuroscientific research on bereavement.

[18]Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “Embodied Knowing, Embodied Theology: What Happened to the Body?” Pastoral Psychology 62, no. 5 (2013): 743–758.

[19]For sustained theological engagement with Psalm 88 and the lament tradition, see Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox, 2010), 44–51.

[20]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 61.

[21]Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Harper and Row, 1974), 243–249.

[22]Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Eerdmans, 1987), 26.

[23]Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351.

[24]Ibid., 346.

[25]Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, 159–168.

[26]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 160.

[27]Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (Continuum, 1994), 89–97.

[28]Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 72–89.

[29]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 59, citing Victor Gabriel and Dwayne Bidwell.

[30]Lartey, In Living Color, 171–175.

[31]Tucker, Can We Talk About Death?, 128–129, citing Jonathan J. Foster, indigo: the color of grief (SacraSage Press, 2023), 83–84. I, and I believe Tucker would also, whole-heartily recommend Indigo to any person regardless of stages of grief or religious view.