grief

Day 5

I’m 27 years old: I thought my family was supposed to be growing at this point in my life, not shrinking, but I’ve lost a brother, a mother, and we can’t get pregnant. We’ve been “trying” for two years now, for all you well-intended people that keep telling us we need to have kids. I don’t like to talk about it, it’s deeply personal. But today? It’s just another wound in a long list of hurts.

It’s hard to trust God in times like these — life can be so cruel, and this feels devastatingly horrific. I see the support of God in the provision for my family, in the food at our table, in our ability to have my remaining living family here, in the friends that hold us, clean for us, and provide for us. The support is palpable, but it’s still hard to trust God. I so often say “I know God can do anything, but I am also vividly aware of what he will allow.” Here we are again, harrowing in what God will allow.

Our table felt so small after Patrick died. Our immediate family of six became a family of five, and now our family of five becomes a family of four. Oh but wait! “They’re always with you!” No, there’re not in the empty chair. It’s still just as painful without them in it. When I was a child, I used to think families of four were so little. Family of four? We had four kids in ours! And it was loud. Now, it’s so quiet. So somber. So mournful. It should be — we loved our Mommy.

It’s so tense and so stressful and so sad. A myriad of emotions waiting to burst from our eyes or escape from our lips.

Daily Tip for Communicating with Someone in Mourning

Just… be so gracious. As you can read, I’m a little snippy today. I need a lot of grace. Don’t be surprised if someone deep in mourning gets a little snippy with you. It’s not you, it’s all we’ve got going on.

I know many of you reading this are likewise deep in mourning — be gracious with yourself and with your family. I’m sorry if those around you haven’t experienced much grief — it’s incredibly hard to fathom a grieving mind if you haven’t experienced a deep personal loss.

Future Ways to Help

Lawncare: My parents’ have a beautiful lawn, with gorgeous trees and plants. A lawncare service would be very helpful. Beyond a lawncare service, weeds grow so fast here — if you drop by, maybe scan the lawn before coming inside and pick some weeds if you are willing and able to.

Gift cards: Right now we have plenty of food, but in a few months, making dinner every night will feel overwhelming.

Any little act of service helps. All those small little normal tasks feel like such monstrous feats when your heart is hurting.

If you can’t physically help but still want to do something, please consider the GoFund Me: https://gofund.me/6617c101

Thank you, immensely, for everyone who has shown up to help, who has given, and who has prayed. Every little bit helps 💙

Day 4

My mind is… occupied. Lots of people coming into town, lots of arrangements to be made, lots of logistics to coordinate, lots of thoughts to think.

I started to get snippy today and short-tempered. I don’t like that, but thankfully I have a lot of wonderfully gracious people to talk things out with.

There are so many details in death. I feel so much older than I am.

Be in the youngest in my family, I will likely be involved in the funeral planning of the majority of my family, so I guess I am really learning how to do this by myself one day. I just hope it’s not anytime soon.

Anxiety starts to mature within me. Who’s next? I ponder as I look around our table. It’s scary.

I’ve been here before — it provides a nice kind of structure of what I think the mourning process will be like over the next few months, but it also brings a sickening dread — How much will it all hurt when everyone leaves and life goes back to “normal”?

I miss my mom. Sometimes it’s a searing pain, sometimes it’s a dull ache. It will be like that forever.

Thank you to everyone who has reached out — I have an abundance of messages I cannot keep up with, but I do enjoy reading them and appreciate your encouragement and support. I read them in small doses when I want a distraction.

Daily Tip for Communicating with Someone in Mourning

Saying “Your mom is always with you,” is not helpful. Perhaps it will be in the future, but in the first few days it’s more of a reminder of the chasm between my life and my mom’s death.

Day 3

Tired. So tired.

It’s a liminal space where days flow together and nights seem endless due to the lack of sleep. I fall asleep, I wake up, I cry, I fall back asleep, I wake up, I cry… and the cycle repeats.

Thankfully, I began counseling/therapy at the beginning of the year to handle past trauma I felt safe enough to revisit, including the suicide of my oldest sibling. Ironically, I told my therapist a few weeks ago that I thought I was ready to “graduate” from therapy – she agreed. And then… this.

She scheduled me immediately for a session this morning and we cried as I detailed her reality and my experience. It was freeing to lay it all out in the open, but the void my mother left will always be there — my life has changed forever.

My entire [living] immediate family is together, and together feels good. It brings drops of happiness where an ocean of sorrow surrounds us.

We sifted through hundreds of photos, both digital and encased in beautiful photo albums my mom made. We crafted an obituary. We played in the pool. We cried. We talked. We mourned.

I can’t thank you enough, reader, supporter, friend. We have had such phenomenal support. Close friends and family have gone above and beyond. I can’t thank my husband enough, though he too is deep in mourning, he is so attentive, kind, and sensitive to whatever I need.

For those asking how to support us, Carrie created a GoFund Me for my Daddy: https://gofund.me/350f5f59

I am grateful a lot, I am hurting a lot.

Daily Tip for Communicating with Someone in Mourning

If you have to start a sentence with “I’m sorry to ask you this,” or “I’m sorry to pry, but…” do us both a favor and don’t ask that question. That’s your conscious telling you that, yes, it is an inappropriate question to ask.

Day 2

I answered most of my messages sometime between 3 and 5 AM, messages so sweet and so thoughtful, and then I fell asleep once more and woke drenched in tears.

There’s a difference in seeing support and experiencing it: meal after meal delivered, my home cleaned by sweet friends, people hugging us through tears.

We went to church today, twice actually, and it was so sweet and healing.

My mom devoted herself to her family and to so many — we’re benefiting from all the lives she touched. She loved them well, and now they’re loving us well.

People brought us meals immediately, but to be held by so many filled me with thanksgiving and sorrow.

I’ve always loved alone time, but right now it’s too hard — I took a bath today, thinking it would be relaxing, but I rushed out of it because the quiet was too overwhelming. Did she know I loved her? Was I a bad daughter? Too many thoughts haunt me, and my tears seemed to drown me in the tub.

“My Momma, my Momma, my Momma,” I can’t stop mumbling.

It’s excruciatingly painful. Incommunicably hard.

We feel so supported and we feel so loved. We’re all saturated in tears.

I loved my Momma.

Day 1

Ground zero.

I’m always amazed how much pain people can endure when faced with suffering.

I woke to notes of encouragement, sorrow, and prayer. My breathing fails, my eyes swarm with tears, and my body heaves with the weight of my mind.

“My Momma. My Momma. My Momma. I loved my Momma,” I chant in a voice choked by emotions and tears — words barely able to escape my mind and reach the outside world.

My Momma is gone, and she’s not coming back. My Daddy, my Daddy. My Daddy☹️ I can barely move. I don’t know how to function, “My Momma. My Momma. My Momma,” I mumble.

how do I reconcile this? It doesn’t make any sense. I know I’ll be angry with God for that sometime later, but today I’m just trying to survive. All I want to do is be with my Daddy and my brothers.

I can’t walk 20 steps without sobbing: “My momma, my Momma, my Momma.”

All I want is my Momma

Redemption is Coming

Now without faith it is impossible to please God, since the one who draws near to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Hebrews 11:6, CSB

I lost faith when I went through a few years of loss and turmoil.  My mind and thoughts were tormented by the harsh reality that my friend was gone, and my brother Patrick gave up his life to shame and depression.  Unable to make sense of life anymore, my faith faltered.  I was broken and in a state that felt impossible to recover from.  My reality was horror.  How can one have faith when his or her circumstances seem to contradict that which one believes? 

We each respond differently to grief and suffering; while I struggled to believe, my mother remained steadfast.  Her trust in God did not waiver despite the reality that her baby was gone, and I could not understand it.  Thus, with water-brimmed eyes in 2019, I asked her how she could remain confident, and she provided aged wisdom:

“You are so young.  I cannot imagine having to face the things that you have had to your whole life.  I have faith because I have seen the faithfulness of God over the years.  You spent the past 15 years watching destruction without redemption.  You have been so strong.”

Her words made sense – It’s challenging to maintain faith when one’s life has been painted with suffering since its beginning.   My life has been beautiful and even amidst intense suffering has been filled with mercy and blessing, but, like many, I began viewing life through lenses of sorrow as a young girl.

We are so very attached to outcomes.  We have faith that God is good, that He is the God that delivers redemption and provides healing.  Broken endings aren’t good, and they don’t look like redemption. 

It’s been four years since my brother took his life from me and I assure you, death is not good.  Mourning never ceases.  My faith was unfathomably wounded back then.  My heart turned to dust, my mind to ashes, but dust is what God used to breathe life into man. 

We died that day, each of us who loved Patrick.  Our hopes for earthly restoration disintegrated with his demise.   We were broken beyond repair, we needed entirely new perspectives and new hopes.  We had to relearn how to think, how to communicate, how to be still.

In the years following his death, I began to seek and experience the redemption my mom told me I had not yet experienced.  I felt restoration in my own life and in my own mind.  It has been beautiful because it feels like entering Spring after a harsh Winter.  It was warm and safe and filled with healing and new life. 

I have the faith I lacked those four years ago, and now I know that I can be the one to encourage fellow sufferers to hold on: you may not have had the chance to experience redemption and restoration, but you will.  You will. 

God is with us.  He is our reward. He is our comfort, our strength, and our healing.  Even when our faith falters, He brings life from loss and healing from grief. 

God is good, even when life is not, and He is good when our nightmares become reality. 

Have faith, my friends.  Your story is not over, and your life does not have to be without redemption.  Your heart can be healed.  You can have abundant life after tragedy.  Hold on, have faith, redemption is coming. 

Love Enduring

Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

I Corinthians 13:7-8

I wrote in a letter to my deceased friend’s parents three years ago (2020).

You hear the verses in weddings, but are they not just as applicable at funerals?

Grief is love that endures – beyond life and beyond loss. It endures. It remains. It loves against all things, against hope, and against the belief for its object of adoration to return.

In the end, it’s love that goes on.

It can make us bitter or it can make us springs of life and of hope and of beauty once more.

Where there were once caverns of bitterness, may there be fields of tenderness.

Where there were once deserts of anger, may there be harbors of forgiveness

Where there were once rivers of sorrow, may there be streams of mercy.

Love transforms us in unfathomable ways. Lost love breaks us with the bleakest measures, but our response to love and love lost distinguishes us entirely.

Some respond out of anger, some shut down in sorrow, and some pretend through avoidance. Each response is unique, with each respondent clinging to the response that feels the most emotionally safe.

Friends and strangers hold their breath and peer at grievers in hopes of a response that will provide them with an image of the grievers’ hearts.

How quick we are to observe the unfathomable, but how slow we are to communicate the tragedy. We look with bravery but cower in speechlessness. All the while, the griever, the sufferer, sits in isolation and trapped in love’s loss.

With fortitude, the sufferer remembers his or her enduring love and allows that mercy to shape the day. Love and truth tear away the temptation bitterness invites: these tools patch up lost love’s damage.

Patched, but not healed. Bandaged, but not mended. The sufferer must reach out beyond the frailty of his or her understanding and leap towards something more. The promise of more – the promise of the fullness of life.

Choosing to trust God beyond all belief, the griever leaps into freedom and the chance for redemption. The chance to experience the beauty of life and the beauty of love restored. The chance to overcome bitterness with a happiness long forgotten. The chance to live abundantly despite every odd being against the individual.

This, this is love enduring. This is love unending. This is love restoring, healing, and beginning.

I Write to the Griever; I Write to the Friend

Shame cloaks one in fear.  Fear keeps one in isolation.  Isolation repeats the cycle. 

It’s the tragic irony that prohibits us from knowing how to reach out to others when we need them most, and it’s often that same irony that keeps others from reaching out to us. 

The concealment of shame safely shields one from oneself and from others – at times I have been afraid to voice my concerns and share my story simply because the story itself frightened me.  Sharing makes life’s nightmares more real.  Other times, the fear of another’s someone misunderstanding has kept my fingers from typing and my mouth from speaking. 

But where does one turn when he or she internalizes those matters that are too dangerous to share with others?

I look to words – to books and to music, to poems and to plays – but what happens when there are no words?

The prevalence of centuries of literature whispers God’s mercy: one looks to the Psalms for comfort and contrition, the Old Testament stories and New Testament parables for history and application, and the prophecy books for detailed truth of who God has always been.  These precious words preserve timeless truth. It is God who bestows light and life into man, and man who reflects the image of God (Genesis 1, John 1). 

Mankind mirrors fractures of God’s mercy, not because God’s mercy is broken, but because we are broken and fallen creatures.  Mercy cracks through the brokenness of man, reflecting the glory of God, through the gift of man’s words. 

Words meant to heal, words crafted to explain, words written to comfort.  Words to bring the shamed out of isolation and into compassion: words powerful enough to help the confused and broken feel understood and validated.  

I didn’t get those words.  I couldn’t find them. 

When my world fell apart, I fell with it, and there were so few resources to explain.  No one writes about the loss of a sibling, though most of the deceased are survived by siblings.  It’s rare for young people to experience and detail loss. 

And grieving a “complicated death” (ie: suicide, murder)?  Some psychologists write to attempt to explain, but few first-hand accounts exist.  These deaths are shrouded in the shame of the survived, leaving the survived isolated, tabooed, and unreached.

I intend to share the depths of a griever’s experience as a sibling, as a friend, as a woman, as a youth, and as a survivor.  In weeks to come, I will share excerpts from my journals to convey the intensities of loss and the miracles of mercy. Some excerpts may be incredibly intense and seem hopeless, but these are the details of redemption and lament.

In the end, we’re each the griever and the friend.

So, let’s break the cycle.  Truth is not powerless. Isolation, shame, and fear are powerless.  

A Solemn Prologue

In the busyness of life, I nearly forgot my own.  I nearly forgot my past – who I was, where I was, what life was like while I was there. 

I nearly forgot the tears, the heartache, and the traumas. I nearly forgot that I was such a young girl dealing with such developed problems.  I was such a child, scared, and hiding, yet mandated to make mature decisions.

I was 14 the first time I witnessed someone lose his mind to the brink of insanity.

Summer 2012

What a child.

I was so young, enduring too much beyond my own comprehension.

Even now, colleagues marvel at what I went through, and yet I expect myself to be normal – to act like a person unacquainted with loss and torment.

Torment. Absolute torment.  It was hell and I didn’t even know it, because hell had become normal.

Normal was hiding, wrapping clothes around me as a shelter to cry in peace.  So much hiding. So much crying.

And I never could have imagined how much worse it could get.  Oh, so much worse.

I can’t believe that was my normal. I can’t believe how much I hid from the world. Hide and hide and hide.

No wonder I have such difficulty grasping out of hiding.

I lived in Sheol. Abaddon was my home. I can’t believe I lived through it.

In some ways, I think I always knew someone would die.  Maybe I knew, somehow, that something else would destroy me.  Maybe.  Maybe I knew that I needed to be destroyed. Maybe it was always there in the back of my mind, hiding safely behind the clothes of denial.

I loved. That is the crime that caused me so much pain.  That’s the face I saw in the grave.  A man so wounded, he forced gravity to take the life out of him.  I was 21 years old when my brother stole his life from my arms, and I’m still trying to come to terms with that reality.

April 26, 2019

Grays, Blues, and Splatters of Red

Apprehension gathers around my temples and sends shakes into my hands. 

I feel calm: I smile to myself as I peer into my rear-view mirror, fighting the duplicity of my inner turmoil.  We’re nearing the end of the year, the end of the decade.  So many endings. 2020 looms menacingly behind a two-week’s notice, and its emanate arrival bubbles conflict within me. 

bubbling… boiling… overflowing… overwhelming… apprehending.

I don’t feel calm: tears kiss my quivering lip, fear desires to relinquish the skirmish in my mind.

Am I going to believe what I know to be true?

I know God is good.  I know 2020 will hold good things.  I know I’ve had a lot of joyous moments in 2019.  I know the progression of time is natural.  I know ending the year numerically/measurably separates me from pretty terrible experiences from 2019.

This year feels like finishing a chapter of a Stephen King novel; the horror is over, but the adrenaline from terrors pulsates through one’s veins and makes him aware that the books is not finished and that more trepidation awaits.  With apprehension, the reader begins the next chapter. 

I know I’m not living-out a horror novel, however, Jesus literally promised “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33).  I know that, and that’s easy [for me] to believe.  He also declared, “I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10) and compared, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11). Somehow, those two facts are a bit harder for me to believe. 

These truths I know, but I battle each day to believe them.  I echo a millennia-old cry: “I believe!  Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

I exhale, imagining the year altogether.  An overwhelming year amplified by increased stressors from the past few weeks.  I’m tired of fighting.  I reminisce on the past year in color: grays, blues, and splatters of red.

Gray.  The color of endings—colors fade into a vortex of grays.  From dust we came and to dust we return (Genesis 3:10).  It’s the color of loss, of hopelessness, of abandonment, of absence.  A sky convulsing with beating rains.

Blue.  The color of sadness—shades of somberness in waves of emotion.  As deep as the ocean, as expansive as the sky. 

Red.  The color of passion—drops from the hands, the feet, and the head of Christ.  It indicates hurt.  Likewise, it’s the color of life, of love, of anger, of danger, and of longing. 

Apprehension gnawing at my soul and shivering in my hands, I petition myself again: Am I going to believe what I know to be true? 

I know James was earnest when writing “the testing of your faith produces endurance,” (James 1:4).  I know that God works all things together for good (Romans 8:28).  I know that it is God who works within me (Philippians 2:13).

But oh, how hard it is for me to believe that my pain will not be wasted.  How easy it is for me to believe that all of this is for nothing.  That my pain is meaningless, that my words are meaningless, that I am a failure because I do not always believe the truth that I know, and that my pain will be wasted because it’s not easy for me to believe in goodness.  

It’s hard to see the world around you when you’re filtered through gray, blue, and red.  I am of little faith.  I cling to the truths I know—I see God’s mercy, provision, and grace all around me—even while I shudder at thoughts of the future. 

Yes, I’m happy to leave 2019.  But 2020 will be the first year of my life without Patrick, and that’s never something I wanted to write.  I will no longer live in the year of his death.  The closer we get to the date, the more apprehensive I become.

It’s not that I don’t trust God with the future.  I do.  It’s simply hard to look forward to an unknown that currently holds little tangible hope–yet, my hope is in Christ and I know that my hope will not be put to shame (Romans 5:5). 

Hebrews 11, a chapter exemplifying people of great faith, begins with “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not yet seen,” Hebrews 11:1.  I have faith that God will bring good things from the dark year I’ve endured, but I also know the reality of their lives: “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (verse 13).

“Remember the promises of God,” many tell me.  I remember them, I acknowledge them, and I cling to them, but I know that I might not live to see his promises fulfilled.

I—we, my friends—may never witness one drop of goodness to come from the tragedies in our lives, but we will experience God’s faithfulness.  While not tangibly measurable, if we surrender ourselves to Christ, we are guaranteed to see some promises fulfilled. We will experience sanctification.  We will experience knowledge and growth.  My broken perspective doesn’t make God’s workmanship any less true.

We might not see the goodness amidst the darkness of today, but we can see God’s faithfulness.  We can see God’s mercy, and we can trust God even when we cannot seem to believe.