strength

Day 28

I have a lot of unread messages and a lot of comments I haven’t responded to, but I see them. I like to save them for nights and when I can’t sleep.

I am grateful for your overwhelming support, for the food, the gift cards, the cards, the encouraging messages, the comments, the phone calls. Thank you.

It’s hard to fathom we’re all here. It’s hard to accept. I wish so badly it wasn’t real — we all do. I am so sorry, I am so sorry for our loss. I am sorry you’re hurting so much, too.

My Mom had a beautiful and vast influence. She touched the hearts of many, and now the many mourn. I am sorry we’re all working through the weight of this quizzical grief.

I’m so sorry for my mom. I am so sad for her. I am endlessly sad for her. This is not what she would have wanted.

I am so haunted by answerless questions, and I know we all are. After Patrick died, one of my professors said “Knowing ‘why’ rarely helps,” and I have wholly believed that for years. Knowing why would never be enough — we would all think “we could have worked this out.”

I loved my Mom so much. I know we all did. I know that, in her right mind, she knew that too. I am devastated that she did not leave earth feeling that love. Maybe, maybe in her last few moments she did. Maybe she felt it all as she drew her last breath. Maybe she did, I hope she did.

When Patrick died, I had this vision of him entering heaven with tears pouring from his eyes while he said “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and Jesus held him and said “It’s over, it’s over. You’re home now.”

I haven’t gotten a vision like that with my mom. Truthfully, I haven’t been able to picture her much at all… I think it is too painful for my mind to recollect at this point.

I am so sad her mind lied so cruelly, and I will forever be sad of that.

I wish so bad I could hold her hand one more time and remind her how much we love her. I wish so desperately she wasn’t gone. I would have loved more than anything to bear our burdens together. I know we all would.

I know this life will be good without my Mom, and I know too well how God brings grace and beauty from horror. But I hate that I have to say goodbye, and I hate that it will be good without my Mom. It reminds me so much of Tolkien’s famous words:

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness, and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why.

Two Towers

I love you, Mommy. I’ll always love you.

Day 19

Today was hard.

I’m not really sure what to type today, but I set out to write and publish 30 days of thoughts to give people a glimpse into the world of a survivor.

“Suicide,” “murder,” “survivor” — these are all words I never thought would be so incredibly personal and defining in my life. I remember the first time I really learned in-depth about suicide the was in an eighth or ninth grade English class, studying Thirteen Reasons Why. I didn’t care much for the book then… I detest it even more now. I had no idea, back then, that suicide would claim as least a third of my family.

It’s so dark, so horrific. I observe that most shy away from the topic. Families have been shamed, judgement often cast at survivors. Survivors — what a heavy title. Institutions often choose not to address it corporately. I assume so few understand the depth of the concept, and people often flounder when they are unfamiliar with something so dark, so scary, and so sensitive.

The band Twenty One Pilots engages in the conversation. Their song “Neon Gravestones,” discusses how culture has glorified suicide, stating it’s “further engraving an earlier grave is an optional way.” Contrasting the idealized perspective, the band ends the song with the following lyrics:

Find your grandparents or someone of age
Pay some respects for the path that they paved
To life they were dedicated
Now, that should be celebrated!

The beginning of the song highlights a dangerous mindset:

“Keep your wits about you while you got ’em
‘Cause your wits are first to go while you’re problem-solving”

This is a dark post, but I do want to bring awareness to this epidemic.

For those who are struggling, ending your life does not solve the problem. Your pain and your hurt are real. It may feel absolutely impossible, but you can heal. Your life can be redeemed. This pain, it will be redeemed.

This is not the end of our story.

Day 16

Silence. Quiet. Peaceful, terrible.

Tomorrow will be the first day without any guests. All have gone home, and my father, my brother, and I will experience our first bouts of alone time. It’s necessary, it’s healing, and it will likely be painful.

Torrents of grief, sacred and terrible, assuage we mourners. I’ve loved and appreciated the depth and beauty of sadness, but I still hate enduring it at this level of intensity. Sorrow opens one’s eyes to a new world and demands a new perspective from the sufferer. This new perspective can make one bitter or it can make him or her more compassionate, but it either way the perspective shift prompts a response.

Grief is traumatic. It assaults the mind and the nervous system. It manifests itself in sadness and anxiety. It steals sleep from some and it keeps others in bed for days. It produces shaky hands and sore eyes. It creates fear and mistrust. It eliminates filters and threatens boundaries that otherwise would protect its victims.

We aren’t strong, we mourners, we are incredibly weak. We are at our most vulnerable and most sensitive. We are raw. We hurt, often more than we ever deemed imaginable or bearable. Yet, we bear it.

Some watch mourners with awe and amazement — unsure how we could function. Some are offended if a mourner is snappy or not as “bubbly” as normal. Some prefer to look away, noting how painful it is to even think about what a mourner endures.

Grief manifests differently in every individual because of the uniqueness of every single relationship; while that makes each person’s experience vastly personal, a wondrous communal aspect exists when we mourn the same individual.

It’s private, and it’s not. It’s personal, and it’s shared.

Mourning callously brings out both the best and the worst in people, because we join together in our grief but can quickly isolate from offenses and hurts. We are vulnerable, we are tired, and we are boundlessly sad.

When we love each other and show up for one another and extend continuous grace — that is when we mourn well.

We mourn because we lost someone so incredibly precious, and we cannot stop loving them. Love transcends time, space, and even death. Love well.

Above all, love each other deeply for love covers a multitude of sins

I Peter 4:8

Day 14

Two weeks.

There’s a weight so heavy on my chest I feel like I can barely breathe. It feels like I am operating at 50% of my normal capacity, if that. It feels so heavy. What does that even mean? Why does it legitimately feel like there is a weight pressed against my lungs, collapsing them? How does that work? How does the body do that?

I thought we had something special, me and my mom. I thought we had a great relationship. Now I feel like I didn’t even know her. Who was this woman I spent so much time with? I thought she liked being with me, I thought she wanted to be in my life, I thought she wanted to be here. But in the end, she wanted to leave me. It wasn’t worth it for her to stay in my life. She didn’t want to see me grow up anymore. I thought we were going to be two old ladies together. I thought she wanted me. I thought she wanted me. Did she think I did not love her? Why weren’t we enough?

I hate my name. I’ve hated it for a long time. My mom gave me this name because she hoped so badly for me… what good did that do for her? It’s so cruel to be named Hope when it feels like so many people in my world are hopeless.

“Hopey, you’re my Hope. You make me believe that everything’s going to be okay and that we’re really going to make it.” That’s what my brother Patrick told me two days before he ended his life. Once he died, I really started to hate my name.

Before that, I was always a pessimist. It felt so ironic to be called “hope” when I so seldom experienced hope myself.

Now this? I hate my name. It feels so cruel tonight.

Why did I start writing these? I keep asking myself that. More precisely, why did I start publishing these? I’ve loved writing for my entire life. I used to write fantastical stories, dreaming worlds late into the night when I was just a young girl. Then in puberty I started writing to cope with my ever-changing world. Now, I almost exclusively write when my emotions cloud my head, spill out of my eyes, and pours from an ink pen onto a blank page.

So, why did I start publishing these?

After Patrick died, I seriously isolated myself. I did not answer my phone for over a month and I had no desire to make contact with the outside world.

In our American culture, grief is so private. Suicide is beyond taboo, and people in mourning may be given three days of bereavement leave. Three days… how pathetic. Our culture almost treats grief like something to be ashamed of or to be quickly gotten over. Because of this, death and grief are seldom discussed and very few — especially at my ripe old age of 27 — people have much of a framework/understanding of mourning and grief.

Grief shouldn’t isolate. It should be something that pulls us all together, something that makes us stop and hold one another closer, something that prompts us to change our lives for the better.

As my friend Olivia Chancellor always says “Alone is a lie.” Maybe if I share my thoughts, others will have the courage to share theirs too. Thoughts can be scary and painful and feel so isolating, but alone is a lie. “Everything that is exposed by the light becomes visible–and everything that is illuminated becomes light,” Ephesians 5:13. It’s only when we share our darkest thoughts that we are truly able to heal from them.

I want to live. I want to have a life full of beauty and joy and pain and wonder. I want to experience it all. I want to be fully present. I want to experience life to the full in every possible way, no matter how it hurts.

I don’t want to move on from this. I will be carrying this for the rest of my life, and I want to grow and learn to carry this with grace and love and even hope. I want to live, and I want to live well.

In Loving Memory

Life is too precious.

 

My Grossi met Jesus March 11, 2019.  She listened to Him release the words, “Well done, Thy good and faithful servant.”  I wonder if He had tears in His eyes as He said it.  God watched Mary Ellen endure her deepest joys and most anguished sorrows.  She made it—she fought the good fight, and she finished the race with joy.  I wonder if it brought tears to His eyes.  

He had comforted her when she mourned, as He comforts we who mourn.  

 

I think that the hardest part about grief is knowing that you will never be able to make memories with that person again.  Death prompts you to remember all the little things that you didn’t realize you would miss.

 

Her smile, her laughter, her lipstick, her spunk.  Her resolution.  She was stubborn, as many of you know, and she was strong.  I admired her tenacity.  

 

It’s in those little moments that you grow to love someone—it’s the collection of those small moments that builds our trust and our admiration.  Those small, insignificant moments.  

And it’s often not until death that we realize the magnificence of all those moments.  

 

Mary Ellen Schraner built her life from a collection of moments that highlighted the importance of faith, family, and friends.  This church and these people made those moments.  You, here today, were everything to her.  She found her foundation in Christ and her blessings and joys in you.  

 

Nine years ago, my mother gave her a notebook entitled Grandmother, Tell Me Your Story.  Within it poses the question, “What are some of the things you hope your children and grandchildren have learned from you?”

 

Her answer: “Faith—the belief in God, Cooking—Hospitality,” which I know many of you inherited, and “peace in the family.”  Mary Ellen taught me those three things, and she taught me to have fun and to celebrate when life calls for celebration.  She prayed for her family more than anyone I know, she welcomed me to her home many times, and she filled my heart with joy and abundance.  

 

It’s strange that she’s not here with us.  It doesn’t resonate well.  My mother once said, “We are eternal beings.  We were never meant to say goodbye.”  I suppose that is why it is so devastatingly painful to miss someone who deposited memories into our own life that made us have a life worth living.

 

So, as we hold our breath, and as we will the world to stop spinning, let’s take the quietness of grief and utilize it as a reminder to cling to the mundane moments.  Let’s hold one another a little closer, for a little longer.  Life is far too precious and far too short to cling to anything but those who love us.  

 

I John 2:17 reads, “And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”  This became one of my favorite verses the first time I endured grief from a separation that feels so very permanent, but the reality is that permanence fades when you recall Christ’s three words: “It is finished.”  

 

Mary Ellen was ready to meet the Savior of the world, the God that held her tears in a leger.  The God that gave her breath, and the God that took her breath away.  The God who allowed tragedy, the God who prepared and encouraged her through devastation.  The God who blessed her with so many people and things.  The God who allowed her to live a full life—she was not afraid to meet the God she knew so well and loved so dear.

 

I wonder if she brought tears to her Savior’s eyes—happy tears.  Christ knew that He brought her home.  The heartache and the pain of this world has left her, and she has been made alive in the fullness of Christ.  

 

While we cry because we miss her, I think that Christ may shed a tear in welcoming her home.

Light-Hearted

Fact: I am insecure about my writing when it’s not demanded from an overflow of desolate emotion[s].

Maybe that’s why pain beguiles me.  I don’t like pain, but, somehow, it seems to be the only thing that provides me with enough bravery to inscribe my thoughts.  Sorrow composes beauty—I’ve witnessed it create masterpieces in the lives around me, but perhaps I need to gain a similar perspective on lighter emotions.

Today, I do not write from emotions drenched in disappointment, but, rather, from an abundance of joy.

The joy of the LORD is your strength.

God carved this verse in my mind at the beginning of 2017: page after page in various notebooks were etched with the simple eight words.  I often scribbled the verse at some of my happiest moments, and thus it seemed peculiar when God reminded me of this verse.  It came in moments when I didn’t feel like I needed strength–moments when I was strong.  I was so happy, so why would God remind me of a verse that seemed more appropriate for perilous days?  

I was such a fool to think I didn’t need those words because I didn’t understand the weight of them at that time.

God allowed those joyous moments, each one meriting my trust and my strength in Him, and He reminded me at those specific times so that I would know exactly where strength proliferates when those perilous days would finally come.   

Truthfully, I couldn’t remember where those words came from… Thus, I googled the verse a couple weeks ago, and that’s when I gained a new understanding.

Then he [Nehemiah] said to them, “Go, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, and send portions to him who has nothing prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord.  Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Nehemiah 8:10

I was unaware of the beginning of the verse’s final sentence each time I journaled it. 

Do not be grieved,

for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

My eyes opened.  Inhale, exhale.

God engraved that verse in my mind when I was strengthened in Him to show me that He was the same God when I was crushed in spirit; He gave me that verse amidst joyous occasions so that I would know where to acquire strength when I felt despairingly weak.  He was there with me in those joyous moments, showing me His loving kindness in ways I would not comprehend until nothing else made sense. 

The timing that confused me was the exact time that God was pre-preparing to strengthen me again.  He knew how events would unfold in my life, and He knew I would need to remember His kindness when I felt that I could no longer bear my circumstances.  It’s one of the greatest paradoxes that beautifully played out in my own life: “Therefore I am well content with weakness, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong,” II Corinthians 12:10 (emphasis added).

In joy I write, remembering the sovereignty of a God who continued to remind me of His goodness when life was “good” simply to re-remind me of His goodness when life didn’t feel good. 

God reveals His strength gloriously through the depths of my humility.  I despaired, but He did not allow me to linger in anguish.   He reminds me that He is good, that yesterday and today are temporary, and that I can trust Him with tomorrow.

I received this notebook for Christmas from Victoria Romano, with the verse displayed on its back cover. Tori didn’t know what this verse had meant to me, she was just a dear friend giving a sweet gift. Behind the scenes, Christ was strengthening me through my weakness in the remembrance of this verse and those moments.  I felt unbearably weak for so long, but He renews me each day:  I feel strong again because that verse permeates my every breath.

Thank you, Lord, for doing in me what I wished would not be done, and for reviving the life I had not known was dead.