Leaning into Grief

I haven’t written in awhile but I’ve had a lot swimming around in my heart regarding grief. First of all, March was the most difficult month so far in this 8 month journey. I can’t even begin to describe the depths of agony that we have gone through. I would go on my 3-mile prayer walk and be doubled in half, in gut wrenching sobs as I tried to see clear enough through  my tears to not walk into the middle of the road or walk off the side of a bridge.

Bethany described life right now as being “very sad” while Nathaniel’s grief has been a constant ache of sorrow that doesn’t change much but never goes away. Yet, I also feel that we have rounded some type of bend in March that is rather difficult to explain but I know that something major has changed. For one thing, I am realizing that this pain is not going to go away any time soon. But I have also learned that the presence of sorrow does not mean an absence of joy. The presence of pain also does not mean that I cannot go on with my life and begin again. In the past 8  months I would experience moments, sometimes a few days at a time, of happiness and great relief. It was at those times that I thought I was ready to begin again and discover what the next 30 years or so of my life in Christ was to look like. Yet, those times of happiness and relief from grief were short lived.

During all this time I’ve been looking for the relief of pain as sort of a cosmic nod of the head that it was time for me to move onward. What I am beginning to realize is that in the great loss of my husband, the pain is always going to be there to one degree or another. If I sit around waiting on the pain to go away in order to begin my life again, I will be waiting in my misery for a very long time. The lesson I have learned is that it is possible to live a new life in Christ with an enormous amount of sorrow in my heart. I can live again, love again, and laugh again while there is still a gaping hole in my heart from the loss of my dear Gary. Living without pain is not my goal but living as a servant unto the Lord is what my life is about. I am realizing that it is impossible to run from this pain therefore, in order to live I need to lean into the pain and not fight it. I can lean into it and still move forward. I can lean into it and still laugh, love and rejoice. I can lean into my pain of incredible loss while discovering newness of life.

On the other hand, I do not mean a numb acceptance of depression. That is the furthest thing from my mind. What I am talking about is the very real and vibrant awareness of the depths of the ache in my heart yet no longer fighting it but learning to rejoice and move forward within it. Within the pain…..that is a very new concept for me. My whole goal from the beginning of this journey was to get THROUGH the agony. And now I am realizing that the path laid before me is not to get through the pain but to lean into it and allow my life in Christ to be changed by it. I think this is what the author of “Things Unseen” was trying to communicate but I was too deep into my grief and sorrow to really grasp his message. I think the point of all of this is realizing that yes, I can live again but the pain is still going to be there. It will be there if I remarry, it will be there if I get a wonderful home, a secure job, and a lovely town to live in. The pain will be there no matter what I do. The only thing that could take away this pain of grief is to have my dear husband resurrected from his grave of ashes buried under the lemon tree in the back yard of our house in Taxco.

So here we are 8 months into our journey of grief and now instead of trying so hard to get THROUGH this journey we are realizing that we are in this journey for life. My life and the lives of my children have been forever changed, marred, hurt, and wounded. In the words of Sense and Sensibility “they just lost their father, their lives will never be the same.” There’s no way to just “GET THROUGH” to the other side of grief but to learn to live our life in Christ within our grief and allow the pain to take us constantly to the cross of Christ and into the arms of our savior. Yes, I am ready to begin again. I am ready to see what the next 30 years of my life in Christ will look like. But yes, the grip of sorrow and the sting of death is ever present in our lives. We are no longer trying to get through this journey but now learning to live within our pain, lean into it and see the work of Christ and the suffering and victory of His cross in the midst of our sorrow.

Ignorance and a Passion for Knowledge

Ignorance shrouded my early life. I was cloaked in a murky coat of lack of knowledge that was like a dark cloud over my life. Never being taught how to learn I was slow in gaining ground in self education. I was 32 years old before I stepped foot in my first library. I actually was very scared of this first experience. I didn’t know what to expect or what to do! Slowly, as I began to digest the ability to learn, I grew to have an insatiable appetite for it. Now it is my delight and pleasure to check out hundreds of books a year at the local library, mostly in the area of research and education. I actually rarely read a book simply out of pleasure because I gain such enjoyment in the learning process that anything less than that leaves me let down and desiring so much more.

Every area that I have a measure of proficiency in has either been self taught, God taught or Gary taught in my life. I never went to college; I never was required to do well in school or to complete my homework. Everything about me I have learned as an adult with my own resourcefulness. All of my cooking skills have come through self education. All of my writing skills have come through painstakingly learning how to construct sentences and the beautiful use of language. My parenting skills came from the mountain of books I read when my children were small as well as Gary’s wealth of wisdom and knowledge. Of course my Biblical knowledge has come from being taught and mentored by my dear husband.

To say that I have overcompensated for a very difficult beginning in life would probably be an understatement. I was so deprived of learning that I have an unusual thirst for knowledge. This passion for knowledge has served me well and has given me the perseverance to press on through the difficulties of learning a skill in order to see it through to excellence. It has allowed me to see that learning is a lifelong adventure and that the moment I take my last breath is the first moment that I will have ceased to learn upon this earth, only to begin to learn of Heavenly things. Bottom line; I love the pursuit of knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

However, Gary’s death and the last year of his life have been enveloped in confusion and ignorance. This is an area of my life where there is layer upon layer of grief that I am in the process of excavating within the quarry of my heart.

I am writing this blog basically as my grief journal. You are welcome to read my writings but I am not composing this for anyone but for my own journey of grieving the loss of my husband. My feelings and experiences are simply that; my feelings and experiences. For me, the confusion and lack of a medical conclusion, regarding Gary’s death has been one of the most difficult issues for me to face. Here I am, a woman who thrives on knowing things and having accurate information and I am faced with losing the most important person in my life without being given a medical explanation as to what happened.

I know that Gary and I both had some very unhealthy eating and lifestyle habits in our past and I truly do not know how much that affected the outcome of his life span. I do know though that he had lost weight, got in shape and had stellar cholesterol and medical checkups just weeks before we left for Mexico. He literally had rippling muscles from weight lifting and for a 63 year old man was able to work, lift, and run better than many men half his age. He gardened, dug trenches for our sprinkler system, lifted sod, and shoveled rock as we delighted in working on the outdoors of our home together. We ate organics and had a competition for who could get the lowest healthy ratio cholesterol and Gary won by 30 points! His stats were way better than healthy average and his medical exams necessary to get our visas for living in Mexico all came back that he was in wonderful health. We literally thought that he would live another 30 years on the mission field proclaiming the gospel and watching his grandchildren teach and preach!

We were thoroughly unprepared, not only for his sudden death, but the peculiar things that clouded the last 9 months of his life. There were “signs” that he was having major heart problems but because of his prior level of health and the fact that he lost an additional 20 pounds during our first year in Mexico, we didn’t take these signs seriously and even if we would have we wouldn’t have known how to get him medical help where we lived in Southern Mexico. I now believe that he had several major heart attacks during the last year of his life, that went untold to us by Gary and somewhat unnoticed by his family. There were signs that something was drastically wrong but given our life in a new culture and the restoration of our home, it was easy to ignore what was going on and assume it was cultural adjustments or the tremendous work load associated with our ministry center.

The death report that I hold in my hands is written in Spanish and says that my husband died of an accidental wound to the head. A dear friend who is a cardiologist nurse thinks that it may have been a seizure or an aneurysm from his genetic vein disorder in his right leg. My diagnosis is sudden cardiac arrest. One person suggested a severe staph infection that affected his heart. I’ve even pondered an undiagnosed cancer that weakened his heart. Did he get lightheaded from his mitro valve prolapse (heart murmur) and as he passed out did he actually hit his head hard enough of the pavement to cause death from the fall?

Minutes after his death our home filled with Mexican police armed with machine guns. What I believe was the equivalent of a coroner was telling us that we must bury him immediately, IMMEDIATELY, have him cremated IMMEDIATELY or ship his body back to the States IMMEDIATELY. For a nation stereotyped as having siestas and a slow pace of life, the moments after Gary’s death were nothing resembling slow and calm.

One of the things that haunts me is my dear son pleading with the officials, “Can’t we have a little more time to figure out what to do?” NO! They would not agree to give us any more time. I didn’t have one moment to call any family back home not even his two adult sons and their wives. We were whisked from one government office to another for hours upon hours during that horrible day of his death. We had his body taken to a neighboring town to be cremated, forever eliminating any possibility of my knowing medically what happened to my beloved husband. 

This lack of knowledge really bothers me. I find myself being immobilized in fear that I am just going to fall over dead for no apparent reason because this is what seemingly happened to Gary. If I knew what had been wrong in his body, at least I could tell myself that the same thing isn’t wrong in my body or my children’s bodies so I can live in a measure of peace. Between the suddenness of his death and the mystery surrounding it, my life has been sucked into a vortex of a fear of death. Not a fear of eternity but a fear of death.

I don’t want to go into all the theological and faith aspects of this area of grief for this is in fact my journal and I am being brutally honest within it. All three of us have suffered in this area. Recently someone fainted in front of Nathaniel and he had to walk away as others woke up the guy who was fine but whose fainting had a tremendous affect upon Nathaniel’s wounded emotions. Bethany couldn’t handle her cat meowing for months after Gary’s death because even the cat’s meow sent Bethany into flash backs of her daddies death. For me the flashbacks and fears associated with this horrific event have been massive. Because Gary’s death seemingly happened without reason and certainly without any medical explanation, the residual effects of that lack of knowledge and of the suddenness have been very difficult to deal with.

I have come to terms with God’s timing and trust him that his hand was upon Gary’s life as well as his death. I know that the days of Gary’s life were known by God from the foundation of the world. Gary’s death did not take God by surprise. Yet all of that doesn’t change the fact that it was the most dreadful event for our family to walk through. There was no diagnosis of cancer. No heart disease. No prognosis of high blood pressure, high cholesterol or hardening of the arteries. One minute he was declared to be in stellar health and the next moment he is lying dead on our driveway.

It’s almost as if he was lost as sea or a victim of war whose body is never found and the family is left to wonder what really happened to their loved one. If I knew why he died then all of the events surrounding his death could better be understood. Why were there such moaning and gurgling sounds coming from him? Why did he say, “Oh wow” right before he fell over? Was it pain? Was it Jesus? Was it a feeling of his heart exploding? His brain exploding? What was it that happened to him? Why did he roll around on the pavement totally unconscious but with such loud moans and groans? What was happening in his body? I know he was probably observing the scene as he was being welcomed into the arms of Jesus. He probably heard me crying out to Jesus. He probably saw Nathaniel giving him CPR and he probably saw his little girl standing in the doorway crying as she watched her daddy die. He probably wasn’t aware of pain but at that point was looking into the eyes of his savior as Stephen did as he was being stoned for his faith.

Yet, his body was part of the Gary that I knew and desperately loved. I saw him lose bladder control. I felt his arm quiver. I heard him moan and saw him roll around. I saw his body react violently to something? But to what? I can only conjecture what may have happened to my beloved husband and this is very difficult for me to deal with, the woman who has such a thirst for knowledge doesn’t even know why her healthy husband suddenly fell over dead one warm July afternoon.

So I’m writing this to attempt to work through these emotions of grief and shock. I have made progress. The first time I wrote about this I was quaking violently throughout my body. And now I can write about it without a strong physical reaction. I know however that there are more layers to this area of grief to uncover and deal with.

I am seeing that grief isn't just losing a person but everything surrounding the death as well. There is a sense of grief in not knowing how or why my husband died. This is a layer of grief that must be dealt with and so I write, not for you all but for me. I write in hopes that the telling of this story will bring a measure of healing and peace to my emotions and to my tendency to fear that any second one of us is going to just drop over dead like a thin summer dress hanging on a clothes line thrown to the ground by a strong gust of wind.

Yes, life is fragile but I don't believe it is meant to be as fragile as all of this. I think our feelings of fragility are based upon the suddenness and unexplained nature of Gary's death. Yet, there was certainly a reason for his death. He didn't simply die at 64 years of age for no apparent reason. Because we don't know why his life was ended so quickly and without explanation, it is difficult to put logical sense to it. Therefore, all of life seems like we are walking on a precipice and could fall of at any second.  These are the emotions that I hope to work through in prayer, in writing, and in learning how to deal, in an emotionally healthy way, with this traumatic event.

God has brought an enormous measure of healing and I trust Him to continue his mighty work in our hearts and emotions as we walk this way of grief held tightly in his arms of love!