Your Whole Being Grieves

After the death of a child, the parent’s whole being – bones, muscles, brain, heart, skin – every cell grieves. There is no part of you that’s functioning normally, without stress or pain. After talking with hundreds of parents, I came up with a description of the grieving parent. Before I begin talking about that description, I need to enter a disclaimer: I’m trying to describe Chaos, so every description will be flawed. I’m trying to organize my thinking about chaos. It can’t be done very effectively. So, I describe a grieving parent as a person who is affected Mentally, Physically, Emotionally, Socially and Spiritually. While you are one being, one whole, I have divided you up into these categories just to help with this discussion. But I don’t think you are actually divided this neatly. 

But for the purposes of discussion, let’s talk about how grief affects a person mentally. In my own most severe grief, it was like I was thinking through Jello for weeks after the death. Decisions were too hard to make so I wore the same pair of earrings for months. I talked with a mom who, when it became dinner time, the decision of “what’s for dinner” was too overwhelming. So, for about 300 days that first year, they had pizza. No kidding. In this case, there was also the issue of the empty chair at the table. Dinner time served to highlight in fluorescent green that one child was not there. It is hard to make decisions. Even getting dressed in the morning is difficult because you have to decide whether to wear black or brown socks today!

Mentally, it is hard to remember anything from one moment to another. You can go upstairs and forget what you went to get. You can forget where you parked the car or why you went to the store in the first place. You can forget what you were planning to say between the beginning and the end of a sentence. It is also hard to concentrate on anything, including what someone else is saying. It’s hard to follow a thought from the beginning of their sentence to the end of it.

The one thing you can’t forget is that your child died. You can’t forget what he looked like the last moment you saw him, whether he was living at that time or you saw him in the ER bed after life left his body. That picture takes up all the space in the front of your mind so everything else is hard to remember. You can forget where you are going and forget to stop at stop signs. You can just space out, forgetting where you are and why and what you have done for the last few minutes.  

Since you can’t remember anything and you are thinking through Jello, it is hard to be organized. Now, I have little in the way of organizational skills, so someone like me is even more debilitated! But another mom who is gifted organizationally said she was prepared to be sad but not prepared to be so disorganized. You can miss appointments and skip details and forget to pay the bills. Since time moves very differently you can forget it’s Wednesday – thinking it’s just Monday. You lose things, words and time.

Grief affects a person mentally. The intensity may vary with many factors, including how recently the child died and what waves have overwhelmed you lately. I want to ask you all to be careful out there. Be careful driving, since it can be hard to concentrate and make decisions. Be careful doing anything with any remote danger involved, even cooking. Delay as many decisions as you can, since it is hard to follow a thought from beginning to end. Take it easy and be kind to yourself. Slow down your life to the pace you are able to manage in your present state of grief. And know that it won’t always be this bad. Take it from me; your mind is not permanently gone. You are grieving and you can heal. 

This is normal grief. I’ll talk about the other categories of your being in the next few blogs. Joe Bayly was a man acquainted with grief, having lost three sons at different times in different ways.  He spoke at a BASIS retreat some years ago and said, “whatever you are feeling right now, is normal for you in your present state of grief.” Just know you are normal. You are healing. God is with you.

Thoughts from Psalm 31

Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief. My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak. Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends— those who see me on the street flee from me. (Psalm 31:9-11 NIV) Is this your experience in your grief? Eyes, body, soul. Anguish, groaning, affliction. These are words you might use to describe your body, your anguish. And these are the words from God’s word that David uses to describe his situation. I believe David, the human, was writing under God’s inspiration to express God’s thoughts. This is God’s Word. He describes affliction like we would describe grief. It shows me He gets this human experience. God understands your grief. But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hands; deliver me from my enemies and from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love. (Psalm 31:14-16 NIV) In the psalm, David deliberately turns his attention to the Lord. Where is the Lord while David is so distressed? David declares his faith and asks that God in love would save him, fully expecting it to be so. In my alarm I said, "I am cut off from your sight!" Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help. Love the LORD, all his saints! The LORD preserves the faithful, (Psalm 31:22-23 NIV) And by the end of this psalm David knows his cries, his prayers have been heard and that the Lord is acting in love. The Lord preserves. I am praying for you that your experience of grief, which probably includes groaning and anguish, will also include the preservation that His love can bring. The God of the universe, knows your sorrow and cares about working in your life to preserve, to heal your broken heart. He cares.

Chaos

Grief is a Chaos of emotion! So said a young pastor whose wife had died. It was not said by a bereaved parent but it certainly describes the grief of parents when a child has died! Chaos. That means surprises, sometimes, and extremes of emotion. Other descriptions bereaved parents have used include: being blindsided or being knocked down by waves of grief. Some of those waves you may know are coming. They are triggered by known sources, the way an earthquake can cause the development of a tsunami. A trigger for a wave of grief could be a date on the calendar, a season of the year, an event such as the first day of school or a family wedding. Other triggers are a sight, a sound or a smell. Some waves of grief are unpredicted and unpredictable. All waves can knock you down. These waves can send your emotions into chaos. You can be sort of stable for a day, then smell something and be sent into a pit of sorrow. A piece of his favorite music can send you over the edge. It’s a chaos of emotion. Light hearted laughter for a moment, immediately followed by tears. Peace disrupted by anxiety and worry. If this describes you, even a little bit, I’m writing this to let you know you are normal. Grief is, in fact, a chaos of emotion. Don’t think you aren’t handling it “properly” if you are feeling like this. No amount of “proper” handling will prevent these waves. Just know that waves will come. In the midst of the chaos, there is One who is not surprised or knocked down by the waves. God is consistent and stable even in this tsunami. He can hold you and keep you through the chaos. My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. Psalm 62: 1-2. Hold onto Him, and when you can’t hold on any longer, He holds onto you. You are safe. You are also normal. Grief is, in fact, chaos. That’s the truth about grief. It’s also true that it will get less intense in a while. Just hold on.

In the Beginning, God...

I have been thinking about how to begin this blog on grief. Since I decided to begin in the new year, the first of a new decade, “beginning” has been on my mind. So I’ll start at the beginning of God’s communication with us – Genesis. In the beginning of His-story with His creation, God made the heavens and the earth, then all the beings on the earth, and concluded with humans. I have learned a lot from the creation account that informs my thoughts about life and behavior and family. There is also useful background that informs my thinking about grief. In the beginning, God made man, and then noticed that it wasn’t good for that man to be alone. That’s not a ‘sex’ statement but a relationship statement. Also, His recorded thought: “let us make man in our image,” is a relationship statement. So we are made for relationship. We, as humans, were made to live in a perfect world, before Adam’s disobedience to God’s word and the punishment for that sin. Adam and Eve were sent out of the perfect garden. Then Adam and Eve, and now we, live in an imperfect world. There are thorns around us and in the garden, there are issues between people in every relationship, there is now Death. We were made to live in a perfect world in perfect relationship with God and other humans in a world where Death did not exist. But now things have changed, because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Now we live where there are many breaks in our relationships, and finally, Death, the complete breaking of a loving relationship. No wonder we don’t know what to do when our child or other loved one has died! No wonder grief hurts so much! This loss and pain go right to the core of who we are made to be. It’s no wonder we don’t know how to navigate through this land overshadowed by death. The rest of God’s story is about His willingness to guide us through this strange landscape for which we are not equipped. Thanks be to God, He is with us! Right here right now, wherever you are in your grief journey. From the beginning, He has offered us what we need to get through – His presence. I’ll be sharing a thought every week or so about things I have learned from or seen in other bereaved parents over the years. I want to be truthful about grief and to look to faith in Christ for hope in the chaos the grief can be. I am praying that there is help here for you, no matter what your loss or what kind of day you are having. In His grace, sufficient for even this.

New: Devotionals that Bring Hope

Beginning on April 1, 2009, H*VMI will be posting a monthly devotional with words of encouragement, hope, and support.  They will be written by our own staff.

Please check back then for the first devotional.