A Mother’s Day or Father’s Day Dilemma

Mother’s Day was last weekend. Father’s Day is around the corner. Every child who has died had a mother and a father. They may also have a step-mom or step-dad, probably some grandparents too. So there may several mom types or dad types who are grieving and who don’t know what to do on these days celebrating motherhood and fatherhood. The loss of a child brings up certain questions including “Am I still a parent?”

Let’s think about this from the beginning.  A man and a woman made love. A baby, a small human, was conceived. God oversaw her growth and development in the womb. God saw the child. Whether you are the birth parents of that child, or her adoptive parents, you are her parents from the moment of conception, or the moment you conceived of the thought of adoption. The child is an eternal being, made in the image of God, under His watchful eye, with plans of important work for that child to do to glorify her creator. The child is eternal even if her life on this earth does not last many years, months, or days. You are her parent then and now. Yes, you are still her parents.

Here are some scriptures to back up my statements:

• “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139:13-16
• “Then God said, ‘let us make man in our image, in our likeness…’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:26-27
• Paul says “for me to live is Christ, to die is gain… I desire to depart and be with Christ,...”          Philippians 1:21,23  This passage is rich with implications of life beyond the grave.
• “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” I Corinthians 15:20  The fact of the risen Christ is historically proved in I Corinthians 15: 5-8. As Christ is living after His death, so shall we be living after ours. We are eternal beings.

For bereaved parents, it is often painful on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. While others in your congregation are receiving words of encouragement and perhaps a rose, what do you do? It’s a dilemma. God  has taught us to think of Him as Father (in the prayer He taught the disciples in Matthew 6:9); and has used the images of both mother (in Isa 66:13 Isa 49:15) and father (Ps 68:5) to help us understand the nature of our relationship with Him. He knows both the mother’s hearts and a father’s. He understands each or you and why the dilemma is troublesome.

In my opinion, you are a parent and deserve a rose. But if you feel more discouraged or lonely because of being recognized in this way, you have permission to make your own choices and to not accept that rose.  God knows your heart and your heart-ache. Like He saw your child’s development in the womb, He sees yours now. He sees you and knows you and loves you completely. He offers His love to comfort you even in this dilemma.  

The is God speaking to you: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you;..” Isaiah 66:13

Heard on the Radio

A sports commentator was reflecting on his recent “grief” experience.  It all started 18 years ago when a local sports hero was killed in an auto crash. This reporter was traveling in a Midwest city at the time. Last week he was back in that city and IT hit him! The memory of that person, that loss, just hit him by surprise. He said he felt a shudder of grief go through his body as he remembered “the last time I was here was when (the player) died.”

I have felt that same shudder. How about you? Probably. These kinds of incidents are reported often in conversations with bereaved parents.  It’s similar to “where were you when…” – Kennedy was shot, or the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, or you heard about the Tsunami in Thailand or hurricane in … or any other disaster. You remember where you were. Being there brings it all back.

I call these reminders “triggers.” A place can be a trigger and bring back the memory and the sorrow. Many other things can also be triggers, including smells and sounds and seasons and more. If you have experienced these kinds of surprises, you are normal.  Being “normal” is important. Among other things it means you are not going crazy. It also means that like most grievers, you can and probably will recover to some sort of normalcy for the remainder of your life.

A triggered surprise of memory can be useful and sweet. Maybe you are remembering a favorite day with the one who died. Maybe you are remembering a hike into the woods on a beautiful spring afternoon, or a cup of hot chocolate on a skiing trip. How sweet are those memories and the time you get to relive that moment. Give thanks for the good memories.  

Maybe you are remembering a conflict you had with the person, or an argument, or an unhappy good bye on a particular occasion. It can be useful to take this time to think through what happened at that moment. Reflect on how it fits into the larger context of your whole relationship with your child. You may chose to use this triggered memory to help you resolve in your heart the sorrow you feel for the conflict. Was it really a big deal or was it one of those things that should fit into the category of: “love covers a multitude of sin.” Some things that we fight over truly can and should be allowed to just evaporate in time, rather than have a big talk about them. Or perhaps it was a big deal. Even so, you can decide to forgive them or to be forgiven, receiving from Christ, the forgiveness He offers. Then once you have been forgiven by God, it is all cleansed and no one should hold that against you again.

So triggers come. Allow yourself to be blessed by the pleasant memories. Allow yourself to grow in grace and resolve the unpleasant ones too. As time marches on, use the moments of memory to openly receive the blessings of grace Christ intends to give you. He is your ever-present helper. (Some scriptures used in these thoughts: I Peter 4:8, I John 1:9, Psalm 46:1)

The hard work of Easter

Before Easter, before the good news of the resurrection, Jesus had a very difficult job to do. First he asked His Father for a break. He requested, he begged, he prayed and sweated and asked that the Father wouldn’t require the Son to do the job set out for Him. He asked in the most urgent terms that “this cup might pass from him.”   It may be true that you prayed as urgently that your child might not die. You could have requested healing, begged for life, prayed and sweated and cried that your child might live and not die. If your child was sick and declining, you had time for these prayers. If you received an emergency phone call in the middle of the night, you still may have prayed “NO! NO! Please NO!” It is the same urgent prayer.

Does it help you to know the Jesus has been through the same experience that you have been through? It helps me. It reinforces the thought that He knows my human experience of life in this fallen world. When I pray now, He knows what it’s like.  He knows the urgency. He knows the pain and sorrow of facing a great loss or a great threat to life. He knows the pain of not being able to reconcile our knowledge of God’s goodness with events. He knows.

The thing that Jesus did, that’s so hard for any human, is he yielded. He yielded to God’s purpose even though it would hurt physically, emotionally, and spiritually. A Wayne Watson song, “Home Free,” expresses this very well:

…Good people underneath the sea of grief Some get up and walk away Some will find ultimate relief

Out in the corridors we pray for life A mother for her baby, A husband for his wife  …And while we pray for one more heartbeat The real comfort is with you

You know pain has little mercy And suffering's no respecter of age, of race or position I know every prayer gets answered But the hardest one to pray is slow to come Oh Lord, not mine, but Your will be done

Let it be...  Home Free, eventually At the ultimate healing we will be Home Free

 Not my will, but yours is a very hard prayer to pray, even for Jesus, the One in whom all the fullness of God dwells, who is also the Son of Man. He’s like us, and it was difficult for Him. We are like Him in his humanity and it’s very hard for a parent to pray “not my will, but thine.” In another place in scripture, it says Jesus came to this conclusion: “…for the joy set before him, He endured the cross.” The writer then refers to heaven, the throne room where everything is set right and there is no more pain or sorrow. Then he says to us as humans living after the cross and resurrection, “Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” If you can focus on Jesus, who focused on the greater joy after the cross, in heaven, you can endure your own grief and loss and “not grow weary or lose heart.”  

I could go on, but it’s best if I stop talking. There is so much more that could be said about Jesus and hope. He is not only our role model in right living, of being a child of God and of enduring hard things. He is our source of Comfort since He promised to send the Comforter after His resurrection. He is our source of strength since His spirit is in us who believe. But I’ll save other ideas for another time. For now, focus on Jesus who focused of the biggest and best plans of His own heavenly Father, and yours, and endured.(Scriptural references used for these thoughts include: Matt 26:39, Col 1:15-19, Heb 12:2-3.)

Blessings to you in His grace.

Thoughts from Jesus in the garden: friends disappoint.

Let’s look for some comfort for grieving people in some of the scenes of the last few days of Jesus’ life. Let’s look at Him as He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32-41; Matt 26:36-46; Luke 22:39-46). He went to pray because He was deeply distressed and overwhelmed with sorrow. He asked for the support of friends – to watch with Him, to pray with and for Him. They disappointed Him. Could that describe you in your grief – overwhelmed, asking for support and disappointed? If you spent any time in the hospital with your child it probably does describe you, at least some of the time. If your child died suddenly, maybe this wasn’t your experience before he or she died. But maybe it has been your experience since his death. Jesus’ friends couldn’t stay with the task of support and prayer, even though they loved Him very much. They just couldn’t pray earnestly and long enough.  You may have asked for different kinds of help during the final illness of your child or since his death. Your friends may have left before you even got to this point of need. But if they stayed in your life, they may have actually wanted to help, but somehow they disappointed you. Perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from pain – their own as they faced the death of your child, or pain from seeing your pain – they couldn’t endure. Just like Jesus’ friends.

Perhaps they counseled you to pray a certain way or to see a different doctor or to take a certain herb or other ill-considered advice that just didn’t help at the time. Jesus’ friend, Peter, also gave Him some bad advice at this time (attack the soldiers with swords). They may have fallen asleep literally or figuratively. They may have just faded away or stopped calling you to find out the latest. Jesus was disappointed that they couldn’t stay awake and pray. The second time, he acknowledged that they were tired. The third time, He just told them it’s all over, it’s time and confronted the betrayers. Jesus realized He had to face His future alone. The friends couldn’t take it away or change the path the Father laid before Him. Your friends too, may have the best of intentions, but just can’t stay with you long enough. Nor were they able to change the course of your child’s illness or life.

Unlike Jesus, there are other helps you can find.

• BASIS or another support group. (In a later blog I’ll share why I believe in the gathering together of people who have lost a child and what they can do together for each other.)
• A Bible study that focuses on the presence of God or on what it means to suffer in this fallen world.
• Certain books or websites on grief.
• Others who have walked this road before you. Your hope can be boosted just by seeing that someone else has survived their loss! 

Like Jesus, even though your friends disappoint you, you do have the Father who is always present, listening to your heart’s deepest groaning. Since there are so many similarities between your experience and His, you can know that Jesus knows what it’s like to go through this valley of the shadow of death. He understands the disappointment friends can inflict on your hurting heart. Jesus knows and cares. So do I.   

In the next couple of blogs, we will seek more comfort from the Easter passages of Scripture.

Your Whole Being Grieves - Emotionally

Not only are you grieving mentally, physically and socially, you are grieving emotionally. Maybe I didn’t need to say this at all because you already knew it. In an earlier blog I mentioned that Grief is a Chaos of emotion. It’s chaos. It’s unpredictable. It’s a whirl wind or a tilt-a-whirl of emotion. There are waves that threaten to overwhelm you, like big surf at the beach. There are dark days and heavy nights when the “shadow of death” is almost oppressive. There are tears, fear, anger, sadness, regret, disappointment, etc. I can’t even name them all. There is a long missing of the person who died. 

The anger can be directed at the one who died or at the One who didn’t stop this death.  It can be focused on others because of some choices they made that contributed to death or didn’t contribute to life. The anger can be directed at medical professionals, or other drivers, or –you name it! There are logical targets and there can be targets for that anger that are completely irrational. Yet that person may receive some of your anger. Grief is like that, reactionary rather than thoughtful and rational. 

These emotions are in a stew within the grieving person and on a short fuse! Grieving parents are often fragile –if you look at them the wrong way, they break down. Or they may be volatile – if you look at them the wrong way they may blow up! Think about a pair of parents, whose child recently died. They lost the same child at the same time and they both feel this chaos of emotion, both with short fuses. In any household, any couple, there could be several breakdowns and blowups when that stew of grief emotions gets stirred. The best way of coping with this within a couple is grace. Each parent can graciously decide to give the other one a bit of repentance on the one side and, on the other, the benefit of understanding that their grief is chaotic and sudden reactions sometimes just break out. 

If you are feeling anything like I have described, you are normal. There is some comfort in knowing this is normal. If people have felt this way in the past and if most of them survived, then I can survive this turmoil too! Truly, there is hope here. Others before us have survived.

But there is more. Jesus wept. Jesus grieved when he went to visit his friends, Lazarus’ family. He saw the family and friends grieving and he felt their sorrow.  It was said of Him, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” (John 11:33) Jesus had real emotions when He thought about the death of his friend and about the grief His other friends were experiencing. He didn’t suppress or hide the emotions. I think He feels your grief and sadness too. As He wept for his grieving friends, He weeps for you too. He knows your heart hurts and He knows how much.

Looking at the context a bit more, He knew Lazarus was really dead but only temporarily. He knew He would raise Lazarus from death in just a few minutes. Yet He wept. He wept for the grievers. He wept that death ever entered into His creation and into our lives. I am so comforted by Jesus’ tears in this situation. They show me God feels my pain. They also give me permission to shed a few tears. They do not represent a lack of faith. It shows there is sorrow at the end of every precious human life. Jesus knew all, knew that Life is just around the corner, and wept anyway. Tears are part of a proper response to death.

Your Whole Person Grieves - Physically

One mom said to me “I never knew you could hurt this much!” That’s how painful it was, greater than she had ever experienced before.  I have always thought this statement was not quite complete. I think the rest of it is: “… and live to tell about it.” There is pain and a heaviness in the chest, as if a truck were parked on it. There is the deep breathing and sighing, because of that heaviness. It feels like you can’t catch your breath. There is the GI upset, the tightness in the gut and the loss of appetite. You may have to make adjustments in how you eat. I ate kinder gentler foods, easier to digest foods, comfort foods.

There is the emptiness in your arms. The need to touch your child didn’t die when they did. To stroke their hair, to hold their hand. There is the need to hug your child, to smell their skin, to feel their lashes in butterfly kisses. There is the need to hear their voice. All this need to physically connect with them leads to physical pain in your body since none of these things can be accomplished.

There is fatigue too, because of all this constant pain and all the work to catch your breath. It takes energy and determination to think a thought, and after that, you are physically fatigued. Grief messes with your sleep patterns and with your eating habits. So of course you are fatigued after not sleeping enough. Each of us will experience some sleep issues. For some it’s laying down that is most difficult. Your mind runs and you can’t stop thinking about the one who died, or your loss, or your grief. For others, it’s hardest when they wake in the morning. Sleep has been an escape but all the pain and loss come rushing back when the mind starts waking up. Job describes the hoped for blessings of sleep in Job 7:13-15  “When I think my bed will comfort me and my couch will ease my complaint, even then you frighten me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine.” What he found were the curses of sleep. Sleep is sometimes the one and at other times the other.

Regarding eating, there are 2 kinds of people when under stress: those who eat and those who can’t eat. I’m an eater; anyone who can see me knows that. But I know there truly are people who can’t eat when their heart is broken. For both kinds of people, you need to determine in your own mind to eat at least one healthy thing each day. Small baby steps along the way help with the healing.

This weekend I met a young husband whose wife died of breast cancer. Just 6 weeks passed from diagnosis to her death. He mentioned that he is surprised how much physical pain his emotions produce. Like I mentioned, the categories are invented conveniences but you are one whole being. The pain of grief is in every cell.

So, there is pain in the skin and in the bones and in the heart. The Lord knows this. In His word, He records some of these same physical expressions of grief:   “my bones are in agony, my soul is in anguish… I am worn out from groaning, all night long I flood my bed with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow…“ (Psalm 6:2-3,6-7) This Lord, who invites you to pour out your heart, knows the pain in your grief too. He is not surprised and He does care.

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.