I don’t want to write this post. But I can’t seem to contain the words. The more tightly I grasp them, the more quickly they squeeze out between my fingers and pour out of my mouth.
It’s exhausting, this straining to hold in all the grief. All the tears.
A few days ago, Shawn Smucker wrote, “I told Maile how strange it is that this is our new normal. We are both in our late 40s. It seems that friends and acquaintances die with regularity now, that the losses are piling up one after the other.”
Those were essentially my words to an old friend at a memorial service the other night. It’s like I turned 40 in 2020 and bam! people I knew started dying.
My friend suggested, “Oh, it’s just Covid.”
Laughing (because I was tired of crying at that point), I just shrugged and agreed.
In the beginning, I actually thought maybe it was. Even as only a couple of people I knew in person died from Covid, I still wondered if somehow the overall insanity of 2020 (remember murder hornets??) created some bizarre effect that was increasing the death rate apart from the virus.
Crazy, I know.
Now I’m wondering if it’s just a byproduct of aging. If so, I don’t like the tempo.
We aren’t shocked when old people die. Miscarriages unfortunately happen at a frequency that leaves me almost expecting them—not that it makes the searing grief any less.
But children. When children and teenagers and college students die—or adults near their prime—when these are cut down, this horrifies us. Shocks us. Steals our breath in surprise, over and over again.
People younger than you aren’t supposed to die. At least, not in your 40s.
My cousin Jonathan was 16 years old when he drowned while fishing on August 19, 2022. He died doing what he loved in a river he’d fished in for years with his family and friends. A ham-it-up, outgoing middle child, Jonathan loved God and other people fiercely. He had a running list of over 100 people he was praying for. He loved making his family and debate club friends laugh through his crazy, but surprisingly good, impromptu dances to “Party in the USA.”
The kid had Elvis hips.
My husband and I had been on a date, our first since our youngest had been born a few months before, when we got the call that David had gone under. His body had yet to be recovered.
Just moments before, we’d been all sparkly and laughing. Now we stared at my cell phone in disbelief, a familiar numbness creeping over us.
It’s not as though I’m unacquainted with grief. I’ve traveled this road before, sat with others at its waystations, and have been aided by other travelers along the way. But before August 2022, there were exit ramps. Now I’m stuck in a 54-car-pile-up of grief, where all the survivors, the walking wounded, are struggling to check on each other while we wait for the paramedics to arrive.
The loss of our baby at 13 weeks was the first significant death in our family. Our oldest child was four and desperately wanted a sibling. I hated that she was touched by Death so early in life. All of us had to learn the sharp, yet gentle cut of grief through this loss. Learn to ride the tsunami-sized waves without drowning until the storm calmed. Learn that grief never fully dissipates, but becomes a quiet, background companion, who abruptly (rudely?) speaks up when you least expect it.
Our journey of grief after David’s death had scarcely begun before we were gut-punched in late October with the news that Ian, a dear friend from long ago, had stage 4 cancer in his lungs and tumors in his brain at just past 50 years of age. Ian and his wife prayed, and God told them this was the end. Ignoring the tempting pressure by friends and church members to pursue various treatments, remedies, and “cures,” they stuck to the path they believed was ordained. They spent Ian’s final six months creating memories with their three children.
Several states away, we wept. Ian had led the Bible study that facilitated our courtship, had with his wife mentored us while we dated, and had paid a $500 fee to become a one-time civil celebrant at the last minute to perform our wedding when no evangelical church in Northern Virginia was willing to marry us on our expedited timeline.1
Without Ian, we possibly wouldn’t be married. Our children might not exist. And we’re not the only family who owes itself to Ian in this way.
These deaths were not the only ones to touch us deeply this past year. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our beloved cat who died on her own terms a few days before Christmas. She was old and had had a neurological event a few months prior leaving her partially paralyzed. Her death was expected, and plenty of relief was mixed in the grief. But the timing leveled us in a season of cheer.
Death caused our grief cup to the spill over. With each successive taking, I want to push back, scream until I have no breath remaining, ENOUGH!
Haven’t you taken enough, already? I ask Death.
But I already know the answer. Solomon recorded it for us so long ago.
There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, “Enough” – the grave, the barren womb, land that is not satisfied with water, and fire that never says, “Enough!”
— Proverbs 30:15b-16
Last week, a coworker died of a heart attack. Jennifer was 39 and joyously planning her wedding. She was more than an acquaintance, an almost friend as we shared several close friends in common. When I first learned she’d died, my own heart stuttered. For several minutes, I searched for my breath, my voice. Finally, I said to my equally stunned husband, “but she was planning her wedding.” I repeated this again and again as if I could undo what Death had done. As if being engaged exempted you from dying.
In the midst of all of this, I was reminded of a truth I’d learned in the months of anger and confusion following my miscarriage. A truth I’d lost sight of.
Grief is good.
Death is vile, but grief is a gift from God. Without grief, we have no path forward. We have no way to move toward hope again, toward learning to live again.
Without grief, Death wins.
Yes, Jesus conquered Death in the ultimate sense. But we all will experience death on this earth. And those left behind must grieve and grieve well to learn how to live after each loss. In a way, Jesus defeats Death again through our grief.
With our grief, we can push back against Death and prevent it from claiming us as a walking dead while we remain on this soil.
But grieving is hard work. It’s messy, annoying, inconvenient, and takes what feels like forever.
It hurts and shadows our days in a way we can’t capture with words.
My family and church culture have primed me to fight against grief. As good, stalwart Midwesterners (on my dad’s side at least), we absorb our grief and swallow down our anger until it bubbles out like molten lava, damaging those around us. We have an unspoken code: we don’t talk about grief, no, no, no.
But it’s only by acknowledging Bruno (sorry, wrong grief tale), talking about grief, and going out of our way to sit with those grieving that we actually can move forward.
On the other hand, there is an impulse in modern evangelicalism to fight grief by demonizing it. Not every evangelical church or evangelical Christian does this—I have more recently seen healthy versions of grief modeled. But I’ve also been whiplashed by well-intentioned words sugar-coating Death as our doorway to heaven and funerals as celebrations. It is as though giving in to grief somehow tarnishes the blessing of our afterlife or runs contrary to “we don’t mourn like those who have no hope.”
Before Jesus raised Lazarus, He wept at his death.
It may help some to talk about how happy so-and-so must be in the presence of God, but most of us need to grieve at least a little before getting there. You can’t rush it. If you try to plug it up or ignore it, the grief is going to come out eventually, and probably in a manner you’d rather it not.
You can’t shortcut grief on this earth by endlessly affirming the glories of heaven.
I’m really, really glad if you’ve made it this far. And I’m really, really, REALLY sorry if this has been hard to read. Because it means you’re grieving like I am.
But if we let grief do its good work in us, our tears and mourning, our shuddered sighs and angry railings, God uses it to mend us. Of course, we will always grieve those we’ve lost who were dear to us—we never forget—but we learn that joy can coexist with grief. We embrace the both/and of joy and grief rather than the either/or we sought before our loss. We find that grief does eventually live in the background instead of obscuring our vision. Grief helps us honors our beloved ones by remembering them.
So, here’s to the Jonathan, Ian, or Jennifer in your life—the ones whose deaths surprised you. If you are in a season of grief, take a moment to feel whatever you are feeling freely (tears in the shower are good when we can’t release the emotions anywhere else). Share a memory of your loved one with someone or write down your thoughts. Regardless of whether you are actively grieving or not, remember to give others space to grieve as they need to. For some this is tears. For others, it’s a lot of laughter as they may need a break from all the heavy bereavement. Encourage them by listening first. Reflecting back what you hear or observe can aid them in processing their grief in a healthy way.
Thanks to the goodness of grief, Death doesn’t have to have the last word. We can learn to hold those we’ve lost in our hearts and live on.
Three weeks after my husband proposed, he very unexpectedly received his National Guard mobilization orders. His unit was deploying to Iraq in as soon as six weeks. It was mid-February and we had to toss our Memorial Day weekend wedding plans out the window. If we wanted to marry before he left, our best option was his spring break in early March. At the time, nearly every evangelical church in our area had pledged to uphold the sanctity of marriage by requiring couples to do a minimum of 6 weeks of marital counseling before performing the ceremony. We called dozens of churches after our own church refused to flex for extenuating circumstances. No one seemed to be willing to make an exception. But that’s for another post.
I'm so sorry for these losses, Abigail. Grief is a tough old friend, but can be a companion, for good or for ill.