Outside the window, I can see encroaching clouds in the skyline. The quickly moving storm clouds are a dark blue-gray and just below that I can see the pale horizon letting a few rays of sunlight sneak through. A large storm front is moving in and the power and magnitude of the quickly moving sky above is dizzying. It looks a little bit like the sky over the ocean, blue, vast, deep, and mysterious. I sip tea as I ponder grief. I just left my friend who lost her daughter a few years ago. Earlier she asked me does it ever get any better? Do we ever really recover from death on this side of Heaven?
How on earth do I write about this God? There are no words for something that goes beyond Earthly language and requires groans from the Spirit.
Death, the moment when reality is a thousand knives to the gut and all of a sudden we feel so vulnerable and undone.
Death, the kneeling by her grave in the bitter cold of winter and feeling nothing on my numb skin.
Death, that God hates so much, he had to go through it, just so He could tear it apart.
The truth is that we can’t control our grief. It’s the one thing we have no control over.
There will be years where it is better and years that are more difficult. There may be an anniversary that is not as bad, but then a holiday or birthday that year will trigger the grief. When it does well up, I let the tears pour out to God without holding back. He is big enough to take the pain. Tell God how much it hurts or lift up to him whatever emotion you feel. Release it again and again. Each time I acknowledge my lack of understanding of God’s plan and purpose in it all and then I release. I tell him how much I miss them and then I release. I believe that eventually the occurrences of grief will decrease and maybe their intensity, but the only healthy way is to go through it, not around, not ignore it, not angry that you’re not over it by now, but through it. There is no right or wrong in this, no forward or backward.
There is only the acknowledgment that death is not natural, and that it was never supposed to be this way.
I used to read classic literature all the time, it was a glory to my soul. The words on the pages moved me. It created glorious worlds of possibility and beauty in my head and I relished the way an author could describe redemption, love, and hope on the pages I held in my hand. We don’t seem to be holding many pages anymore as a society, but that’s not the reason I stopped reading. I stopped reading the year life broke me.
I used to have the expectation of beauty like a child standing on the glorious sands of the seashore and beholding the foamy crash of the ocean water at their feet. The awe and wonder is beautiful and terrifying, but life was a horizon full of hope. The beauty of this glorious world was beckoning me in, like the possibilities held in the first few rays of a new sunrise.
Until the year she died.
My little sister.
22 years old
We watched her die.
Life leaving her body
Skin turned cold
Breath ceased.
Until the year my husband of five years divorced me with a six-month-old baby.
Until the day my beloved grandma died the day after my second daughter was born.
Until I finally thought, those books lied.
That’s the truth of it, life and pain. Beauty and fear, darkness and light and death swirling together in a never-ending current, where there is no perceived visual line for when one wave ends and another begins.
I haven’t read a single classical book in the nine years since she died. Some people dread reading and would never touch those books, but for me, they were life. They were an escape from the pain of the world around me. They were a part of my soul and delight.
Until they weren’t.
Grief is a terrible and strange little thing that perches in the heart and refuses to be tamed. No matter how hard we rage against it, its very existence rages back at our reality.
Before you tell me to just go pick up a book…
I can’t.
I have tried for 9 years and I can’t. My brain and body won’t let me, because no matter how the heart moves on, the body remembers.
But maybe one day, I will.
I will read again.
It will be a day that I can’t control or bring to fruition any faster by an act of the will.
But one day,
I will read again.
When I stared at the ocean of my future as a young child, I trusted God. The water looked so beautiful, and the sun was shining gloriously over the water until it sparkled. I dipped my toes into the crashing surf. The cool water washed over me and my feet sank into the soft sand. I took a few more steps and felt the enjoyment of the water enveloping my body. The gloriousness of weightlessness. The beauty and the sensation of the water are what love feels like.
Until the water became too deep and wave after wave hit. Until I was choking and gasping for air. Drowning is what grief feels like.
Someday, I will be back on the shore of that vast ocean. I am healing and there are times I am above the water. But sometimes a wave, memory, anniversary or song will come along and I am back under the water. Sometimes I beat at the water and try to float by myself and then other times, I realize God has been holding me up all along.
And I release.
God lifts me up when my strength to fight, to swim is gone. But I am not back on shore yet. Maybe the day I pass from this Earth to my heavenly home will feel like setting my feet back onto those beautiful sinking sands.
Outside the window, the dark gray sky has surrendered to the warmth of a yellow sunset. The rain is gone but the dark clouds sit side by side with the light. The sky seems at peace now that it’s had a good cry. What is grief? Will your heart ever heal? The beauty ever before me is the only answer I have. The sunset, my baby boy’s golden curls, the feeling of a hug from my husband, the delightful smell of a rose. The light meets the darkness again and again. Perhaps the pain we have experienced makes the beauty so much more.
If you would like to know more about my family’s story and losing my sister, I made a video about it below.
