Grief, Revisited...

What do you do when someone you care about is grieving? I mean, grieving so hard and so deep they can't pull themselves out of the pain and the darkness of the hole they're in? I know someone who is hurting right now, keening with the sheer magnitude of the loss he is realizing more and more each day. He lost his beautiful wife, and he can't make sense of it. He expects her to come walking back in their door, smiling and waving hello. He doesn't sleep well. His dreams hold her in them, and when he wakes up, restless in his need of her, he imagines her laughing in their kitchen, her long hair all tousled, her slender body in her favorite comfy pajamas, with a spatula in her hand as she fixes their breakfast. When he tells me his stories about her, I feel a sharp deep jab in my own heart, and I wonder, over and over again, how he makes it through the day. I never met her. And I feel the loss of her bright, lovely spirit and that smile she shines, the one I've seen in her pictures. I feel incredibly hopeless and helpless when his voice breaks, and I hear the tears choking his words. So what do you do, how do you respond when you are faced with this level of heartache and pain?

My mind drifts back to another time, and my heart wants to run away. I don't want to go to where my mind is taking me, but I have no choice. The memories rush me, crowd impolitely in my head, and stampede my shrinking heart.

There is another story being told, and this one is being acted out in front of my lonely, shocked heart. I don't want to go there, I can't stand it, and yet, here I am, once again. This time around, it's not my friend with his shell-shocked grief. This time, it is 2007 and the one whose heart is aching is my dear sister's. I must stand and watch as she, the sister closest to me in age,  survives, unimaginably, a horror that I cannot begin to comprehend. She has lost her darling, her firstborn daughter, her Nikki. Nik left so abruptly. The car accident took her with no warning and my sister, my strong lovely hurting wounded broken sister, Lynda, is left to live in a world that no longer makes any sense. She wants to go be with Nik, but she can't. She has another daughter who needs her, a younger daughter who is reeling right along with her mother, and she has a husband who holds her heart, their hearts, in his hands. This makes no sense at all. I rage against God, this God we have trusted in for most of our lives. I cannot make it work out in my head. I cannot make it work out in my heart.  My sister stands alone in her daughter's bedroom, and stares, unseeing, as the grief and awfulness of this terrible reality makes itself known to her, over and over again. Day after day, night after horrible night.

I do not know it then, but this sister will not be the only one of the four of us girls who will lose a beloved child. Six years later, in 2013, our youngest sister, Sherry, will stare with eyes that do not see, just like Lynda's, as her firstborn son, Kyle, is buried in the ground on a hot July day. Kyle's body will succumb at last to the cancer and tumors that have wrapped themselves in his brain. His body will sink into the ground as his soul joins his cousin's in heaven. He was 13.

My body shudders as I find myself back in the present. I feel drained by the memories. I don't know what to say, or do, or think, but I know Who does. I find my way to my brown sofa. I lean against the cushions. My heart is bruised and my eyes are wet. I am angry at the loss, the emptiness, the hurt, the pain of these people that I love and care about.

I take my old Bible, the one that I got from a yard sale when an old godly man died and his daughter sold it to me for five bucks. I would have given her twenty, which was all I had. The old man scrawled notes in an unsteady hand in the margins. He underlined passages that meant something to him. I find immense comfort in the Book he loved so well, in its worn softness. And ancient words lift from those old pages, to bring me comfort even though the pain doesn't go away, and the answers still are not there. I do what I do: I take what I can get to get me through this moment, and I pray for His grace and mercy for me, for my friend and for my sisters, in this journey that has shaken each of us to our very cores.

"There is a time to be born," the old Book reminds me gently, "and a time to die....there is a time to cry and a time to laugh. There is a time to be sad and a time to dance...there is a time to be silent and a time to speak."  I breathe in, I breathe out. I do it over and over again, because that is all I can do at this moment. Just breathe. Breathe in, breathe out. Steady, simple, strong and sure.

I don't have any answers. I don't know how to do this. But I open my mouth and words come out and they are words of honor and worship to my God, Who gave up His only Son for my sake, and I worship His Son, Who took on my shame, Who suffered, bled and died for me. "I hate this, " I tell Him. "It isn't fair, and it doesn't seem right. I am angry and I am hurting. And so are they, in ways I cannot begin to understand. I wouldn't have played it this way, Lord," I tell Him, my heart fierce in honest rejection of what He allowed in my loved ones' lives. But, in that honesty, I let Him know something else, something that won't die, and that is my continued Trust in Him, my belief that He does not make a single mistake. "Even in this," I whisper, my throat sore from crying, "even in this, I want to trust You."

It isn't fair. It isn't fair and it is ugly and it is the kind of pain that cripple you if you let it. But I don't want to let it. Don't let me let it. This is when we get to worship naked before Him, stripped of all our righteousness, our human comprehension, our religious platitudes. Because all you have, in a time like this, is your most honest, real self: the part of you that's broken. And that is who he loves the most.

Grab a hold of Him. He won't ever let you go.