I remember driving up Highway 64, heading to her parents house to get our dog after a short trip, and our conversation flowed easy as it always seemed to do: “I would walk through hell with you”, I said. She looked at me and said, “I know you would”. It was true. Those words, that commitment, came out of my heart and soul. Blurted from my lips without a conscious effort. Speaking my truth. Even she would be unable to deny it’s validity. And while I struggled to walk through my own hell more than a year later, I did it alone.
In my house, where I was raised, my parents were far from a perfect marriage and our house had it’s own demons. But I was raised that it is in the commitment to survive the fires of hell that you are shaped and molded, like steel, into the sharp point of an old happy couple. Many years later, in my own home, I found what we did differently was lived out a mantra- if you are going through hell, I will take inevitable burn and live the scar of failure, rather than endure the necessary pain of healing to come out a new person, a rising phoenix, on the other side with you.
Piled there beneath the spring cleaning rejects of a neighbors garage, a piss covered mattress no home of its own, but a promise of a good nights sleep. My mother found that old mattress on a walk around the block and brought me back to grab it in the cover of night. Rounds of lysol and carpet cleaner later I laid on that bed and slept soundly for the next 8 years. How an old broken mattress continued to do its job until its final day foreshadowed the boy who slept soundly and would grow old himself, broken and stained by life, to persist and provide his calling until his time will run out.
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” ― C.S. Lewis
The ashes of my terminal end seemed to fall about me for months. My panic persisted in abundance as I frantically thrashed about emotionally, desperate not to feel this remarkable pain of loss. Begging and bargaining out loud to nobody, waiting, screaming in an empty house, breaking into sudden fits of sobbing. I watched as she erased me from her life with out a word spoken to me. I thought of what helped in the past to cope with pain. Drugs? Never again, they only made my life worse the first time. Alcohol? I was too fearful I would take my own life if inhibited. Exercise? I couldn’t move. Frozen on the couch in a constant state of terror. Memories everywhere. Thoughts of her moving on to break her own promises too soon. I searched through a dating site and panicked in 36 hours, shutting it down- I couldn’t even imagine touching another person. I googled vacations and places to travel. Why travel with no person to make memories with, especially without the person you traveled with so much before the fall? Okay, all else failed perhaps a new hobby? Fear had become my new hobby. No light could shine onto any new possibility. To be honest, very little light still shines through the cracks of this prison wall. I found that all I could do is ask, why? Why God? WHY?
Driven by fear and pain, “why” is the first question on the lips of every suffering child. It necessitates a satisfactory answer. It mandates a response that is fulfilling. I only want to hear one thing- I’ll fix this. My entire being is so consumed by the flames of fear that any response to my cosmic questioning, except all that I lost will be reinstated, will not suffice. “Why did this happen”, falls from my mouth and lungs so many times that it eventually evolves unnoticed to “why aren’t you answering me”? My mind is so chaotic all I can hear is the constant drone of unwanted memories and the sound of my heart breaking into more pieces. My body and mind buzzing with a million thoughts, regrets, alone beneath a blanket of shame. I ask for forgiveness but cannot even come close to forgiving myself. Hanging myself on that cross without the respect of a burial and certain of no resurrection. I believe God exists. I believe he can put me back together, speak miracles into existence, calm my storm. But I only want one thing from him. So, what I perceive is silence.
When I found him in the garden, he was praying quietly, but he was speaking to me still: calling to me. Not giving me an answer. Not taking away my pain. Just inviting me to sit and share in his own experience of grief, even to the point of death. I had to wander in on him, there in that garden, several times. It took multiple invitations. Eventually, I sat there long enough to hear him speak again. “Now come with me to the cross”. Fear again took over because the cross demands my confessions. But this is what I asked him for: to hear him speak. Even then he did not answer my why. He wouldn’t because I already knew. I know why I am here. Instead I finally asked him what- what should I do? What do you want? What can I learn? What am I? What do YOU WANT ME TO UNDERSTAND? And then, the slightest movement. The next vision. The next image. Coming in more clearly every time. Speaking to me. First he demanded honesty. He demanded me to speak the truth in my confession. Then he walked toward the cross and I hoped to follow. That was my first real experience knowing for certain that I heard the voice of God. No voice at all- but I heard it still. What now? Well, I don’t know. But I do know, at least, He is real. And He speaks to me.
“Why” still wanders into my heart every few minutes, it seems. It still sucks the air out of the room and pierces my chest with sudden pain. I try to redirect my question to “what”. Knowing that “why” will trap me and “what” will eventually free me. Hoping. Wanting. Wishing. What do you want me to understand, Lord?
Daily writing prompt
What’s the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?
God still speaks to us. Why is God silent when we need him most? He isn’t standing by. He isn’t teaching us something through silence. He isn’t sadistic. The answer is chaos. There is so much chaos. So much pain and loss that terror fills every part of us so that all we can hear is the echos of our screams. For the same reason we are unable to see someone’s love and commitment to us when it is right in front of us and we make choices that contradict our true identity- we don’t see that we are standing in our own way while God speaks. He speaks: through feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, words, visions… But if I am so surrounded and filled with FEAR, I cannot hear the voice in the storm. Fear of losing what we had forever. Fear that we already know it will never return to “normal”. Fear that what God will say we do not want to hear. Because only one thing, one single response, would do. And that is what we want most and most what we cannot have. And fear is so damn loud.
My vision comes to me in low resolution, like an old television, bunny ear antennae straining in different directions to pull in bits and pieces of the image across the screen. Christ kneeling in a garden. It’s dark. It’s dark all around in the trees that surround him with a single torch burning in a small clearing. He doesn’t look at me. I cannot see his face. I see his clothes. His robe- brown and white, his low resolution bare feet behind him but I cannot make out his toes. Odd that I look every time. I hear him praying quietly, desperately, and with fervor. He is sweating and it drips to the ground. I hear him praying. And I hear him say “come sit with me”. He doesn’t pause his prayer, he doesn’t turn to say anything to me, but I hear him.
This is where my journey with him often ends. He doesn’t speak any further wisdom to me. I have nothing profound to walk away with. Nothing to change my life back to whole. Only an invitation to kneel by him and suffer beside him. To witness the pain on his face as he prepares to lose everything he has known in life. His friends, his family, his hopes, his dreams, his comforts. Only an invitation to hear his desperate whispers. To be still. And to know.
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Before the dawn of healing can arise, we must survive the traumatic wounds we suffered in our loss: the acute bleeding out, sudden broken bones, the shock, the pain. While the pain doesn’t subside with the healing, we can hope that every day has improved our chance of survival. We can accept that this really happened and wasn’t only a bad dream, waiting with longing to jump from your sleep. It happened. We were actually ejected through that car window at high speed, glass shattering, head on into a still standing tree. The past we had still smolders in mangled metal and leaking gas, rising smoke and dying flames, wrapped unrecognizable around it’s trunk. Our body lays only feet away. We can see our wreckage, but we cannot return to it. We cannot, despite our deepest wishes and most anxious desires, rewind the accident that occurred to the moments before the crash. We close our eyes, the enormity of the suffering washes over us, we wish for deliverance.
While the wounds begin to heal there are many things to keep in mind. The first, is that in our trauma we can persist in that state of fear and withdrawal, continually hunkered down in fear letting the suffering claim our every moment. That is absolutely a state we can remain in forever. The problem is that the wounds will heal in time, but on their own. And without the proper attention and care they will heal into deformities that will claim you disabled for the remainder of your time. The memory of this loss is debilitating enough, God knows. Why add further dysfunction and suffer the loss of quality of life?
The second thing to keep in mind, is that the wounds of grief, denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and all the emotions they bring with them may dissipate but the pain is going to be there no matter what choice you make. If you sit with the pain, it hurts. If you get up and try to rehabilitate, it is going to still hurt. The poison you choose does not take away the immediate pain. For all I know, nothing will. Pain is still a constant in my life. But the distraction of healing, the goals you set in recovery, the changes you make so you can experience the best of what is left in life- they can bring hope and at least a little more peace than sitting at the site of the wreckage hoping for what will never come.
Finally, remember that the suffering you feel while sitting beside your wreckage praying for that car to reverse back into a whole piece with all the survivors in tact is reliving the acute and sudden pain in a way that will only intensify the suffering you have been damned to endure in this life. The suffering you will feel while you heal, and heal well, will at least be suffering with progress. That accident, the loss that destroyed your life, has been recorded in time. It has already affected the timeline of everyone and everything. Let it be remembered, not relived.
“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one your book.” Psalms 56:8
This all starts with honesty. Ironic, as a lack of honesty often put us in our darkest hole. But even if your tragic loss was just an accident or the sadness of death, the start of a healing journey requires the same honesty. The truth about your pain, its existence, your role in it, the justice in it, the injustice of it, the inevitability that the change in your reality will never return to what you had once found your greatest peace in life. Pain cannot be hidden. Suffering cannot be avoided. The truth cannot be held captive. We fear that taking an honest look at the monster will hurt us beyond what we feel now. But the suffering of what we imagine only prolongs the suffering that must come.
We are going to have scars. We will never forget how we suffered. When Jesus was resurrected and showed himself to his followers, he did not come back from his suffering scar free. They were there. Evidence and memoriam of the pain that had to be endured in a long journey to healing.
“Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe.” John 20:27
Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?
Created by song, a place where a child could become a King or Queen, creatures for conversation. I would vacation in Narnia and bring my worries to Aslan.
“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love”. George Eliot
As often as this is the case, that we save our deepest look into love at the agony of our parting, I can honestly say it was not always the case for me. I found myself laying next to her feeling so deep, my love for her, I knew she must feel it radiating off my skin. I prayed for her. I celebrated her. I never thought I deserved her. But even still, the depths of that unconditional love for another person that I experienced once in a lifetime did not even scratch a shallow surface of the depths revealed to me in the agony of loss. It is an eternal abyss. We stare long into the darkness until their face fades away and all we see is our reflection.
Of my anger and loss, the greatest of these is the hatred I carry for myself. For in the end, we have no person to blame but ourselves. The shocking dichotomy of knowing your heart for a person and the love you have and the monster you see in the mirror cannot be reconciled. You start to forget all the sacrifices you made, the acts of love, dedication and commitment and you start to see yourself solely in the few bad moments and mistakes. A yoke of regrets dropped heavy around your neck you plow the fields of shame. The memories you grow hurt. The footprints you leave behind share no company. The depths of love reveals how far it will go by taking your heart into the abyss as company. Falling.
It is hard to say goodbye. It is impossible. Acceptance that every hope and dream is gone will come. But saying goodbye to a person you truly loved only returns to you as an ever present haunting ghost. Who are we to know if that even ends with the grave or will persist through whatever eternal life awaits. Maybe it is saying goodbye over and over again, head down toward the plowing of the field, bearing our yoke, feeling the pain, until each goodbye is easier. Or perhaps, as long as we continue to plow and seed that field we will continue to harvest the pain of loss. Without something or someone yoked beside you, you will only turn in endless circles. If there is any hope that God can deliver us it is in the hope that he may take up that yoke beside you and help you move forward and through the field- for as long as it takes. But even then, if the creator cannot take away the pain of your loss, how can we expect to ever truly say goodbye. Our penance is continually surrendering to God and feeling the pain of the hole left in our chest.
This is the reality of life. That some will love little and go on to live relatively happy carefree lives through every loss. And that some will love great and never fully climb from the grave they dug for themselves. “I will never forget this pain” it says in Lamentations. Nor should we. If you are ever fortunate enough to remove that yoke of regrets, never be the fool who returns to that field of shame again. Remember how you suffered. The ghost that visits you. The pain you harvested for so long. I will never forget this pain. Or this shame. Or this sadness. Loneliness, grief, disappointment, anger, abandonment, heartache, hopelessness, exhaustion, hatred, fear. These are the deep waters on the other side of true love. Their depths can certainly drown you, and at best, leave you changed for the rest of your life.
If this sounds painful, it is. If you have lost and don’t understand the depth of this pain then you never truly loved. Avoidance is not a long-term cure for walking away from someone or losing someone. It is the root infection that will one day bring you right back to your knees. It is hard to say goodbye when you still feel every bit of your loss. But, as it has been said, unsaid goodbyes and those left unexplained are the most painful. So say goodbye every morning. And say goodbye every night. Do everything you can to stop seeding that field of shame.
“As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.” — Anna Brownell Jameson
I would choose to go back and witness the resurrection from the tomb. If he didn’t walk out from behind that stone then the cross was merely an execution. But if he did…
As grief drags on, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, the constant torture of uninvited memories begins to fatigue the ounce of will that remains in a bleeding soul. The longing to not hurt anymore becomes the pain of an itch left unscratched around the nose. Pleading and begging, praying and crying, bargaining and changing: all fall on the deaf ears of a cold hearted person and a distant God. Anyone who says in those early moments of grief, God brings me peace, are suspect and questionable that they truly loved what they lost at all. They have not felt the burning iron piercing their side, day and night.
The literature and devotionals are thick with the grieving in the silence of a Creator. Who has ever successfully explained this? “God’s silence does not mean his absence”. How I loathe those words now. Does this mean he sits near and and speaks nothing while I suffer? Does he stand over me, towering above, not reaching out a single hand of comfort? His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. I understand. But still, how the longing grows from I want my person back to I want my God to be real in this moment. Eventually, we will break. Our will cannot remain forever beneath the weight of our grief. A crossroad has appeared and the options are narrowed. Which is the correct path, in my own personal suffering, I will not pretend to know. One path goes with God and the other we travel alone.
I see God as the option that offers me the most hope. And in these moments, it is hope that is our rarest commodity. A precious metal, water in the desert, rumor of a cure for a horrid disease. If God is real, then he has not judged me for questioning him. He has not hurt me for throwing my punches in his direction. It seems, on the contrary, my punishment comes only when I direct my frustration on myself or others. Daniel wrestled with God. How we adore that simple quote. Perhaps, we do not understand the full weight of what is meant by “wrestle with God”. From the painful words he cast at his Lord it was not the playful tussle of a father and son. It was an angry child on the playground, hurt so badly he did not care the consequences of lashing out at something bigger than him. And yet, that was part of his pursuit of God. It was him becoming, and being, a “man after God’s own heart”.
“Oh Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God! Restore the sparkle in my eyes, or I will die.” Psalms 13: 1-3. Or I will die…does that speak to the grieving heart?
That is David sitting at a crossroad at the very bottom of life. That is David declaring he doesn’t understand, that he is in great pain, that he reaches out and nothing is reaching back. Sound familiar? But it is also his declaration that if there is to be any hope, in his hopeless life, it cannot come from anywhere but God. David cheated on his wife. He committed murder. And he is regarded as the epitome of the kind, loving, Godly, servant. He had shame. He had guilt. He felt as though he lost everything he had to live for. He had depression. He had profound sadness. He had anger. He grieved. And as he cast all of those emotions onto God, I imagine he finally fell exhausted with no will remaining but to eventually be picked up and carried by God to higher ground. And that gives us something to hope for.
Hope still eludes me nearly every day. So much so, that I find myself longing for it, dreaming of it, willing to cut off my own decaying flesh to obtain it. Why? I do not know. I just know that I could use someone holding me close and walking with me, and no person will ever do the way they did again. So, I need something more, something bigger, something cosmic. I need a God that is willing to hear me, to tolerate me, to see me. David sang praises again after surviving the worse life had to throw at him. I suppose, I want that, too. For myself, and also for you. And while acceptance may remain in the periphery, this is a step in the right direction.
“‘Hope’ is a the thing with feathers-” by Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers- That perches in the soul- And sings the tune without words- And never stops- at all- And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard- And sore must be the storm- That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm- I’ve heard it in the chillest land- And on the strangest Sea- Yet- never- in Extremity, It asked a crumb- of me.
