Lately I have been plagued by the question, “Why?”
Not the why you would think. Not the, why-did-my-son-get-cancer-and-suffer-and-die why.
No, not that why.
To that why, my response has always been, “why not?” Seriously. Why not? Why should Tyler have been spared a childhood cancer diagnosis? Why should his dad and I have been spared the helplessness of watching our only son die? Why should his sister, his grandparents, his aunts, uncles, cousins, friends have been spared? It happens in this world. Death and suffering happen. None of us is promised immunity to it. So I can’t help but counter the “Why me?” with “Why not me?”
No, the why that hounds me now, five years after Tyler was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and four and a half years after his death, is about my grief.
Before losing my son, I had lost a number of loved ones. Childhood losses included grandparents and pets. Adult losses included my best friend, my grandmother, and my in-laws. With these losses, as time went on, fond memories took the place of raw grief. The hole each one left in my heart remained, but my heart no longer hurt.
So the tangled, disorderly grief journey since losing my child bewilders me.
I have lived one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight days without my son. If I have accomplished something repeatedly 1,658 times, why haven’t I gotten better at it?
I have survived with traumatic memories of his suffering for two hundred and thirty-six weeks and six days. With the passage of 236 weeks, why haven’t those memories faded, even a little bit?
I have had fifty-four months and thirteen days to adjust to Tyler’s absence. If something terrible happened to me 54 months ago, why can’t I be “over it” by now?
For me, logic dictates that improvement should come with the passage of time. So why, all these days, weeks and months later am I still brokenhearted, still beleaguered by painful memories, still not better at this? That’s my why to the universe.
I need grief to be logical, and it’s not.
There has been a logic and rhythm to this voyage at times. I know to expect the worsening emotions dictated by the calendar. The big dates – his birthday, his diagnosis, his death. The holidays that are forever linked to his huge presence in my life – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day.
And other, perhaps less obvious calendar dates fall into the expected cadence of my grief triggers.
The month of August is one. Because August 2011 was the last month we lived innocent lives. Lives filled with unfettered hopes and dreams and expectations. Days filled with the mundane and the memorable.
Tyler’s eagerness to be with his school friends again at the end of the month. Volunteering as a counselor at our church’s children’s camp. Going to a Christian concert with a friend. Filming goofy vlogs with another friend. To a local Fair with still others. Squeezing in an appointment to the orthodontist since he had been failing to wear his retainer as faithfully as he should. His last minute completion of his summer homework.
His reaction to the earthquake we felt in Maryland that month. And to a hurricane. His dad and I stayed in a hotel after days without power while Tyler was away at a high school retreat. And it strikes me each August that it was during that high school retreat that a hurricane was brewing inside our son’s body as he experienced the first aches in his back. Pain caused by the fast-growing and fast-multiplying cancer cells crowding the marrow of his bones.
But we were happy, busy, and clueless. Oblivious to the devastation and destruction that was to come.
Each August, my social media account is replete with cheerful stories of families sending their kids off to school and to college. And I grieve anew for that August 2011 boy, those two parents, that sister, those friends… who simply didn’t know about the storm that was about to hit.
Holidays, anniversaries, even the month of August. I’ve learned to prepare my heart and mind for the increased hurt and pain. It’s logical. It makes sense that I would struggle during these times.
But July isn’t on my grieving calendar. In fact, June and July seem to offer me the most freedom from grief. So why, I’ve been asking Grief, did I have one of my worst episodes in July? I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready.
Behind the wheel one day, my mind was drifting, mostly on thoughts about my work day. Abruptly, I was assailed by the vivid memory of holding Tyler as he left this earth. Assailed by the very smells, the very sounds, the disbelief, the senselessness of him having fought so hard and suffered so much only to die anyway.
Tears and anguish hit with blitzkrieg force. More than four years after his death, they rivaled those of the first hours and days after Tyler died.
So I got mad. Mad at grief. Mad that there’s no good answer to why. Why is it possible to feel pain at this level after all this time? Why did this memory and these feelings hit me at this particular time with no special date, no special season, no special trigger to cause it? And my whys were dogged by other impossible questions. Is it always going to be like this? When will this end? Am I doing this wrong?
I want my grief to make sense. I desperately need it to make sense. And it doesn’t… not to me. As I’ve mulled over this… chewed over it… since that July episode, I still don’t have answers about grief, only questions.
Unanswered questions. Unexpected attacks as well as the predictable ones. It’s a recipe for deep mental exhaustion. No other loss has prepared me for this. And 4 ½ years into this, I’m not sure what the next years will bring. It’s unsettling to me.
But here’s an answered question. A completely settled one. Where is God in the midst of my grief?
He’s here.
I was thinking about this, because these past few months as the enormity and seeming endlessness of my grief was wearing me down, I was starting to recognize that the comfort God had given me when my grief was new just wasn’t there for me anymore.
A lot of Scripture became real to me when Tyler became ill and died. Really real. Promises so tangible that they were living and active and organic and breathed the breath right into me. Words I’d read before, but never lived before. My faith was renewed, not daily, but hourly.
I attribute my unwavering faith to being so broken, so helpless, that I wholly depended on the Lord. I took myself out of the equation, and I let God. Just let Him. Let him work, let him comfort me, let him strengthen me, let him bless me. I wanted only what he wanted. And his Word became real.
One verse I experienced in a real way was Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” I’d memorized this verse along with the rest of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as a teen. A short and sweet verse that is easily overlooked in a “that’s nice” kind of way.
But after Tyler died, I understood two things: the true meaning of “mourning,” and the true meaning of “comfort.”
The comfort I experienced didn’t lessen the mourning. The pain and deep grief remained. Rather, the comfort was a presence in the time of my sorrow. God was with me, enveloping me. I’d truly never felt anything like it. Blessed are those who mourn… I now comprehended the blessing part of this verse, the experience of something so beautiful, reserved solely for the grieving and to no one else.
So I’m thinking about this again, four and a half years later. Because turning the pages of the calendar 55 times since I lost Tyler has changed things. To the helplessness and brokenness of fresh loss have been added many new life experiences. The pain… well the pain is as I’ve described. It’s there. But it’s now intermingled with days and weeks and months and years of post-loss life.
Over time, I’ve become more self-reliant at functioning without my son. Less helpless. Less broken. I’ve put myself back into the equation, no longer depending on the Lord for every move, every breath.
There’s a passage in 2 Corinthians 12 that describes this perfectly. When we’re at our weakest, we’re most likely to allow God’s power and strength to prevail in our lives. There’s a seeming absurdity expressed in verse 10 that actually makes perfect sense to me: whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
I’ve come to realize during these past few months of musings about grief that for me, becoming self-sufficient has allowed grief’s exhausting, draining, life-diminishing track to take hold in my soul. I’ve been blaming my soul-weary fatigue and loss of purpose on the senseless and illogical pathway of long term mourning.
I wanted grief to be logical. It isn’t. But God in the midst of my grief? He said blessed are those who mourn. He said my power is strongest when you are weak. Both sound paradoxical, but through the lens of my faith and through the lens of my past experience with this God of mine, this is pure logic.
I don’t have to be a formless heap on the floor, as in those early days of loss, for God’s strength to be manifest in me, for God’s comfort to be mine. I just need, once again, to let him.
I think most would agree that comfort never takes pain away. When a momma hugs and kisses her little one after a fall, the bump is still there. But her presence provides comfort. Imagine that same fall, that same bump, but no momma.
Looking back, as the years progressed, that’s what I ended up choosing. Thanks for being there so tangibly when I needed you, God. Thanks for that level of comfort that I can’t even describe. Thanks for making Matthew 5:4 real in my life. And for all those other promises that breathed life into me when it hurt so much that I wanted to die. But I’m good on my own now. I’ve figured this out. Haven’t I?
I can see that I’ve lost my way a bit these past weeks, months, and years. By choosing to be strong in my own power, I’ve chosen the pain without the comfort.
So as nearly five years of grieving have rendered me despondent and weary, I realize again what I realized so easily when the grief was fresh:
I can’t do this on my own.
Day after day, week after week, month after month. It’s too big, and as it turns out, I’m not strong enough.
I’ve been shaking my fist at grief because it’s been trouncing me. Its predictability. Its unpredictability. Its endlessness. Its senselessness.
So, Lord, I need you. I’ve been doing this on my own steam, but I want to do it on your steam. Thank you, Lord, for this promise in Lamentations 3 and for making it real again for me:
I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
New every morning. That’s how I want to live each day I wake up without my son. With God’s promises new on my heart, with his presence new and infilling.
“Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Whenever I am weak, then I am strong.