I lifted the tiny tuft of down and blew it from my fingertips. It rose over the lawn and mingled with its angel neighbors. A gentle breeze carried it up and out of sight.
My girlfriend Lynne invited Kaye, Bethany, and me over for an intimate “Welcome to Year Two” lunch. (Tember would have joined us, but she was in school.) After we ate, Lynne slid a small ice-blue box my way. I untied the white silk ribbon and lifted the lid. Nestled inside was a sterling silver anchor hanging from a silver chain.
“‘An anchor for the soul,’” Lynne said, “from your girlfriends and me.”
My eyes filled. “Thank you. God truly has been our Anchor. And you guys have been His tangible way of showing up throughout this mess. I am so grateful.” I hugged Lynne and Kaye and clasped the necklace around my neck.
Then Lynne asked a good question: “As you enter this next year, what is it you want?”
I thought of the cottonwood seed. I thought of the grief heroes I knew who had let their loss transform them. While I didn’t have a clue about how to let my grief transform me, I knew two practical things I needed for the journey that lay ahead.
“I want to sleep. I feel like I’ve been running on adrenaline for a year. I am bone-tired. I could sleep for a month. And I want to laugh. I need to laugh. I have overdosed on sorrow. I want to throw back my head and belly laugh until I can’t breathe. I am just aching to laugh.”
My grief tide began to ebb for longer periods of time, making life more bearable and allowing me to catch my breath in between days of deep sorrow. Sleep brought greater rest. Laughter felt less out of place and became more reflexive. And the number of days in which I cried off my mascara before lunchtime decreased!
But stepping into year two was a bit like coming out of surgical anesthesia. As the fog-like numbness of year one lifted, the hazy protection that it had offered disappeared as well. In some ways, I felt my sorrow more acutely, and my relationship with joy remained unresolved, like a shadow slipping through my fingers.
“Your joy is one of the main ingredients to this home’s climate,” Katie had written in my Mother’s Day card just twenty days before she died. “Don’t underestimate your contribution!”
What irony. My joy had been leveled by the loss of the very girl who had touted its merits. Was it gone for good? Was I permanently joy disabled?
Since childhood, I had hidden behind “happy” whenever life got painful, but in recent years, I had begun facing some of my own areas of brokenness head-on. To my surprise, I realized that as my capacity to face pain had increased, my capacity for joy had grown deeper too. While I still had far to go, I had begun experiencing life more intensely by saying yes to all that it means to be human: joy, pain, sorrow, love, anger, laughter—a full painter’s palette of emotions.
But the death of a child is an enormous buzzkill. How would I fill the gaping wound in my soul that Katie’s death had created?
Bitterness would fill it nicely. Anger at God, too. Self-pity—wow, I could fill it to the rim in a heartbeat if I turned to self-pity. Is that what I’d choose?
One balmy night in August, my fear that I might be permanently joy disabled was rebuffed in a small but significant way. I had experienced a couple of good weeks in a row—I’d had a stronger ability to focus, fewer debilitating bouts of tears, and fewer moments when I caught myself reliving some of the more graphic hospital images. As I walked to my car after a fantastic worship service at church and a fun conversation with Kaye, a foreign feeling swept over me—the butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling that comes upon you when the world is good and beautiful and you are so filled with gratitude that you might burst.
I stopped in my tracks. I knew this feeling. There in the muggy haze of a Midwest sunset, I remembered it.
Joy.
Perhaps—just perhaps—the scales in my life were beginning to tip. Perhaps, despite all that had happened, my life was beginning to hold more joy than pain. Not a lot more, mind you. But more.
I climbed into my minivan and lay my forehead on the steering wheel. For the first time in more than fifteen months, the tears I wept were tears of joy.
41
BETHANY FLEW HOME for a few weeks’ vacation late that summer. One evening around bedtime, she knocked on our bedroom door. I opened it, and there stood our girl, her eyes sunken, her face white.
“My head is killing me,” she said. “This is the worst headache I’ve ever had.”
Scott and I exchanged glances. I’d often heard him say that, in the ER, whenever someone describes a headache as “the worst in my life,” right away doctors think aneurysm.
“I’m taking her in,” I said to Scott. He knows I like to be the one who brings the kids to the doctor, and he obliges me.
“It is likely just a regular headache—aneurysms are almost never hereditary. But yes, take her in. I’ll keep my cell phone on.”
“I’ll call you once I know more.”
As soon as the admitting nurse in the ER learned about Bethany’s family history, everyone began to scurry. A tech whisked her back to see the doctor, who quickly ran a few tests, ordered an IV line, and then performed a spinal tap to check for any signs of blood in her spinal fluid.
When the results of the tap were back, the doctor approached. “We found trace samples of blood in your spinal fluid,” she said. “We’re admitting you to determine the cause.”
I knew what one cause could be: a leaking cerebral aneurysm.
Bethany and I looked at each other. “This is like a sick déjà vu,” she said.
Lightning had already struck our family once; why wouldn’t it strike us twice?
They wheeled Bethany away to CT, and I called Scott.
Seven days of hospitalization and myriad tests and procedures later, this story had a happy ending. They determined that the blood in Bethany’s spinal fluid was caused by the ER spinal tap itself, as sometimes occurs, and was easily remedied with a simple procedure. Once the leak healed, Bethany’s headache—just a really bad headache made worse by the leaky tap—abated, and we brought her home. But it had been a scary week, and it uncovered an ugly little something in me—a resistance to prayer.
One of the tests they had run, an angiogram, is a procedure with some degree of risk. I wanted to pray for Bethany’s safety, but this setting—a daughter in a hospital with a crisis related to her head—felt like a rerun of Katie’s ordeal, and it brought back memories of my futile begging for God to heal my middle child. God hadn’t healed Katie. What was wrong with my prayers? Were they jinxed? Was God impotent? This time around, I couldn’t bring myself to pray.
Kaye and Chris had come to the hospital to be with us during Bethany’s angiogram, and Kaye sat with me as they wheeled our daughter away.
“My track record for praying for a hospitalized daughter with head pain isn’t so great,” I told her. “Will you pray?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “But just so you know, God isn’t offended by your resistance. It makes sense. And we don’t just pray for the sake of others—for Katie or for Bethany. We pray for our own sakes, too, because He invites us to trust Him with every part of our lives, regardless of the outcome.”
Kaye prayed for Bethany. When she was through, I added timidly, “Father, help me surrender this daughter of mine into Your care. And I ask You, heal her.”
When you lose one kid, it becomes very tempting to try to control the world, when in reality you can’t. Sitting in that waiting room, I didn’t pray out of a certainty that it would change Bethany’s outcome. I prayed out of a desire to stay openhanded toward God and toward life.
Today when I pray, I sometimes still beg. God invites us to be honest about what we want, after all. But my experiences with both Bethany (who got better) and Katie (who didn’t) broadened my understanding of prayer. God is not a celestial gum-ball machine—insert your request in the slot, get your guaranteed answer out of the magical little metal door. Sometimes the answer we receive isn’t a yes. It’s a no. And the
no can break our hearts.
But the yes or the no isn’t the point.
As much as I hate the answer I got when I prayed for Katie, I can’t call foul. God never guaranteed me a lifetime with her. He never promised me any of the blessings I get to treasure every day. He promises us comfort in sorrow, strength when our own fails, inexplicable peace, His presence in storms, and life in all its fullness for those who follow Him—but not a pain-free life. And the things He promises, He delivers.
I am slowly becoming open to the possibility that God promised me something better than what I had begged Him for. It will never feel “better than” to me this side of eternity. I suspect I will always wish He had just given me my dang yes, and I will always hate the no I received. What mama wouldn’t? But I am learning to rest in knowing that someday beyond this life, I will receive a satisfying answer for each no I have been given. Even the Katie no. Until then, for me, prayer will be about surrender—accepting the answers I get—and then watching for the unexpected ways God shows up, creating beauty even in the worst situations.
42
I MADE REGULAR TREKS to the crash site during year two—sometimes with friends or family, but often alone. Each time, I brought flowers, but I never knew what else I should do. Was there a right way to mark my visits? A ritual I should be following? The setting—with cars whipping by at fifty-five miles per hour—didn’t exactly lend itself to moments of serenity. Nonetheless I liked having a place to make an official—though awkward—attempt at ceremony in honoring my daughter.
When I visited the site in early fall, I found that the utilities company was expanding its underground wires along the ditch in front of the crash site, and someone had moved the crosses farther back from the road. When I returned again a month later, the iron cross was knocked down, and a piece of it had broken off. The white cross and its campaign-poster photo of my daughter were gone altogether. Construction was beginning in the field behind the site, and the harsh clanging of bulldozers and dump trucks added to the less-than-serene setting of speeding cars, old beer cans, and stray plastic grocery sacks. It was too much. I lingered only long enough to push the iron cross back into the dirt, arrange my flowers around its base, and say a quick prayer.
“What should we do with Katie’s Christmas stocking this year?” I asked Scott one evening in early December. “Maybe we could do a variation of the scrolls. We could let each of the kids pick out which World Vision gift to give on Katie’s behalf. What do you think?”
Scott listened intently, then chose his words carefully before he spoke. “This year, hon, I’m wondering if it’s the right thing to fill her stocking at all. We can still designate that money to some good causes if you’d like, but is there a chance that filling her stocking is hindering you from facing the full reality that Katie is gone? Perhaps this year, we should let it hang empty.”
His words surprised me and triggered my usual defensiveness. Who, me? Avoiding our reality? But as I caught my breath, I rummaged around inside my soul, and something in his words rang true. Dang. He was right.
I had worked so hard to lean into the pain of losing a child, to not stuff or anesthetize, to pre-grieve before Mother’s Day, and all that. I had tried to be so purposeful in my grief. But sometimes even purposefulness can be blind.
Last Christmas, an empty stocking was too much. The clever scrolls had been just the thing to help me through. But a year later, I was in better shape. Was repeating the scrolls my way of avoiding? Sure, it might look like a beautiful little tradition on the outside, but down deep, was I now using it as a crutch? A centerpiece?
Scott’s gentle words exposed that I was not impervious to creating the beginnings of an unhelpful shrine. I knew in my gut he was right. Curses!
This year, for the health of my own grief journey, I needed to let the stocking go empty.
So on Christmas morning when the kids awoke, Katie’s stocking hung in its rightful place on our mantel, but with no scrolls masking its emptiness. I explained why to the kids, and they understood—and maybe looked a little relieved that their mama was trying to move toward acceptance rather than settling for distraction or denial. We would pick up the scrolls again next year, and the year after that. They were a good tradition. But for this year, it felt painfully right to let Katie’s stocking hang empty on the mantel.
The thermometer on the back deck registered single digits. Fresh snowflakes were falling, covering the blanket of old snow that had already staked its claim in our yard. Scott and the kids were at work and at school, but I had taken the day off. It was February 4, Katie’s birthday.
I built a fire in the fireplace, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and snuggled under a quilt on the family room sofa, feeling drenched with gratitude for all our years with Katie.
She would have turned twenty-one today. She’d been looking forward to this particular birthday since she was in her teens, and no doubt she would have celebrated it with abandon. Matt, Andrea, and Bethany likely would have taken her out for her first drink in a bar—probably some fruity pink concoction with a little paper umbrella and a maraschino cherry. There would have been plenty of laughter, lots of selfies with friends posted to Facebook, and gifts—the girl loved presents. And had I flown to California for her big day, I would have made her our traditional birthday dessert—chocolate cheesecake with granola crust. A milestone birthday from which she would have launched into full-fledged adulthood.
I felt tender but also curious. I wasn’t as sad as I thought I might be. Last September, when both Kati Harkin and Dan had turned twenty-one, it sideswiped me. My daughter would have loved to be there, celebrating each of them. Today, I simply felt a quiet pleasure in thinking about my girl.
Last August, when that first surge of joy had swept over me in the church parking lot, I had felt such hope. I was getting my game on—or so I thought. But subsequent flashes of joy had been fleeting, and my days had remained pretty dark. Was I stuck? What was wrong with me? How would joy possibly find a recurring role in my new normal?
This struggle wasn’t unique to me. Heartbreak comes in many colors—death, divorce, job loss, poverty, relational fractures, abuse. Pain is the great equalizer, and it spares no one. So where did joy fit?
I stood and stoked the fire. I refilled my coffee and looked out the window. Such beauty. Then I snuggled back under my quilt.
Life is hard, and tragedy strikes. Also, life is stunningly beautiful. Both/and. But our circumstances do not have the power to steal our joy without our permission. If our purpose, our identity, our sense of God’s direction hinged upon a pain-free life, how precarious the world would be. How weak God would be. How few would ever find true joy.
I thought about the lyrics from one of the songs we’d sung during Katie’s funeral, lyrics taken from the book of Job (a man in the Bible who lost all his children): “You give and take away. . . . Blessed be Your name.”[4] The words held deeper meaning today than they had when I sung them in a shocked stupor just a week after Katie died. I now knew from personal experience that the same God who allows pain to enter our lives also sends us comfort, His presence, and more strength than we thought we possessed. And with the sorrow, He extends an invitation for the transformation of our character and a richer, wiser appreciation of life. These were all gifts I never asked for—I would have rather had Katie—but slowly embraced.
The logs burned low in the fireplace. I carried my empty coffee cup to the sink and looked out the kitchen window. The backyard was now buried under a heavy blanket of fresh snow. At the far edge of our lawn, fairylike snowflakes drifted around the cottonwood tree, every branch and twig coated in white. God is good.
Even on the darkest of days, tiny embers of joy had been glowing undetected beneath the ashes of my soul. There they waited for an invitation to flicker into flame.
43
BETHANY FLEW HOME for a visit that spring, and she gave me an opportunity to both laugh and cringe at my own expense.
We w
ere shopping together at Costco, and I was wearing my silver anchor necklace. The guy bagging our groceries seemed kind but a bit socially awkward.
“Cool anchor,” he said, pointing. “Got a boat?”
Bethany sensed where this could lead. Fearing I would launch into telling this complete stranger the full significance of my anchor, she shot me a look and shook her head. No, Mom . . . please, no. Let it go. Seems the lollipop story and others like it had earned me a reputation for sharing too much information with complete strangers.
“Uh, no,” I said to the bagger. “Actually, I don’t own a boat. I, uh . . .”
I looked at Bethany, who raised her eyebrows and gave me the stink eye.
But my hunger to talk about Katie was winning. Maybe, just maybe, I rationalized, this guy’s question is a divinely inspired prompt for me to engage him in a meaningful conversation about God—and about my daughter.
“The anchor was a gift from . . .” I glanced over at Bethany and got a final look that said, I swear I’ll leave you all alone in this Costco.
Too late.
“Actually, some girlfriends gave this necklace to me to symbolize what a steady anchor God has been for us since my nineteen-year-old daughter died a couple of summers back.”
The man stopped loading our groceries and stared, slack-jawed, his mental wheels spinning as he grappled for some sort of response to this woman whose six-pack of canned corn he held in his hand.
Colors of Goodbye Page 24