Posted on

Flashbacks

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

The settling in process continues. For example, as I was writing this post the mail arrived with an envelope containing two copies of Janet’s death certificates. I guess it’s really official now.

So it’s official…

I had a chance to go on a little local radio station this week to talk about caregiving and grief. The host and I talked for about half an hour, and he was wanting to go longer, but our time slot was up. So before we stopped, he asked me on the air if I would be willing to come back and continue the conversation. I agreed, so I will be doing it again, same 8:30 am time slot, on the 9th of April. Also I will be getting an audio recording of the radio conversation that I will be publishing as soon as I can.

Frannie also had a visitor this week ‒ her boyfriend from Houston flew up to visit. He is flying back down to Houston Sunday afternoon.

I had a doctor’s appointment Thursday to get hooked up with a new PCP (Primary Care Physician) after our move up here. My blood pressure is high (which I knew about) but he restarted me on meds for that. He also did an EKG and some blood work. My heart is good and my blood sugar is fine – to tell the truth, I had been a bit concerned about that.

The really interesting thing, though, is that when I mentioned that Janet had died of Huntington’s Disease, my new doctor told me he had been involved in treating members of three separate families in Mineral Wells (pop. 16,788) that had members with Huntington’s! You just never know…

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

About a year ago when I first wrote about the connection between PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and caregiving, it was sort of a new idea, but now the connection is well established. This week I had another encounter with one of the hallmarks of PTSD: the flashback.

Flashbacks are when something occurs that puts the person back into a past situation emotionally. For example, in the past I have been triggered by fire alarms that sounded too much like a klaxon, and was put back into the mental state of trying to find my alert EC135 to run to, when there are, of course, remarkably few planes of any sort in downtown Waltham, Massachusetts. This week I got triggered again, but this time by a dream about being a caregiver.

In some ways, the exact circumstance of the dream is a little sketchy, but I remember that Janet was upset about something (I don’t remember what) and was yelling about it. And as had happened so often in real life, the more I tried to explain things, the angrier she got. I eventually awoke with a start, and I remember being stuck for a time in the same old conundrum of how to explain whatever the problem was in such a way that she would understand and calm down. After a few minutes of my mind and heart racing, trying to come up with a solution, I calmed down myself and realized that there was nothing to figure out and no crisis in need of a solution. But boy, it sure felt like there was a crisis…

But that is one of a flashback’s defining symptoms: your mind and body respond to the situation as though it were happening again. My mind was racing; my heart rate was up and I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears; my breaths were shallow and rapid; and I was sweating like mad.

Again I was reminded of what it felt like to be in a seemingly hopeless situation. Of course the situation wasn’t really hopeless – and not just because the situation was at its root a dream and so of questionable reality. But even when the situation that the dream was flashing back to was occurring in real life, it wasn’t hopeless. That was a lesson that I had to learn back then and is apparently one I needed a “refresher course” on, or perhaps a bit of continuing ed.

Which brought up for me an interesting thought: Perhaps learning from flashbacks is possible. I know that’s a curious, counter-intuitive thought, but stick with me here.

Flashbacks are by definition reliving a past experience that was stressful and even dangerous, but doing so in an environment that is often totally safe. For example, in this most recent case, I didn’t really have to worry about anything bad happening to me. After all, I was lying safe and alone in my bed. No monsters hiding in the closets, and no boogeymen (boogeypersons?) hiding under the bed. So if you think about it, what better way is there to work through fear and trauma than to replay it in a totally safe environment? This realization can be huge – especially if (like me) you are one of those people who always thinks of the thing that they should have said on the way home. Similarly, it is so easy to imagine later what I should have done when this or that happened to me.

Unfortunately, I find that too often I don’t want to actually resolve a situation, not really. Often my sights are set much shorter like merely avoiding the consequences, or figuring out how to hide the problem so I don’t have to think about it. Eventually however, the heartache, whatever it is, will come out – often at a time when I am least capable of dealing with it. For example, there are the WWII vets who have suppressed trauma related to their service for 70 years or more. Now they are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other conditions, and memories that they thought were stuffed down so far that they would never again see the light of day, are popping back up to the surface, multiplying the trauma they are experiencing.

So given these consequences, why would we not choose to really deal with a situation and have it be done with? After I toyed with that question long enough, I finally understood that the logical answer I was looking for didn’t exist. Logically, there is no reason to put off handling problems. One of the first lessons I learned as a little kid was to stand up and deal with the past and face the future – but why is doing that so hard?

As I have thought about it this week I have become convinced that it is not just about human cussedness – though that undoubtedly plays a large part. Sometimes we are told that “stuffing it” is the proper solution. We are told that big boys (or girls) don’t cry and no one wants to hear our troubles anyway. Sometimes it’s the feeling that is so prevalent in culture today, that if it hurts, it’s bad.

For caregivers, the problem can be procrastination born of emotional, spiritual or physical overload. I know that I always found it way too easy to say, “I’ll think about that tomorrow…” Then at some point, there is so much stuff put on hold that either “tomorrow” can’t hold any more or suddenly (as was my case) you aren’t a caregiver anymore, and the pile of things that you have been putting off comes crashing down on you like a high-country avalanche. The result is that now I am not only grieving, but also trying to deal with all the stuff that I kept putting off.

Still, looking to the future, my continuing prayer is that as I experience flashbacks, that God gives me the grace to learn from them what there is to learn, and not simply recoil in fear so the lesson has to be repeated again in the future. And as far as the flashback I had this week, well I’m still working on that one. So though, here at least, I will never be perfect, I can keep moving forward.

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when your past is coming back to haunt you…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the perfection with which You work together the intricacies of creation. But today I want to bless You especially for the wondrous and, at times, mysterious ways in which You weave together my life. I have seen Your glory shining is my mornings and Your majesty filling my nights. Amen.”

Posted on

Preparing for Reentry…

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

Not much news this week on the home front – our futon arrived three days early and Frannie and I got it set up in three or four hours. Now if we have any visitors (?) they will at least have a place to sit. To tell the truth, I would have rather bought something used, but none of the Goodwill stores in the area accept furniture.

In other news, Frannie dropped the bomb on me in passing, that her boyfriend Leroy is coming up for a visit – no word on whether he is packing a ring…

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

The term “reentry” of course comes from the American space program and refers to the process of coming home from space and reentering the earth’s atmosphere. As it turns out, actually being in space is not that difficult. Likewise, getting to space is not inherently very hard. Put enough thrust under anything and it ends up in space – even a red Tesla sports car. No, the really tricky bit is getting home in one piece – you’ll note that Elon isn’t trying to get his car back.

As a kid growing up in Missouri, I remember watching Walter Cronkite using a plastic model of the capsule to explain for the 900th time about a feared malfunction with the heat shield of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 Mercury space capsule, and how they hoped to minimize the risk of it falling off by not jettisoning the retrorocket pack. Their hope was that its retaining straps might help hold the shield in place.

I also remember interviews with Glenn afterwards in which he related the consternation he felt during reentry as he watched flaming chunks of metal hurtling past the windows of his capsule and wondered, “Was that the retropack burning up, or was it my heat shield breaking off?” As we discovered later with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the heat of reentry is so intense that if it had been his heat shield he wouldn’t have had time to even finish that thought.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about reentry as well. Not reentering the atmosphere from the vacuum of space, but reentering public life from the vacuum of caregiving. Though to be honest, I haven’t actually gotten as far as “reentry.” Right now I’m all about the “Preparing for…” phase of the process, and the first thing I noticed was that, with the exception of the airplane-like Space Shuttle, everyone who has ever gone into space has come home sitting backwards.

Which, if you think about it, is an interesting metaphor for life in general, and life post-caregiving in particular. As humans we seem to prefer to back into the future. For me, that posture is often more comforting because it means that I can be reassured by the sight of all the things that I’ve survived – which can be preferable to having to consider all the challenges and hills that there are still ahead of me. The unfortunate side effect, though, is that it makes it kind of hard to see where I am going. So, yeah, I guess that is one thing that I need to be working on.

In conjunction with that exploration, I have noticed something interesting about myself. I often say that if I ever created for myself a personal motto, it would probably be something along the lines of:

Just get started,

inspiration will come…

However, probably from the effect of living with Janet for 35 years I have become much more of a planner – though, from time to time, I still tend to start moving before I have a clear idea of where I’m off to. And while going through life “facing front” allows me to see opportunities and to be prepared for them as much as possible, it also allows me to see innumerable challenges fraught with all manner of potential problems.

For example, being out in the world means having to deal with people you don’t know and perhaps could be even someday, eventually, possibly, maybe, (gasp) dating. I have been out of the loop for so long that I don’t remember all the rules, and the ones I do remember are probably offensive to somebody now. All I know is that the last time I had to figure out “the rules” was Junior High – and that was a pain that I am not looking forward to repeating.

My best friend: “Hey Mike, I talked to Rebecca 4th period and she says she likes you.”

Me: “Hey, that’s great!”

Best friend: “Yes but, she also said that she doesn’t like you, like you…”

Me: “AAARRRGGGHHH!”

And add to that looming dread, the fact that while I can (with enough editing) come up with some pretty good written words, I am fundamentally not super comfortable speaking with people live or in online chats. So I am often left wondering, if we can send people to the moon, why can’t we figure out a way to edit the words coming out of our mouths? Like the time I called Janet by one of my ex-wives names in the middle of an argument. My, but that escalated fast…

But beyond any potential re-living of the bad old days of my youth, this last point brings up another topic. The world has changed a lot in the past couple years. Coming out of the bunker where I was caring for Janet I am finding a world that I at times don’t really like, or even recognize. So I begin asking myself questions like:

  1. How do I fit in?
  2. Can I fit in?
  3. Should I fit in?

With the third question being in many ways the most important. To begin with, the level of fear in society is unbelievable – and to me personally, intolerable.

Or again, people used to say, “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” Today, unfortunately, you seem to only have one chance – period. If in your entire life you have ever said anything that is troublesome to anyone, you are just done. There is no acceptance of misunderstandings and no tolerance for differing opinions, and even if you apologize for something that you acknowledge you were wrong about, there is certainly no forgiveness. Sometimes it all gets me thinking that perhaps sitting on my front porch and yelling at people who walk on my lawn wouldn’t be such a bad life. But do I really want to end up like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino?

This point ties in with another challenge I have been considering. As I grow older, I have noticed a tendency to become more introverted – a not uncommon situation. Recently, I was listening to a radio program that was discussing retirement, and they mentioned that introversion was a real problem in that context as well. The counselor leading the discussion said that too many people decide to simply withdraw from everything, and sit on their front porch in a rocking chair and watch the world go by. But as I have written before, that can kill you.

So with all these challenges in front of me, what am I to do? Well, I could turn back around, try to convince myself that the things I saw when facing the other direction weren’t real, and resume sliding into the future backwards. But for me it boils down to a rather old-fashioned word that people today like to ignore or redefine – Integrity. And as far as I can see there is only one thing that I can do with integrity, and that is to continue becoming who God made me to be. Who I am as a created being is what ultimately gives my existence meaning. As an engineer, I like to tell people that raw data is meaningless. The thing that gives it meaning – and therefore value – is its context. The proper context for my life is The One who created it.

Admittedly, figuring out who that person is can be a big challenge, but then only the big challenges are really worth tackling. It is only by learning who I essentially am that I can learn to let go of the temporary and accept what comes next. For example, the relationship that Janet and I had was the best that I could ever conceive. But that, in a way, is part of the problem: It’s the best that a human mind could conceive – I think I’d kind of like to find out the best that the mind which created the cosmos in all its amazing complexity and diversity could conceive. Now that could be interesting!

So the preparations continue…

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when you are going through life sitting backwards…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the future that You have prepared for those who love You. But today I want to bless You especially for our ‘swivel seats.’ So often I feel afraid of the future, but You are eternally forgiving and patient. At any moment I can turn around in my seat and face ahead towards the future, fearlessly. Thank you. Amen.”

Posted on

UNambiguous Loss

This post describes, my recovery from the loss of my wife to a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. She was healed of this condition when she went to live with our Heavenly Father at 2:30AM, the 10th of January 2021. You can read the announcement here.

Or if you would like to read our story from the beginning, you can start with: How We Got Here…

This week we are preparing for our move, and as you read this we are making our final preparations for the movers who, if everything goes as planned, will arrive bright and early tomorrow morning and start packing us. The movers estimate that it will take eight hours to get everything in the truck, so the day after, we will start our migration north.

Getting ready to move means going through a lot of old papers, especially in our garage. I have told you before that Janet was a school teacher. However, she was also something of a pack rat. In our garage we have boxes with her grade books from classes she taught 40 years or more ago. Likewise, there were boxes of canceled checks that were not only written on accounts that don’t exist anymore, but in some cases on banks that don’t exist anymore!

However, I also found other things… One such find was a note that she wrote sometime in August of 2019. I know that because in it, she refers to the shooting that took place on the 3rd of that month where a deranged man shot and killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso. I don’t know why she wrote it or who it was for as she never showed it to me. She was apparently worried that I would be “inspired” by his actions and go on a similar killing spree.

I well remember those times. She was constantly worried about anything and everything. It was then that I started having to censor the radio and TV programming. I also had to be very careful about what I said around her because there was no knowing what news item or bit of conversation she would pick up on and start obsessing over.

For example, if I came home from work upset about something trivial that happened at work, she would right away jump to the conclusion that I was about to get fired, and she would go on about it for days. Ironically, by the time I eventually did get fired (for not communicating well!) her condition had degenerated to the point that she only asked me a couple times if we had enough money, and that was about it.

Thankfully, I had been putting a bit of money aside and we had enough for two months, which I was able to stretch to three months. Still, God brought this job along just in time.

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

Several months ago I wrote a post entitled Ambiguous Loss. As I wrote then, this sort of loss can take two forms, the most common of which is feeling you have lost someone when in some way they are still there. A typical example of this type of loss is when dementia turns your gentle, loving spouse into a harsh, judgmental stranger. Or when your bubbly, outgoing loved one starts becoming sullen and unresponsive.

UNambiguous Loss is the old-fashioned, familiar kind, where the bed is empty and you are now officially a widow, widower, or orphan.

(Which, by the way, makes me wonder why isn’t there a word for describing someone who has lost a sibling? We really should have one…)

Even when the loss is finally unambiguous, the ambiguity can nevertheless continue in other ways. For example, a few days ago I got a care package from Houston Hospice that included a couple of books on the topic of grieving. Unfortunately, the books were not written with the world of caregivers in mind. Reading them, you find that the books do spend a page or two talking about death after a “prolonged illness.” The problem is that as you read further, you see that they define “prolonged” in terms of weeks and months – not years or even decades. Not surprisingly then, these books were written assuming a timeline that proceeds something like this:

  1. Loved one becomes ill, injured, etc.
  2. Loved one dies.
  3. Grief starts.

To be fair, this plan works fine for the majority of deaths – like if Janet had been hit by a bus, or had suffered a sudden heart attack. But it falls apart when the illness takes years or decades to reach its solemn conclusion. The problem is that in the sort of scenario many caregivers face, the three steps are no longer discrete points in time delineated by sharp edges separating one step from the next.

Rather, the steps get smeared out in time like a rain drop running down a window, or a tear running down a cheek. As a result, the steps start overlapping, getting smeared together. Or to put it another way, each step becomes a process. Sometimes it felt as though all three were happening simultaneously.

To begin with, it is not at all clear when Janet became ill – or is that even the right way to formulate the question? Perhaps I should say it is not at all clear when Janet became symptomatic. Remember, HD is a genetic condition so there was never a time in her life when her genes weren’t messed up. But even determining the onset of symptoms can be fuzzy. Her jaw used to “pop” shut. She said she had TMJ (temporomandibular joint problems) but maybe it was the HD.

But surely death is an absolute, isn’t it? Well in one sense, yes. But in another, I’m not so sure. As I look back, I try to figure out when the Janet I knew started dying. For months, my vigil by her bed had not been about waiting for death, because she seemed to be drifting back and forth between two worlds: the one where we all live, and the one where she is now. So even the concept of death became indistinct and cloudy.

In the end, about all I do know for sure is that, for me, the grieving did certainly not start the 10th of January 2021. For me, and I suspect many others who are caring for loved ones that truly have “prolonged illnesses,” the grieving starts a long time before the person you love and are caring for stops breathing.

In fact, if you look at any list of symptoms of grief you will see that the list is largely indistinguishable from the normal everyday experience of being a long term caregiver. Depression? Check. Feelings of guilt? Check. Exhaustion? Loss of Control? Loneliness? Check, check and check again!

I guess the point here is that things we read can serve to set out expectations of what is right or normal during grieving. So what happens when someone who is already in a precarious state emotionally reads a book that models grieving in a way that is so very different from their own experience? I’ll tell you one thing that can happen: the feelings of guilt that were never very far away, jump out and, taking center stage, start yelling at you.

“See your wife is dead and you can’t even do that right! Man, you are a piece of work! There is nothing that you can’t mess up.”

Needless to say, those sorts of comments are a load of what my Dad used to put on his roses.

Beyond the guilt, the other big issue that has been making itself known is anxiety – especially the fear of being alone. It suddenly struck me today that things are getting more and more serious between Frannie and her boyfriend. His mom and aunt are calling her regularly on the phone and she has met most of his family – of course everybody loves her. So Frannie could be moving back to Houston in the next few months to get married. Which, to be clear, would be a good thing. I have always wanted Frannie to have a life of her own, but still…

So, day by day, the battle goes on and along the way I am learning a few things. For example, it is pretty clear to me that Frannie and I have a lot deeper understanding of love than we would have had otherwise. I remember once, a long time ago, telling Frannie while I was helping Janet get cleaned up after a pee accident, “Don’t even consider telling a young man ‘I love you’ unless you would be willing to do this for him.”

By George, I think she has been listening.

In Christ, Amen ☩

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

A prayer for when your grief seems overwhelming…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for the gifts of strength and wisdom that You give so richly to all Your children. But today I want to bless You especially for eyes and ears that are learning to work better and better. Many times when he was among us in the flesh, Jesus talked about needing eyes that can see and ears that can hear. The lessons are hard, but I am learning to develop both. Thank you. Amen.”

Posted on

Mary lost her son, a story of Holy Week

This post describes, in part, the effects of a degenerative neurological condition called Huntington’s Disease. Any negative behavior on the part of my wife should be attributed to that condition. Any negative behavior on the part of myself should be attributed to my need for God’s ongoing grace.

This week I’m doing something that I have never done before. You can call it a mindful memorial, a tribute, or just trying to deal with the reality of being surrounded by death from various neurodegenerative diseases – the actual label doesn’t really matter, I guess. On any given day, the various support forums carry a litany of death from a multitude of causes that have nothing to do with viruses, and so unfortunately draw little attention.

These brief notices are typically written by the deceased’s caregiver and naturally talk about how wonderful their late loved one was – which is as it should be. But something can get lost with that approach to memorialization: the caring people left behind. These short obituaries talk about the deceased’s challenges and bravery in the face of adversity, but rarely mention the sacrifices that the caregiver makes to allow their loved one to reach the end of their days with some dignity. Neither is it mentioned that these extraordinary measures are undertaken knowing that they won’t change the long-term prognosis even one single bit.

So this week I want to talk about one particular HD-related death from the standpoint of the patient’s caregiver – his mother. Please don’t see this choice as in any way denigrating the contributions of people with other relationships. Fathers lose daughters, children lose parents, and spouses lose each other, and they all perform noble service.

Rather, my choice of subject to stand in for the hundreds of thousands of caregivers worldwide was simple and pragmatic. It is someone that I know personally, and her son is also the fourth family member with HD that she has cared for.

The mother’s name is Maria and she might be familiar to some of you. She lives in Italy and over the past month I have posted several prayer requests for her and her son Giuseppe. So many of you have responded that Maria was, at one point, left speechless. She thought she was the only asking God to give her strength. Not quite! And for the record, I am incredibly proud of the family we have assembled here.

To make a long story short, Giuseppe had JHD and like so many of his countrymen, contracted the coronavirus. Maria spent many long hours living at the hospital helping to care for him. In fact, at one point she went 48 hours without sleeping or eating, and ended up collapsing on the floor. She said the nursing staff was initially afraid that she had suffered a heart attack, but she was just exhausted.

Then during Holy Week, the end came. Since then, there has been an unending stream of details to be managed and arrangements to be made. As I was thinking about this today (Wednesday, April 15th), I started writing. Even though I never met the young man, I had come to feel very close to him, despite his being on the other side of a very large ocean. So the writing was initially to clear my own head and help deal with my own sense of loss – though, to tell the truth, I felt a bit embarrassed to even mention my feelings.

Eventually, my feelings fell to the wayside and the writing morphed into a series of thoughts on motherhood in general, and Maria’s loving dedication to her family in particular.

I have been thinking about it and it seems to me that, for mothers, raising children involves a long series of “letting go” events. For nine months you carry them in the womb but even here, at the very beginning, they are a separate person, so there is a relationship with the child, a connection. The paradox is that they are at once, in you and yet distinct from you. They have their own gender, their own blood type, and their own heartbeat. While this heartbeat may from time to time synchronize with yours, it is unique.

This point becomes obvious at birth when the umbilical cord connecting the two of you is severed and they can become a fully independent human being. But still, you feed them from your breast and change their diapers. Then one day you have to let go of that connection because they no longer need the same degree of attention. I well remember the poignant moment when my Janet realized that she had just breast-fed our son for the last time. But he made it clear that, while milk was all fine and good, he wanted solid food – and lots of it!

After that, life seems full of letting go events that strain, redefine and restructure the connection: potty training, starting school, dances, dating, graduation, college, marriage, and parenthood – each with its own unique set of letting go moments.

But sometimes something goes wrong with that neat plan, and there are other things that a mother has to let go of. When Maria realized that Giuseppe had the Juvenile form of Huntington’s Disease, she had to learn to let go of his laughter and smiles, and eventually the personable young man that he was. Then in a kind of hellish regression, she had to return to feeding and changing him, and doing her very best to care for his most basic physical and emotional needs. But then, doctors and nurses became involved.

I will always remember the message I got from Maria when Giuseppe was being taken to the hospital. I am just learning Italian, but even without running the text through Google Translate, I recognized the words or phrases for “my son”, “hospital”, “intubated”, and “panicking”. The resulting online prayer request is when many of you became acquainted with her name, and there were dozens of you. (Thank you Pamela at the Huntington’s Disease Prayer Support Group!)

Eventually, in the final stages, Maria had to face letting him go completely in death. But even then, her mother’s love was so strong that she continued hanging on, becoming a living “la Pietà” mourning a son, not of marble, but of flesh and blood. She cradled him, craving one more moment of human contact. Soon even that was gone, as people explained to her about “contagions” and the necessity of cremation. She had to let go of even his physical body. In the end, it appeared that all she would have left to show for a lifetime of love and commitment, was just a few handfuls of ashes.

But no, God does not leave His children so destitute. Maria also has memories: The warmth and intimacy of suckling him that first time in the delivery room. The look of brave determination on his face as he headed off for the first day of elementary school. The pride he showed at graduation, and many, many more treasured moments that “moths cannot eat nor rust destroy.”

But in addition to the memories, God also has promises for the future. Promises of renewed hope and love that can, frankly, be so hard to hear while we are in the midst of the mourning. However, we can be confident that these promises have no “expiration date” and their time will come. For example, as people of faith, we have the assurance that death is not the hopeless end to an essentially meaningless life. Rather, one of the great lessons of Easter is that, as strange as it may sound, in death there is healing. When Jesus appeared to his disciple following the resurrection, He still bore the marks of the crucifixion. The difference was that they were no longer bleeding wounds, they were healed and Jesus was none the worse for wear. And so it is for Giuseppe and all our loved ones: There is no HD in heaven.

But for right now those around Maria are supporting her, and while she is so tired and full of grief that she doesn’t at times know which way to turn, she is not the kind to stay down. The life of a Christian in this world is not about “either/or” but “both/and”. We aren’t confronted with the alternatives of either sinner or saint, or either being faithful or grieving. In both cases, we are “both/and”. Always remember that the opposite of grief is not faithfulness, but rather apathy.

So if you have been praying for Maria, please continue to do so – which if you thinks about it is another case of “both/and”. She is both in need of prayer and already under infinite God’s care. To protect her from total despair, God is continuing to fill her heart every day with fresh hope, and the rod of steel that He placed in her spine means that this time of pain and sorrow will not leave her permanently bowed down.

This loss will not be the end of her, and the testimony of her story is yet another assurance that ours won’t be the end of us either…

In Christ, Amen ☩

A prayer for when you mourn…

“Blessed are You, Lord God, King of the Universe. It is right that I should at all times and in all circumstances bless You for your wonderous promises. But today I want to bless you especially for understanding and sanctifying our grief. In scripture we see Jesus first weeping at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, and then reassuring the two grieving sisters that in Him there is life regardless of how things look at the moment. And then again, we have Jesus’ reassuring words, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ Thank you for the opportunity to experience the grief of separations so we might experience an even greater joy at our reunions. Amen”