Your life looks completely different now. Who knew that one person could change your entire world with their absence – but it has. For you. And I am so incredibly sorry for your pain.
After a few months (sometimes even a few weeks or days) the texts and phone calls stop. Friends and coworkers continue with conversations as “business as usual”, because they don’t know how to help or what to say. The gift of normalcy is offered so quickly but it offers no relief. Because nothing is normal anymore. They try, people genuinely care and want to “fix” it but there is no “fixing” this because they didn’t break you to begin with. Life did. Death did. And although everything changed in the blink of an eye, it will take months and years to navigate back to something resembling life before this dreadful news.
I understand, and I hate that you are walking the tightrope, too. The one where you feel the opposing pressures to…
Take time for yourself to grieve but not too much time where you are isolating yourself from others.
Cry to process what you have lost but not to succumb to the ever looming and all-consuming depression.
Talk about their life with others to hold on to their memory but not so much that people are tired of hearing it.
Create plans to prepare for hard times but fight the urge to cancel as they get closer.
Be a good wife… and mom… and friend… and family member… and employee… despite being one of the worst versions of yourself.
Five hour car rides alone have now turned into 5 hours of crying my face off - hello grief. Be alone they said, it will help you heal they said. Sent this reassuring, “don’t worry I grabbed a Yerba to keep me going” pic to my husband mid way through my last trip.
It is a never ending cycle of emotion that can change at the turn of a dime and we are navigating it while feeling like less than our whole selves. So for getting out of bed today, for brushing your teeth and ATTEMPTING to carry on (as you know your loved one would have wanted you to do yet it still doesn’t help), I applaud you. Seriously, you could have quit your job and moved to an island to lay in bed all day to cry. But you are still here. You may be trying and failing but sooner or later your efforts will create progress and you won’t have to convince yourself to get out of bed anymore. You just will.
Not that it still won’t hurt. You’ve lost someone. And that hurts.
I am so sorry for all that this loss means. For the new memories that will never be created. For the laugh that you will no longer hear. For the hug or embrace that will go unfelt when you need it most. For the life updates and children that will never be born, or the kids who won’t know “them”. For all of the things that life grants us that we may have taken for granted, but we surely won’t anymore.
It’s hard. All of it is hard. Big accomplishments and devastating news, family pictures and family vacations, birthdays and holidays. (The worst for me was my own birthday knowing that my brother would never know me “this old”.)
I am no expert and I surely don’t believe that I have all of the answers but in my short 6 months of excruciating experience I would like to offer a few things…
1. Just, breathe.
It may sound ridiculous to boil it all down to this but when life seems overwhelming we, like a teenage boy just starting out pushing way too much weight in the gym, forget the most important rule: breathing. Giving ourselves permission to do the most basic of functions. Big deep breaths that remind our bodies that though we have walked through immeasurable pain, we are still alive. Despite if in the moment we want to be or not. You do, you don’t want to hurt anymore I know, but you do want to live. Deep down under the grief there is still a person with purpose and strength and joy. I promise. Just breathe.
2. Don’t be so hard on yourself, or others.
You have never navigated this loss before. Even if you have walked through grief, every person offers something unique to your life and you have never had to know what it was not like to lose them. So be gentle. You won’t do everything perfectly. You won’t make the greatest of choices – hello emotional eating. And you won’t have perfect communication and well-kept relationships. The goal is to remain healthy, to not do anything that will cause further damage in your life, but if you need to go on a walk by yourself when you said you would meet someone for coffee then give yourself enough grace to know that you are not a bad friend when you advocate for fresh air. You are allowed a walk. You are allowed to be sad. And while you are giving yourself grace, understand that everyone else will need it too. Their words and actions and possible lack of understanding/sympathy won’t be perfect and may very well be the opposite of what you “need” but who knows, you may just change what you need in a day or an hour and our emotions can turn a perfectly normal conversation into a destructive one. So do your best to offer as much grace as you can as you navigate through.
3. Trust that God is exactly where He promised He would be, “near”.
One of my favorite songs to listen to these days is Lauren Daigle’s “Rescue”. It starts off:
You are not hidden
There's never been a moment
You were forgotten
You are not hopeless
Though you have been broken
Your innocence stolen
I hear you whisper underneath your breath
I hear your SOS, your SOS
I will send out an army to find you
In the middle of the darkest night
It's true, I will rescue you
It is easy in the middle of a tragedy to say or feel things that are the opposite of the truth. It isn’t that our feelings are wrong – they are just fickle and not a great indicator of what truth is because they react to what we assume is truth in the heat of the moment. Which, at least for me, turns out to be wrong more times than they are right.
So when you are tempted to say that God is absent, or not good, or doesn’t exist – tell yourself, that this dark moment is not a true reflection of what you know to be true in the light. Just wait. And not just wait, but wait with expectancy knowing that the God who has been faithful to you before will be faithful to you again. Because you are His and He cares for you. (If it is hard to think of God as caring, think of how a father responds when his child is calling from another room. If he knows that it isn’t an emergency he takes his time, but if that child lets out a cry from the pit of his stomach after being hurt a good father will jump from the comfortable chair he placed himself in and run to his child without that child ever asking or saying his name. This is our God. When we are hurt, He doesn’t wait around until we acknowledge Him to run to our rescue. Scriptures say that “he is near to the brokenhearted”, not that “He is near when the brokenhearted call out to Him for help”. So tell your weary soul to rest in knowing that He is close to mend what was broken.)
I hope you know how much I am in your corner.
How the ugliness that comes out right now is not a reflection of who you are, but is because you are broken and hurting. I hope you know that despite how everything “feels”, this horrible thing will one day be the thing that makes you more human and safe to someone who really needs a safe place. Because there will be someone. There is always someone. The greatest thing you can do with this pain is to use it to be someone else’s safe place where they can walk the hard road of grief knowing that they are loved despite wrestling with the worst of themselves. Let them wrestle.
And the only path to getting there, to being that whole being who offers comfort and kindness to the hurting, is walking the hard road of grief ourselves. Not turning back. Not getting stuck. Going through it.
There is no other way.
One breath, one step, and one truth at a time.
We can do this.
XOXO Sissy
(There is a lot of background noise in this video and it is super short, but it is the last video we have of my brother recorded on the one day that the intubation tube was taken out. My dad asked if he had anything he wanted to say to everyone and my brother simply stated, “I love you all very much.”)