A Chronicle of Grief E-Book

Mel Lawrenz

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 170

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award "Eva not breathing. Pray." That text message was Mel Lawrenz's entry into the harsh reality of losing his thirty-year-old daughter. Things would never be the same. How could he and his family cope with this devastating loss? In this narrative of grief, Pastor Mel Lawrenz chronicles how his family struggled to survive the sudden death of their beloved daughter. In raw, vivid episodes, he describes the immediacy of the pain and the uncertainty of what comes next. In the agony of traumatic loss, Lawrenz apprehends the realities of love and life and offers insights on how to navigate our life priorities before or after tragedy hits. You are not alone. You too can find a way forward.

Leseprobe

MEL LAWRENZ

A CHRONICLEof GRIEF

Finding Life After Traumatic Loss

This book is dedicated to those who have suffered devastating loss and are

Contents

1TRAUMA

8LOSS

2HORRIFIC

9CHERISHING

3GONE

10CHRISTMAS

4PLODDING

11RADIANCE

5PLACES

12MYSTERY

6TODAY

13BROKEN

7SEASONS

14SAVING

Epilogue

Appendix 1Practical Matters of Grieving

Appendix 2Matters of Faith

Notes

Resources

Praise for A Chronicle of Grief

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

1

TRAUMA

I was in an unpleasant discussion at work when my cell phone sounded that simple and unobtrusive “ding” that meant a text message had arrived. A few minutes later I slipped the phone out of my pocket and read: “Eva not breathing. Pray.”

What I was looking at made no sense. I stared at the screen. My brain locked up. I felt a wave of dread wash over my body. And then adrenaline. I ducked into an empty room and used my phone to call my wife and learned that my thirty-year-old daughter was in an ambulance being whisked away to a hospital, paramedics applying resuscitation.

This is a survival story.

The worst thing that happened in my early life was the death of my father when I was four. Then, when I was a father of a high school age son who was in a near-fatal auto accident—that was the worst.

But then came the unthinkable worst, on that early June day our beautiful daughter collapsed and died, and all the tortures that followed. Life became even more complicated in the months that followed when I had a serious accident, and then my mother died. But the worst, the worst of the worst, was losing our daughter. The fourteen-month window when all this happened seemed too much to bear.

My first thought on that June day was that we had entered a harsh new reality. I had no say in this reality. The ground had dropped away directly in front of where I was standing, and our daughter had disappeared.

How can this be? What do we do now? What will happen to us?

Since that time I constantly think about the people around me who have gone through searing loss. For some, the death of a loved one; for others, divorce, being betrayed, having a dreadful disease, losing a career, being assaulted or abused, or any other experience that is overwhelming. There is so much we have to survive, and hopefully do better than just survive. How we need other people who care. How we need to be able to access our faith in God, however that works out.

I look around now and I see people everywhere who are suffering some kind of excruciating loss, and they are having a hard time figuring out what to do.

Facing traumatic loss is about keeping our sanity and taking care of those who depend on us, all the while deciding how we are going to face this new unwelcome reality. I learned at so many points that I had to look straight at the loss or I could not find comfort. On the other hand, surviving also meant using distractions and diversions in order to interrupt ascending panic, especially in those early days. We do what we have to do. It’s not wrong if we have to leave the lights or television on in order to sleep. It’s okay to interrupt obsessive thoughts. It’s important to be honest with people who want to know how we are doing.

To unload the burden, I wrote a few paragraphs each month and sent them to friends or posted them on social media. I was surprised that so many people said this writing was helpful to them. Some said it helped them know they are normal in their own reactions to a terrible loss. Others found practical help. And still others just wanted to know there is hope. No one survives on their own.

In that first year I found that writing something, about once a month, and sharing it with others somewhat lessened the weight that was smashing me into the ground. I wrote just to get some of the pain off my chest. This was not an exercise in self-reflection or the discipline of journaling. It was about survival. Taking the edge off the pain. Crying out. Proclaiming love through confessing devastation. A search for meaning, I suppose.

A lot of people responded to me and my family by suffering with us, which is, of course, the literal meaning of sympathy. This is the height of compassion, when someone goes beyond feeling sorry, in some mysterious way suffering with us.

I kept thinking about all the people slain by the pain of traumatic loss who may not know what to do to get through the most difficult days. Who do not find many sympathetic voices around them or who feel some external necessity to feel or behave a certain way. When the dam broke one day two years later and I started writing this book, I was thinking about all of us who know that life goes on but don’t understand how when life itself seems cut off.

I hope there is something here to help if you or a loved one are plunged into survival mode. The chapters that follow include the experiences and some epiphanies that happened in the first three years after our loss—particularly the first twelve months. I recognize that three years into our experience is not a long way, and that we will know so much more five years and ten years from now. But I wanted to write while these experiences were fresh in my mind.

Traumatic loss has a way of slowing time down. Now, three years later, time moves along at a more or less normal pace. But six months after our loss, each week felt like a month. In the early weeks some days felt like they would drag on forever. In the first days time seemed suspended.

For context, here is just a bit about me and my family. Ingrid and I were married when we were quite young, but it was twelve years before we had our first child, Eva. Our son, Christopher, came along two years later. Ingrid and I both experienced hardship and loss as kids, and so when she became a social worker and a professional counselor and I, a pastor, we felt fairly prepared to deal with the core issues of struggles in life. We both have loved doing our work, though helping people with major life problems is difficult when our own family faces one personal challenge after another. We dealt with health issues Ingrid had and a near-fatal auto accident Christopher came through, but when Eva died we came to a crossroads. Would we survive or not?

I had cowritten two books on grief and trauma years ago, and I suppose that helped us when we had to face the unspeakable loss of our beautiful daughter. But teaching about traumatic loss is one thing, getting slain in a day of trauma, another.

Traumatic loss is a technical term. Roughly speaking, it means experiencing something that is unexpected, jarring, and devastating, which causes injury with long-term effects. Soldiers experience trauma. If our house burns to the ground, we might experience trauma. Someone who is mugged or raped or kidnapped certainly has gone through trauma. People react differently to traumatic events. When, in an ordinary day, we have breakfast with a family member and that evening their body is at the morgue, we have gone through trauma. Our lives are fundamentally changed when we go through trauma, and some people would say they have never recovered. But it is possible to survive. To go on living. The word itself, survive, means to continue to live or exist, especially in spite of hardship or danger.

This book could be difficult reading. In the months that followed our daughter’s death, I knew I had to be brutally honest. That to receive full comfort, I had to gaze straight ahead at the pain. I had a strong desire to find the solid ground of faith in God beneath my feet, but I knew that voicing mindless spiritual clichés would be like blowing bubbles. Platitudes fall flat. There are things we can do to survive, and more. We need to find those ways.

So, here it is.

2

HORRIFIC

Survival, in those early days and weeks, was primal and physical. We did what we needed to do to get through each day and each hour of each day.

Every minute of the three-hour drive from Brookfield, Wisconsin, to the hospital in Sturgeon Bay was torture. I tried to shut my brain off and step out of time and just keep the car on the road. It was just me and the sound of tires on the road.

When I rushed out of the house I knew that Eva was in an ambulance two hundred miles away being driven to a hospital while emergency workers tried to revive her. My wife, Ingrid, was with her. She had collapsed at about noon in the house in Door County where she and my wife had been visiting Ingrid’s sister for a week. She had been ill for a few days. In recent years Eva had developed complicated autoimmune medical issues that had put her into a weakened medical condition. Before those years she had been an extraordinarily bright and lively young woman. Engaging and inspiring. A blonde beauty and a curious intellectual. She brought exuberance into any room she was in. But the illness had dulled her in recent years. It sapped her energy and made her withdrawn.

We had sought every diagnostic and treatment plan available. Many specialists. Test after test. Attempted treatments. But her health was still poor. Not terminal, except that a simple infection could race through her body. The next thing we knew, she was in an ambulance, unconscious and unresponsive.

By the time I got to the hospital after 150 miles of driving, she was gone. They could not revive her. My wife and I entered the darkened, silent room in the emergency wing where the medical examiner drew back the sheet covering her head.

This can’t be.

At that moment I knew we had entered a different world with a harsh new reality. I knew that one cold, bare task was before us or else we would be destroyed: to accept this reality.

It is an absolute reality. Every other hardship and challenge I had faced in life before—and there were many—held at least the slight possibility of a solution. But death is an absolute dividing line. Despite the reality of heaven and future redemption, at the moment a loved one breathes their last breath, a divide opens up like the ground splitting between us. Some people are stunned into numbness, and none of it seems real. Not me. I could see it all in its starkness. No breath, no movement, no sound.

Done. Real. Irreversible.

A harsh new reality. A division. A frightening void. Absolute sentence.

No fixing. No negotiating. No delay.

Gone.

An hour later I called my eighty-six-year-old mother and choked out words I found incomprehensible to be saying, “Mom . . . Eva died today.” After I explained a bit, her first words, shaky and tentative, were, “What are we going to do?” In the face of danger our instincts drive us to action. We feel we must do something. Our instincts are to try to solve the crisis which is more massive than we could have imagined. But there is nothing to do. At least, nothing that will make those lungs expand and eyes open.

Within minutes we are, of course, forced to act. We have to answer the many questions of the medical examiner, to tell the funeral home director what we want to be done with transporting the body, to contact family and friends. We had to drive back home the long three hours where our son waited. He was overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. Later that night I had to answer a battery of questions on the phone from the organ donation people. Was I actually answering unending health-history questions on this day?

Please, let it stop.

The three of us slept on furniture in our living room that night, lights on, television on in the background, which was better than dreadful silence. I felt a chill in the house.

The next day pastors came to the house. One started heading back from Wyoming to get back in time to lead the music at the funeral. Action required. We had to pick a date, select songs, write an obituary. Ingrid jumped into it, and all of her instincts were right.

The quiet hours were the hardest, when we were alone with our thoughts. When my mind approached the harsh reality, I tried to face it, but fear and panic surged through my body without warning. What is going to happen? What are we going to do? What has actually happened here? How can it be possible that we are not able to hug her and comfort her as we did for the years she was ill? How can everything so abruptly and severely end?

The whole thing seemed absurd. Evil and absurd.

I had a sense of dread and foreboding. It was like a grizzly bear had descended on our family camp and dragged one member away, and the same monster was still afoot and anyone else in the family could get dragged away at any moment. The dread was unexpected and overwhelming. Death seemed like a power in itself. A wicked, gory monster. This should not have happened. Thirty years old is too young. Who will be next?

The day after, I dragged Eva’s mattress out of her bedroom and down the stairs: thump, thump, thump. Then wrestled it through the door and out to the road where, just a few minutes later, the trash collectors arrived and threw it in their truck. I watched. I felt a hatred for that bed. Eva’s autoimmune disease had caused her to spend far too many days in that bed. It had collapsed in the middle. It had to go—immediately. When the trash collectors drove away I felt just a little bit cleansed. It was necessary to do more than stare at the void. I had to step into it. But it was a battle. A battle with open air.

Her bedroom now contradicted the harsh new reality. A half-drunk can of soda. A trash can with food wrappers. Clothes scattered here and there. A book lying open. The smell of her perfume in the air. These were signs of life. So, how can she not be alive? Is this just a nightmare? How can everything change in a day? I gathered the trash and put away the clothes and stopped every few minutes to force my lungs to breathe. At a certain point I felt overwhelmed and left the room, debating in my mind whether or not to shut the door. Do we look into the hole, or wall it off? The answer was different every day.

In those early days surviving meant getting through not just every day but every hour and every minute of every hour.

That meant cutting off escalating panic. I talked to a couple of friends who are mental health professionals about whether it is okay to use any mental trick to shut down spiraling fear. This fear was a monster. Yes, of course that’s okay, they told me. In those early days and weeks that was not avoiding grieving. There would be months of grieving ahead. This was surviving. It felt good to hear that everything we were going through was normal.

So I watched cable news in order to stay present-focused, feeling embarrassed that I had to resort to something so undignified, but it helped a little. It was important, in the face of the harsh new reality, to focus on other realities of life—the big, broad world where there were dramatic things happening—most of it bad, some of it good—but it was real. It was now.

We are alive. We need to get through this. We need each other.

Sometimes the panic would subside only if I stared at different physical objects in the room. That table is real. This chair I’m sitting in is springy. My feet are in contact with the ground. I’ll count the panels in the ceiling. There, good, I can breathe again.

We just do what we have to do. Pacing could take the edge off. Sometimes calling out Eva’s name and telling her we loved her—over and over again, with sobbing—was painful, but it was the right thing to do. Ingrid and I loved her from the moment she was conceived. We had waited more than ten years for that to happen. There is no way we would allow death to stop us from loving her now. I would look up and shout out “we love you,” and I knew it mattered.

Does all this seem like a family who has lost their faith? What about heaven? What about the assurance that Eva had a place in that great mystery that is the presence of God? I didn’t worry then that my reactions contradicted my faith, and I do not worry about it now. Just look at the honesty of the psalms. God allows us to weep and to shout. These are the surest sign of love, God’s greatest gift.

Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint;

heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony.

My soul is in deep anguish.

How long, LORD, how long? . . .

I am worn out from my groaning.

All night long I flood my bed with weeping

and drench my couch with tears.

My eyes grow weak with sorrow. (Psalm 6:2-3, 6-7)

To fully feel the stabbing pain of loss is not a lack of faith. It is the affirmation of deep love when it is cruelly interrupted.

The faith dimension of our loss would be worked out in many ways in the months that followed. We would gain the assurances that faith in God offers—along with the pain. It is not either-or. Crying out to God in lament is no less an act of worship than praising God.

Right from the start I knew that if we did not honestly admit the horror of the harsh reality of the loss of our daughter, we would delay the blessings of reassurance and faith.

Faith begins with poverty.

3

GONE

We all experience loss and grief differently. For some, the worst thing that has happened to them is getting fired from a favorite job. For others, it is going through a divorce, being sexually assaulted, being in active combat, getting a dire medical diagnosis. Any such experience may require us to adopt survival skills while we try to get through the immediate loss and then the journey that follows.

When someone very close to us dies, we find ourselves staring at this stark reality: our loved one is gone. Just gone. And there is no bringing them back. That final breath is final. We can’t call another medical specialist. We can’t have a final conversation because the last one we had was the last one we will ever have, and we can’t choose to have it in a different place or on a different topic. We know that now the major work of our life is going to be to accept this new harsh reality. We simply have no choice.

We fall back on our faith, if we have faith, and maybe in those early days we have some comfort, but maybe we cannot access that comfort just yet. We are staring at the edge of the cliff, eyes darting back and forth to find our loved one who was standing there just a minute ago. But she is gone. And we keep wondering how that could possibly be.