Grief and That Thing We Call "Closure"

What follows is the epilogue from my book How to Help a Grieving Friend, A Candid Guide for Those Who Care. The book was written to provide help to friends who are wondering how to give meaningful comfort to hurting hearts. It is a result of my personal experience with profound loss--and my personal experience apologizing to people for the stupid things I said and did when they were hurting and before I'd personally experienced profound loss.The working title of the book was "Lifestyles of the Well  Meaning But Clueless." It really was. 

     The older I get, the more I realize that the subject of grief is much bigger than the subject of death and dying. We humans grieve many kinds of losses in our lives--the loss of lifelong dreams, the loss of youth, the loss of a marriage ... experiencing loss and grief is part of life. I've become more tenderhearted as the years have rolled on, but I still have a lot to learn about how to help my grieving friends.  

In Closing ... A Word About Closure

My oldest son's best friend was killed when the boys were four years old. His mother cried when my son graduated from high school over a dozen years later. She has two healthy, wonderful children and a good life. But grief for the loss of her firstborn son returns with the milestones she will never share with him. It would not surprise me at all if she sheds a tear when my first son's son is born--grief for the grandchildren she will not have from that beloved son, no less beloved because he left us when he was only four years old. No other child can fill the Thomas-sized hole in that mother's heart.

     My best friend died in 1996. In 2003, when I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the toilet in what used to be her bathroom (and was now my bathroom because I had married her widowed husband), I cried. The last time I scrubbed this toilet, my best friend was dying in the other room. I wish she were here. I wish she hadn't died. I wish ...

     My new husband found me crying and understood. We laughed, then, about how convoluted life can be and how, if I still had my best friend Celest, there would be more than just a a slight problem with my having this new husband. I have a new best friend. But she is not Celest. The Celest-sized hole in my life remains.

     I am remarried. Life is good. But my love for my new husband has neither replaced nor diminished my love for Robert Thomas Whitson. I wish he could be here to talk late at night with his sons, to teach Sunday School classes, to give the elders' reports that always included humor and made the congregation laugh, to cheer on the Huskers football team. When our first grandchild is born, I know I will cry because I am crying even now as I write this. God has given me new love for a new mate. But it is new love. The old love remains. No one will ever fill the Robert-sized hole in my life.

     Jesus promises His followers that His burdens are light, and I have been in grief long enough to experience His lightening of my load. But it is a lightening, not a removal.The emotions of loss are still there just on the other side of today. Sometimes those emotions punch open the door between the past and the present, march into my life, and remind me of what I have lost.

     We do not close the door on people who have changed our lives forever. We celebrate what they have meant to us, and we look forward to seeing them again. And sometimes, even decades later, we cry.

     So in the closing of this book on grief, I want to say that closure, in the way most people mean it, does not exist. We gain new friends, we have more children, we remarry. The pain of loss becomes less, and we learn to live around it. But we still carry it. Sometimes it returns in full force, and we find ourselves crying, years after everyone around us assumes we have accomplished what our culture calls closure. This is painful, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it is part of being human. It is part of loving and being loved. 

     And yes, it is worth it.

--Stephanie Grace Whitson

 

to read the rest of How to Help a Grieving Friend: http://tinyurl.com/l4trqpo

Christian Fiction with Native American Characters

A reader who had just discovered my Dakota Moons series (pictured at right),

asked me about other Christian fiction with Native American characters, and so I asked some of my

writing friends for titles. Here's what I've compiled:

Burning Sky by Lori Benton

Walks Alone by Sandi Rog

Beneath a Navajo Moon by Lisa Carter

A Whisper of Peace by Kim Vogel Sawyer

Abraham's Well by Sharon Foster

Series by Marol Schalesky:

     Only the Wind Remembers

     Cry Freedom

     Freedom's Shadow

Series by Laura Frantz:

     The Frontiersman's Daughter

     Courting Morrow Little

     The Colonel's Lady

Tender Ties Series by Jane Kirkpatrick

     A Name of Her Own

     Every Fixed Star

     Hold Tight the Thread

Also by Jane Kirkpatrick

     Love to Water My Soul

     Sweetness to the Soul

Prairie Winds Series by Stephanie Grace Whitson

     Walks the Fire

     Soaring Eagle

     Red Bird

Dakota Moons Series by Stephanie Grace Whitson

     Valley of the Shadow

     Edge of the Wilderness

     Heart of the Sandhills

ENJOY!

     

A Promise Kept

I don't often review a book on a blog, but I've just finished Robin Lee Hatcher's newest, and I can't just move on through my day without doing everything I can to tell others about it. Yes. I'm that enthusiastic about it. The book captured me from the first page. Of course it has all the elements that would draw a reader in--a flawed heroine in a difficult place, a glimpse at past lives through discoveries in an attic, a gorgeous setting, and a darling dog. What's not to like?

The thing is, this story begins with broken threads and weaves them into one of those tapestries that shows God doing some of His best work--taking brokenness and making it whole--but doing it in a way that no one would expect. Hatcher's characters know heartbreak. They know what it's like to pray and feel like the words got no further than the ceiling. They know what it's like to just go through the motions of everyday life ... waiting for something--anything--to happen. In other words, they know real life. Hatcher doesn't dodge the tough questions, but in the end she gives a message we all need, which is that God is sometimes doing His very best work when we think He's stopped paying attention.

Read it. You won't be disappointed. In fact, you'll probably put it on the "to be re-read" pile.

http://www.christianbook.com/a-promise-kept/9781401687656/pd/687656?item_code=WW&netp_id=1156338&event=ESRCG&view=details

For Young Mothers Everywhere

I remember being a young Mom who felt like she wasn't accomplishing enough when "all" she did was hang out with her children. When the house was a mess and supper was sandwiches and the laundry wasn't folded and and and ... I remember. On those days, I would sometimes go back my "Favorite Quotes" binder to remind myself that what the world called success and how I had prayerfully decided to define that term would always be at odds with one another.
Here's one of those reminders (a gift from my mother-in-law).

I Took His Hand and Followed

Author unknown

My dishes went unwashed today,

            I didn’t make the bed.

            I took his hand and followed

            Where his eager footsteps led.

            Oh, yes, we went adventuring,

            My little son and I …

            Exploring all the great outdoors

            Beneath the summer sky.

            We waded in a crystal stream,

            We wandered through a wood.

            My kitchen wasn’t swept today,

            But life was gay and good.

            We found a cool, sun-dappled glade

            And now my small son knows

            How Mother Bunny hides her nest,

            Where jack-in-the-pulpit grows.

            We watched a robin feed her young,

            We climbed a sunlit hill …

            Saw cloud-sheep scamper through the sky,

            We plucked a daffodil.

            That my house was neglected,

            That I didn’t brush the stairs,

            In twenty years, no one on earth

            Will know, or even care.

            But that I’ve helped my little boy

            To noble manhood grow,

            In twenty years, the whole wide world

            May look and see and know.

A Poem for those who Grieve

Cocoons

by Stephanie Grace Whitson

A lifeless shell (to earthly eyes)

Can open, freeing its surprise

To dance on a garden leaf.

Gossamer wings gently hesitate

To fly. And then, as wind abates,

It flutters toward the sky.

Out of sight, it yet exists,

And, dancing on, its wings persist

To unseen garden leaves.

No less alive, though out of sight,

It testifies to each man’s plight;

A common destiny.

For each of us must leave behind

A lifeless shell. And earthly-minded

Men can think, “Life’s done.”

It isn’t true. Although unseen,

We flutter on to gardens green

With joy, alive in Christ.

Alive in Christ, whose dead cocoon,

Though buried in a garden tomb

Arose to give new life.

Here’s hope for all in facing death:

A lifeless shell (to earthly eyes)

Precedes the birth of butterflies.

9/11

I was at home alone. My husband had died the previous February, and so learning to be alone was part of my new job description. Not one to watch much television, I had gotten in the habit of having it on "in the background" ... just so there'd be noise in the house. So now I share the collective memory. Those images live alongside my memory of the day JFK died.

But I have one more personal memory that lingers of 9/11. My daughter crying for all those people "who have to feel like we do ... because they lost their Daddy."

Contemplating and remembering today has turned my thoughts toward heaven, thanks in part to author friend Randy Alcorn's morning e-mail, which shared a list of quotes on heaven.

My husband once told someone who was expressing sympathy at the concept of his "terminal" condition, "You're terminal too, you know. It's just that I'm more aware of it than you." He'd already turned his heart toward heaven.

So today, in remembrance, I thought I'd do the same. The verse below was one of my mother's favorites. She died in 1996, and when my husband entered hospice care early in 2001, our nurse shared it with me. Both versions said "author unknown."

If you are grieving a loss, today, I hope it brings you comfort.

I am standing on the shore. A ship at my side spreads her sail to the breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and I stand and watch until she hangs like a speck of cloud where the sea and sky meet. Then, someone at my side says, "There! She's gone."

Gone where? Gone from my sight is all. She is still as large in mast, hull, and spar as she was when she left my side. Just as able to bear her load to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

Just at the moment when someone at my side says, "There! She's gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

... And that is dying.

I'll post another poem tomorrow, one I wrote back in the 1980s.

Proverbs 31 and a Perpetual Sense of Failure

If you are like me, there are days when you read Proverbs 31 with a sinking

sensation. "I don't do that." "I need to do better at that." "I don't do that." "I've never done that." "Okay ... I try that, but I'm not very good at it." 

Isn't it just like the Enemy of our Souls to take one of the most beautiful tributes ever written and use it to create a perpetual sense of failure?

Some friends and I have been discussing the woman who inspired Proverbs 31 (you can read about her here: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031&version=AMP

To be quite honest, there are days when we are tempted not to like her very much. She's just too perfect.

                                                                                                               

The phrase that always gets me first is "rising before dawn." I've never been able to establish that supposedly perfect and ideal routine. I cannot count the number of times I have promised myself that I will get up at 5:00 a.m., read the Bible, pray, work out, and have a piping hot breakfast ready for the family when they awaken.

I fail. Failed. Have failed. Will fail. Failure. That's me. 

It seems to me that the Enemy too often takes my honest belief that the Bible is literal truth and twists it into something that, instead of producing good fruit, produces an unholy sense of abject failure ... a temptation to "just give up, already, you're never going to get a gold star."

I've spent the last few years trying to find a balance in my faith walk that doesn't leave me feeling like a perpetual failure God is about to whack over the head. 

I think this passage provided a lyrical way of saying a good woman works hard. If I don't "rise before dawn," it doesn't necessarily mean I'm doomed to be a failure in God's eyes (and honestly I have felt that way). 

I think it's okay to envision the actual woman who inspired Proverbs 31 being just as amazed as I am when I read about her today. I envision tears rolling down her cheeks as she looks at her son, the author, and says ... "Really? You see me that way?" Sort of the ancient version of me when I read one of "those" Mother's Day cards. You know the ones I mean.

Now ... don't take this too far. I'm NOT saying I give up and I won't even strive for the mark. God's Word is powerful and it accomplishes what it was meant to accomplish. Proverbs 31 is the ideal. I should strive for the mark. But sometimes I should also give myself a break, already. A perpetual sense of failure isn't what it's about.