For Mary Langford, the doorbell changed everything.
“That sound, and the news that followed it, shattered the day’s plans and the predictability of our lives into a thousand painful pieces which would never be put back together exactly as they had been.”
The person who rang it told her that her son was dead.
“There in that dining room, which had been such a happy place a few minutes earlier, I turned to the One to Whom I have turned in every need of life,” she wrote in her book, “That Nothing Be Wasted.”
“I asked Him to help us to honor Him as we walked this unknown path,” Langford wrote of her family — her husband, Don, who was a surgeon at a mission hospital in Hong Kong, and their children, including a daughter in nursing school in Alabama. “My husband had the same reaction. He came and took me in his arms and said, ‘Now we will see what the Lord does. Now we will prove the truth of what we have believed and taught for so many years.’”
When you lose someone, you start a long, difficult journey with God, clinging to His faithfulness, said Anne Lawton, a licensed professional counselor with Pathways Professional Counseling.
“Grief takes time,” she said. “There are no numbers or time frames. It is not a short process. Expect for it to take as long as you need.”
Langford wrote that in the early stages of her grief, she felt a continual physical ache.
“I felt almost all the time as if I were carrying a bowl full to the brim with tears, trying very hard not to spill any,” she explained. “Every emotion led to the emotion surrounding my loss. Even laughter would change midway into a sob.”
But, she said, she knew it would not always be that way.
“I was not on a dead-end street, but in a tunnel. It was a dark tunnel, and I was uncertain how long it was, but I knew there was unseen light at the other end,” Langford wrote.
“In the meantime, I looked for something to hold onto in the darkness.”
Lawton said what you choose to hold onto and what you do with your feelings of shock, anger, loneliness and depression can be helpful or detrimental in the short run and the long run.
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Reach out to those grieving
Author Philip Yancey says he feels really helpless around people in pain.
“Really, I feel guilty … there is no way I can span the gulf between us to penetrate their suffering. I can only watch. Anything I attempt to say seems weak and stiff, as if I’d memorized the lines for a school play.”
It’s a feeling that often keeps people from saying or doing anything at all, said Anne Lawton, licensed professional counselor with Pathways Professional Counseling. “Many people feel that there’s nothing you can say. And that part is true — there are not many words that will provide comfort.”
But avoiding them isn’t the answer, Lawton said. Be there. Sit with them. Mourn with them. Don’t avoid them.
But don’t be insensitive either, said Gloria Horsley, an international grief expert, in the Huffington Post. Several comments that people commonly make after a death do nothing but put a person’s feelings down and make the pain worse, including:
- “You can marry again,” or “be glad you have other children.” People are not replaceable, Horsley said. “Our loved ones are unique and fill a special place in our lives.”
- “You must move on.” This comment is often ill timed, she said. “People move and change when they are ready.”
- “They had a good life.” “My sorrow is not about their ‘good life.’ It is about how I will construct a new life without them,” Horsley said.
Instead, try actions, such as:
- Show up. It’s your presence that’s important, Lawton said. “Just being with them, sitting with them and listening to them — that’s what’s important. You don’t have to say anything,” she said.
Horsley agreed, noting that you don’t have to try to be profound. “Just showing up and sitting with grievers is profound.”
- Do a kindness. Mow the lawn, walk the dogs or take the kids to the movies, Horsley said.
Lawton adds that sending letters, meals, gifts and Scripture may be well-received, too.
- Ask how they are really feeling. “Don’t ask this question unless you are willing to take some time to listen,” Horsley said. “You feel dropped when people ask you to dig deep and then look at their watch.”
Lawton said it’s important not only to reach out but to stay connected with those who grieve.
“There tends to be a great deal of support in the days surrounding the death but not so much in the weeks and months and anniversaries that follow,” she said. “An email, phone call or text message just to let them know you are there and remembering them can be very helpful.” (TAB)
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Facing emotions properly can help long-term healing
“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, no right or wrong feeling.”
But keeping those feelings inside can be detrimental to long-term recovery, said Anne Lawton, a licensed professional counselor with Pathways Professional Counseling.
“Internalizing sadness can turn it into anger and bitterness,” she said, suggesting several ways people who are grieving the loss of a loved one can externalize their feelings in a healthy way.
1. Journal.
Make a list of favorite memories shared with that person, Lawton said.
“You can write, ‘I’m feeling sad or mad,’ or ‘Here’s what’s on my mind today,’” she said. “Even if it’s just five minutes a day, it can be helpful in getting the feelings on the outside.”
For Mary Langford, writing poems and letters to her son who’d passed away (see story, page 8) “served as a release.”
2. Talk.
Find trusted friends and family to talk with and share memories. Community grief support groups can also be helpful, Lawton said.
“Being in a room of people going through a similar situation can be powerful in a way that counseling or talking with a friend cannot,” she said.
3. Pray and read Scripture.
Facing grief can bring a variety of responses to God, Lawton said. Sometimes people question God, and sometimes they have anger toward Him, for example.
“They may even face a crisis of faith,” she said. “Honesty is important. Taking your questions to God in prayer is important.”
The person grieving may find the questions the psalmist asks to be familiar, she said. It’s helpful to know by reading the Psalms that, even in biblical times, people asked God “why,” she explained.
Joyce Rogers, wife of the late Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church, Cordova, Tenn., wrote in her book “Grace for the Widow” that God’s Word was the only answer to coping with grief. You have to intentionally make time to read it every morning, to “seek Him, asking for His guidance, protection, comfort and strength,” she wrote.
“No, I didn’t feel like praising God, but … I learned to praise God by faith, and one day that faith turned to feeling,” Rogers wrote. “I trusted God before, and I would trust Him now. God’s Word was the basis for my life before, and it would be my foundation now.”
Author Peter Kreeft wrote that the answers to the questions of grief aren’t “something,” but Someone (see story below), and the deep peace and love of that Someone — Jesus — can only be found through a relationship with Him and through knowing His Word.
4. Give yourself grace.
Grief brings a variety of emotions and reactions, according to author C.S. Lewis, who wrote “A Grief Observed” after he lost his wife to cancer.
At times, grief feels like being concussed, he said. “There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.”
Sometimes you want people around, and sometimes you don’t, Langford wrote. Sometimes she “was amazed that life went on,” she wrote. “I had no interest in plans or conversations which would previously have been important to me. Every subject paled into insignificance when compared with the enormity of the fact of [my son’s] death.”
In order to cope for the time being, Lawton said you may need to change some of your habits. If certain family traditions are hard for you at the moment, don’t feel bad about that, she said.
“Starting a different family tradition may be helpful. For instance, if you always had Sunday lunch together with the family, and that time becomes hard, why not switch it to Sunday dessert, or to a different day,” she said.
5. Live again.
At some point, letting go will be a step in the grief journey, wrote H. Norman Wright in “Experiencing Grief.”
“We resist it because we think it means not caring anymore or blocking out the memories of my loved one. Letting go is not the same as not caring,” he wrote. “It doesn’t mean not remembering your loved one. You want to do that.”
It means taking the energy and emotions you had invested in that relationship and investing it somewhere else, Wright wrote.
“It’s shifting your focus,” he wrote. “There’s an insecurity in letting go but a greater security in embracing life.”
It involves clinging to Christ and knowing that He works all for good for those who love Him — even your pain, Langford wrote. “He is Restorer of broken things, and it is His desire that nothing be wasted.”
Peter Kreeft: Answering the question ‘why?’
The answer must be someone, not just something. For the problem (suffering) is about someone (God – why does He … why doesn’t He … ?) rather than just something. To question God’s goodness is not just an intellectual experiment. It is rebellion or tears. It is a little child with tears in its eyes looking up at Daddy and weeping, “Why?” This is not merely the philosophers’ “why?” Not only does it add the emotion of tears but also it is asked in the context of a relationship.
The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). …
The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. Clues are abstract, persons are concrete. Clues are signs; they signify something beyond themselves, something real. …
He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. Love seeks above all intimacy, presence, togetherness. Not happiness. … He did the most important thing and He gave the most important gift: Himself. It is a lover’s gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?” He came, all the way, right into that cry.
In coming into our world He came also into our suffering. He sits beside us in the stalled car in the snowbank. Sometimes He starts the car for us, but even when He doesn’t, He is there. That is the only thing that matters. Who cares about cars and success and miracles and long life when you have God sitting beside you? He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives … Are we broken? He is broken with us. … Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take any more!” He was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” …
But He came into life and death, and He still comes. He is still here. … Love is why He came. It’s all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into His screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of His own people’s hammering hatred, hammering at His heart — why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and He can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.
Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know — we must know — that He is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes His tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but He makes them His. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or His tear-filled ones?
(Source: “Making Sense Out of Suffering” by Peter Kreeft)
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Helpful Resources
Pathways Professional Counseling
A ministry of Alabama Baptist Children’s Homes & Family Ministries
For individual counseling: Pathwaysprofessional.org
Community Grief Support Service
Professional grief counselors, grief support groups and grief education in five counties in and around Birmingham: communitygriefsupport.org
“Experiencing Grief”
A book by H. Norman Wright with in-depth guidance on walking through grief
“That Nothing Be Wasted”
A book by Mary Langford about how she coped with her son’s suicide
“A Grief Observed”
The journals of C.S. Lewis following the death of his wife
“Grace for the Widow”
A book by Joyce Rogers, wife of the late Southern Baptist leader Adrian Rogers, on how she dealt with the loss of her husband
More books and resources
For those going through grief or helping others through grief: centerforloss.com
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