Permission Granted

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross staked her claim in the counseling world with her work entitled “Of Death and Dying.” (Yep, that’s a title that will bring the masses….)

The book describes the 5 stages of grief, and I remember studying it in college as I majored in Youth Ministry (technically, I majored in Bible spec. Youth Ministry, but that’s semantics for you), and thinking it was pure genius. The book (http://www.ekrfoundation.org/five-stages-of-grief/) does an incredible job of breaking down the grieving process and of destroying that ridiculous notion that we should all just “suck it up and move on.” It let us all know that YES, you can cry! You can get angry! You can take all of the time that you need! And your grief is as unique as you are—there’s no order, and that’s OKAY!!!! 

My professors at the time had no idea how important all of this information would become to me throughout my life…how I clung to what I learned, and how I so desperately needed to hear that what I was feeling in the wake of my daughter’s death was my own version of normal.

The world tells us we need to do whatever we need to do, to feel better quickly.

Sometimes, our families and friends do the same…they want the “old us” back again, but for me, that person died for a very long time. I know I’m not alone in that…Part (if not all) of my heart went to a very dark, sad place for years, and it took years for all of me to emerge.

And when I finally came out of that dark place, I was someone else…someone who was still me, but who had lost their “shiny.” I went from being like newly-polished metal into being more like a hammered shield—still me, still the same materials, but with an entirely different outlook in every possible way.

It wasn’t an easy journey, and sometimes, it still isn’t. 

This fall marks what would be my daughter’s 10^th birthday, and to be honest, I’m struggling with it. It’s not like I’m going psycho about it; it’s just a painful realization, and I don’t think I should have to rationalize my feelings any further. The labyrinth of grief is so multi-faceted and unique that I am positive that I am right where I should be for my process, and I would like to thank Ms. Kubler-Ross for teaching me that I have that permission.

I have permission to grieve, and though the knowledge of that may have come from Ms. Kubler-Ross, the grace to do so comes directly from Jesus…from His grace, and His compassion, and from His ability to carry it all. I have His permission to mourn what was and what was not (within reason), and I have His consent to burden Him with my heart. What a wonderful, glorious, awful, thankless thing for Him to carry…what a huge thing for Him to trade, and what a beautiful exchange! I give him sorrow, I share my grievances, my anger, my broken hopes and dreams, my FEARS…He gives me new hope, new joy, new goals, new adventures. He restores, He soothes, and He LOVES. He gives us permission to express all of our massive emotions, and He gives us FREEDOM FROM THEM.

I’ve described my own “stages of grief” in past blogs, but I’m reminded of my own words: Grief is like a body of water. Some days, you’re drowning in an ocean of sorrow, you’re Jack and/or Rose floating on a piece of wood in an overwhelming lost cause…you can’t breathe, you can’t move, and you can’t function.

Some days, you’re swimming in a river, keeping your head up, but only on the surface. The slightest tug/pull/reminder, and BOOM, you’re back in the ocean again…

Some days, it’s a creek, and you walk through the clear water, and it’s up to your knees, and you can handle it, and you can even see some of the beauty in it…

Some days, it’s a puddle that you step in and jump over, impressed that it didn’t trip you up, and you keep walking.

Some days, it’s a raindrop that falls on your face…you hold the memory in your hand for a minute, catch your breath, and you keep going…

Until out of nowhere, you trip, and there you are, back in the river, or the creek, or the puddle, or sometimes, the ocean again…and you start the process over, and as time goes on, you navigate the waters more efficiently, and with more grace, than ever before.

It’s a constant process.

I feel like that as the years have gone by, I learn to predict “the markers.” I know certain things will get to me (like her 10^th birthday, or dresses with flamingos on them, or seeing my niece that was born 2 days before my Hannah died) to various degrees, so I can prepare myself. Some things still catch me off-guard, and that’s okay.  

One of the best things I’ve learned is how to gracefully (seriously!) remove myself from situations and conversations that affect me. I have learned how to stand up for myself when necessary in this process, and when to take a deep breath and extend the grace of realizing that people have the “best of intentions, and the worst of executions” (I should trademark that). People who haven’t been through deep loss are at a loss for what to do or say, but they sure try; sometimes, people who HAVE been through deep loss say things that are dumber/more hurtful than those who haven’t (been there, done that, stuck my foot in my mouth HARD-CORE)! We are humans, we are unique, and we have big hearts and small brains. What really and truly matters is that we LOVE the person who’s been going through grief, and that we remember to put them first. We have a responsibility as human beings, and as Christians, to bypass drama and simply love. Be there for the grieving when the audience/drama has left. Be the meal one month into the process for the family that is so fractured. Be the hug on a busy Sunday morning when worship has rubbed a stinging, healing balm into a shredded heart.  Be the quiet place for the mind that cannot make itself turn off the frantic internal screams of pain.

Grief is such a difficult, unpredictable process, and we all live it out in different ways. The Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) are worked out individually at times; sometimes, they gang up on you; they play out in unexpected ways. I think the key thing to remember is that they “play out.” 

If you’ve just gone through a deep loss, first of all, my heart aches for you. It doesn’t take much for me to tap back into what those early days felt like, and I will never forget what I went through (publicly and privately). Secondly, please remember that anyone that tells you to “get better,” or “get back into the swing of things,” or, “it is what it is,” or “just go back to work and stay busy, you’ll feel better!”—The person who says those things is not your friend, and is not a kind of counsel that you need right now. They may think they’re helping you, but they’re not. Grief is a pushy beast; she WILL be part of your life, and the more you try to stifle her, the more she will come out in other areas. Your health will suffer; your mental health will definitely suffer. Your entire world will suffer until you let yourself be free. You have to give Grief her time, even though the horrible world keeps right on spinning.

You have to give yourself permission to grieve.

Your family and friends need to give you permission to grieve, even in the midst of their own grief (assuming you have gone through this loss together), and they need your permission to grieve in their own way.

You have to be honest with God; He knows how you feel, even if you don’t even know yourself….even if you don’t want to talk to Him, or if all you want to do is scream at Him (or scream at Him and beat your steering wheel into a pulp—hey, at least I didn’t hit a person).

Please give yourself the gift of time. Let yourself feel; don’t wall yourself off. Know that you’re going to have good days and you’re going to have awful days. As time goes on, you’ll have more good than bad; but at first, those bad days are going to be more prevalent. It’s okay to have a bad day!!!!

Finally, please know that time really does heal. It doesn’t make it all go away—that’s a stupid, stupid myth.  In my case, I lost my daughter…she was literally a part of my body, and she was gone. I have scars, physically and spiritually…I will never be the same, and I embrace that (although I used to feel that I should be completely healed, now I know that my scars—seen and unseen—are more like a road map to redemption. They’re markers of healing, and of undeniable change). Time heals, but you will always have a marker in your heart, and it alters you.

And that’s okay.

Ten years is a long, long time…My grief is nothing like what it was, but there is a tenderness there that I will not apologize for. There are things to note in this season that I will probably ponder in my heart more than usual…questions that will come up, and debates I will resurrect with Jesus. The healing process is lifelong, I believe, but if we’re willing, it’s lifelong progress…

We have permission to grieve…permission to question…permission to hurt…We have permission granted by the very Savior Who willingly carries our every emotion and burden, and Who gives us the greatest gift of all:  Answered Hope.

Day 5: A Time You Thought About Ending Your Own Life...

Whoa-it just got real. This blog challenge seems to run from the mundane to the very, very serious. When I read that title, it was like cold water had just been tossed on me. I could give you the answers that you want to hear--"Oh, I'd never!"--but I made a promise to be honest in what I wrote.

A lot of people don't know that suicide is very personal to me--I lost my step-grandfather and my aunt to it. There is much to both stories that is not for blogging; some things need to remain private, even for me. The bottom line is that both losses were very painful for my family to go through, and are not something we talk about very often. I loved my aunt--she was vibrant and funny, and far too young. I don't understand her reasonings, but anyone could deduce that her heart was hurting. Her loss was particularly devastating to me, especially as I was still a teenager at the time...

I've always looked at suicide as a coward's way out. You kill yourself, you don't have to face the consequences. You don't have to look at your mother's face, you don't have to clean up the mess you've made. You're scott-free, and that's not fair. You've run away from reality--the reality that you are loved, that life is hard, and that it will--it DOES--get better. It does, even when you're in the deepest valley. That sounds really, really cliche, unless it's coming from someone who's looked hell in the face. Well, I have, and if I can say it gets better, then darn it, you have to believe that it does.

I can remember wanting to run into traffic as a small child. I can remember thinking that the world would be better if I wasn't around. I felt like an outcast, even at home, because my personality is so different from most people and family that I knew. I was the result of an unplanned pregnancy, and I never fully realized that my mother DIDN'T regret having me. It took the birth and death of my first child for me to have that conversation with my mom--I spent my entire youth thinking that she'd wished she'd had that abortion. That's pretty brutal, and the enemy had a field day with me. Please don't get me wrong--my mother loves me-she always has. But the smallest things can be used as a weapon, and that wound its way into my psyche like a parasite.

I've never really been afraid to die; my heart problems were initially diagnosed when I was 18 (mild arrhythmia, attributed to stress), and I'm about as accident-prone as they come. I'm more afraid of missing out on something, though, and I think that curiosity/nosiness has kept me from taking my own life on many occasions. Looking back, I've probably struggled with depression since I was 15...the trigger was most likely the death of my grandmother, who was my mostest-favoritest person in the whole, wide world. Her death had a huge impact on my life, as she was the one person who ALWAYS made me feel loved...Grandma Myers was my refuge, and when she died, I was anchor-less, even though I was raised in the church and knew that God was supposed to be my hiding place.

The thoughts to end my own life were (obviously) the hardest to combat after my daughter died. I've never made a serious attempt, although I did have at least one occasion where I pushed the limits. Definitely not my finest point. There is no "set time" when I thought about ending my own life. Truth be told, I think that my personal tendencies in that direction are the strongest when my hormones are out of whack. So, about once a month, I have to fight thoughts of driving my car into a cliff. It's been that way for as long as I can remember. I can recognize it; I know the counter-measures, and I know the consequences. It's not a thought-trail that I allow myself to go down, by the grace of God, but it is an issue that I have to be careful with.

Life is beautiful. It took 3 years after the loss of my daughter, for me to remember how it felt to laugh...for me to come back to  reality as a mother who had lost her child. I spent two years in the deepest valley of despair that you could imagine, and suicidal thoughts were a constant battle. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is more of a battlefield...and death casts a long, long shadow. When the sun finally began to creep out again, it shone on a whole, new world that I'm still getting used to.  Hannah would be turning 7 this October, in the first grade, and probably covering the world in glitter. My son just turned 6 months old....my little guy with his giant, Charlie Brown head and his beautiful green eyes brings me more joy than I ever thought possible. Just seeing his picture on my desk can bring me to tears of happiness. I didn't think I'd ever know such joy again. If I could go back to me as a teenager...as a new mother (with Hannah)...as a devastated woman who had no child to hold, and a broken heart...If I could go back and see myself sitting in that bathtub with my bottle of wine and my bottle of meds, waiting to see which would knock me out first...
If I could go back, and show myself a picture of my beautiful boy...
Or let myself know about the lives that Hannah's story has touched...
Or let myself know that the road is long, but so totally worth taking...
Or let myself know that yes, there is a husband for you, and he is amazing...
Or let myself know that the man I married was the strongest, bravest person I would ever meet, and that he would love me through my darkness...
If I could go back to those times of utter despair, and just let myself know that yes, it's a fact: God is there. He is here. He never lets me go. He will ALWAYS be there, even when your head is bowed, and you can't raise your face to see the sun...
Life becomes beautiful again through our weakness, because it's in His strength that we keep walking. It's in His strength that we finally look up and notice that the clouds have passed, and we can go on...broken, fixed, healed but scarred...we can not only survive our darkness; we can revolutionize the world with our testimonies.
So, minus my monthly hormonal swings and occasional thoughts (and my brief-but-treated round with postpartum depression), it's been a long, long time since I toyed with "what if I did?" But I have, and I think I have to be honest about that. Being a Christian doesn't mean you don't think about it--in fact, I think you just might think about it more, because Heaven sounds so much better than earth. But you can't win people to Christ if you're dead, and that's what we're supposed to do while we're here. We stay. We live, we breathe, we share our testimonies, and we raise the next generation to honor the Lord. Suicide is selfish and cowardly. We're called to be brave and strong, and to seek Him for the resources to do so.

But when you just can't....when you really, truly feel like you can't go on, even in His strength, there is hope. There is help. Just because you're a Christian, doesn't mean that you have to fight alone. And it doesn't mean that sometimes, our chemicals/hormones/neurotransmitters don't get a little messed up! So if you need or are on medication for depression or imbalances, don't think for a second that there's anything wrong with that. If you personally are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please click here:
It's a link to a list of hotlines that are for Broken Believers, and they can help. At my darkest times, I sought counseling from Dr. Mary Jo Schneller at South County Christian Counseling; you can reach her at (314) 729-0481, or online at www.scccchome.com.  There is hope, and there is healing. And life is a wonderful, beautiful gift! :)