When my mother died last winter, I discovered the gift of grief.
In the span of a single year, my mother went from being a vibrant, constant presence in my life – through phone calls, text messages, and, when we could, in-person visits – to declining rapid improvement of his mental and physical health.
The first sign, for me, was an unexpected call at 5 a.m. Mom had many skills, but being active at 5 a.m. wasn’t one of them. Calls at 10 a.m., midday or late at night were much more frequent. I responded immediately, thinking something must be urgent.
“Mom, is everything okay?” I asked, pretending to have been up for hours while clearing the cobwebs from my mind and the frog from my throat.
“Oh, I’m just calling to see how you’re doing,” she said, “but I hope I’m not interrupting dinner for you guys.”
Maybe she’s just confused. Maybe she had a bad night’s sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to believe that this was what my sister, Laura, had kindly warned me about. My sister and her husband had recently moved back to Illinois to live near my parents. And in recent weeks, I had been told that Mom had forgotten how to write a check. Well, it’s not that crazy. Who still writes checks? I rationalized at the time.
“Mom, you know it’s five in the morning, right?” I offered.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” You know, I keep getting my schedules mixed up, what with daylight saving time and everything,” she replied, even though we were far from a time change. After talking a little more, we ended the call. When I told my sister about it, she told me that these kinds of incidents were becoming more and more common.
A few days later, I received another call from Mom, this time weirder. She insisted that there were men in her house, that my father had let them in, and that she had called the police. My heart sank as a realization began to set in: I think we are losing her.
We clung to one last, desperate possibility: It could be Mom’s iron deficiency, a problem she had struggled with for much of her life. We hoped against hope that with a few doctor visits and medical adjustments, Mom could return to normal. My sister dutifully begged, cajoled, and drove her to doctors and specialists, keeping me informed each time.
My father quit his job so he could care for Mom as she slowly lost her memory, until we learned the final, difficult news: her MRI results revealed significant dementia.
Dementia remains a mystery, even to the most learned minds. In the season since his diagnosis, we spoke with experts and friends who had endured this journey with their own loved ones. There was no way to predict how Mom’s health would evolve. Would she, like the sweet wife of a friend in my small group, slowly decline over nearly a decade? Or would she, like my late mother-in-law, decline rapidly?
When you lose a loved one to dementia, you cry twice: once when they lose their mind, and again when they lose their life.
Early grief is like a weight on the soul. I can’t explain the heaviness you feel realizing that the one who gave birth to you, raised you, comforted you when you came home crushed after a bad day at school – the one who stayed behind ‘gap and applauded your basketball games, which I said everything you wrote was amazing even if it wasn’t; the one who introduced you to Jesus – walks away.
This was a particularly difficult season, since I had moved 18 hours to Fort Worth after living near them for almost 30 years. Much of the burden of care fell on my sister, although we went through difficult decisions together with my brother, also local. Still, I was wracked with guilt: Was it a mistake not to stay close to my parents? Had I chosen my career and called on my loving mother? Of course, my friends and family reassured me that it wasn’t true, but I still struggled with these thoughts.
Another recognition also struck me: this is it. In this life, I will never truly know Mom as she was. there is no going back. Eschatologically, of course, we have the blessed hope of the Resurrection, where Christ will breathe new life into his people, both in our bodies and in our souls. But I would always mourn the years of his physical absence and the missed moments with my children and their grandmother – the loss of phone calls and text messages.
One day at a faculty meeting we sang “It Is Well with My Soul” and I couldn’t help but cry freely. The hymns take me back to my childhood, attending our little Baptist church three times a week, dressed in our Sunday best, singing lyrics I barely understood at the time. But those words sank deep into my heart over the years and bubbled up now, like water drawn from a deep well.
I’ve never been a big cryer. My emotions are generally more visceral. I get angry, I ruminate, and then I’m done with it. But the sudden decline in my mother’s health and subsequent death revealed new reservoirs of pain that made my tears flow more frequently.
Yet I have come to believe that grief is a gift, a human response given by God to help fill the space where our loved one once stood – a cushion against the deadly blows of a cursed and a sign of hope that fuels our desire. for the world to come.
I am repeatedly comforted by the humanity of Jesus as he examined the rotting corpse of his friend Lazarus. John 11 seems to indicate that Jesus was both full of sadness and full of rage.
Rage is righteous, because we are told that death is the work of the enemy, the last enemy that Jesus defeated as he endured the cross and rose from the tomb. It is right and right to mourn the loss of loved ones. To blithely move past this anger at death is to diminish the way God values human life. Pretending that it’s no big deal when we lose a loved one is to minimize Satan’s ugly finger and lessen the impact of sin.
Too often, as Kate Shellnutt said wrote for CT, we are not angry enough about death – because “while dying is a fact of life, it is also the enemy we are called to resist.”
Mom quickly declined. We had to make difficult decisions about memory care centers and insurance coverage, and how to help him live out his final days with dignity – choices that our society makes crueler and darker than ever. they shouldn’t be. My faithful father visited me every day, as did my sister, as they both gently guided Mom towards the end. I made as many calls as I could with Mom so I could hear her voice and she could talk to my kids. Luckily, she still recognized all of our names and faces.
We took a special trip last Thanksgiving, to celebrate with Mom at her retirement home. His memory was fuzzy, barely able to recall very recent details but elaborating in almost perfect detail scenes from our childhood and his own. A medical expert I spoke with said that our brain is like a cabinet storing memories in files organized by date, and that dementia is like a storm that scrambles these files, scattering random bits of memory into disarray. and without order.
As fall gave way to winter, so did Mom. His body withered until it was nothing but skin and bones. I took one last trip with my oldest daughter, Grace, and was surprised when I walked into her room. I could barely recognize Mom. But we still gathered together and sang hymns. We comforted her. I leaned over and told her how much I loved her, that she had been a good mother. She could barely speak but she was able to whisper, “I love you.” I’m proud of you.”
I cried. Mom had always told me she was proud of me, and as a husband of 45 years and father of four, I always needed to hear those words. Hearing them at the end of his life was a treasure I will never forget.
A day later, Mom entered eternity, her body temporarily giving in to death. Thus began my second stage of grief – where I remain to this day.
The famous words of Horatio Spafford’s hymn have meant a lot to me over the past year: “when sorrows roll like the waves of the sea.” We know that Spafford wrote this while on a ship, lamenting the tragic and sudden death of his family by shipwreck. And yet he describes how grief often visits us like a tide that washes onto the shore of our hearts before leaving. There is no escaping grief and, like Amanda Held Opelt writingit’s not something that can be outsourced.
I’ve felt this often since Mom passed away – sometimes during worship and often when a familiar hymn brings back the grief. I recently attended a conference where the worship team played “Jesus Paid it All.” I trembled as I sang the words: “I hear the Savior say: / ‘Your strength is indeed small, / Child of weakness, watch and pray, / Find in me your all in all.’ »
The loss of my mother made me recognize again that I am a child of weakness. My strength is indeed small. The loss of a loved one removes our veneer of self-confidence, our masks of self-sufficiency. CS Lewis said that the death of a loved one is like an amputation. So until we meet again in this heavenly city, I am a motherless son, walking with a limp and relying on Jesus.
Paul told the Thessalonians that we are indeed in mourning, but we are not in mourning without hope. I find the waves of grief to be a welcome gift that helps me say, with hope, that even this is well with my soul.
Daniel Darling is the director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of several books, including The Characters of Christmas, the Revolution of Dignity and the Agents of Grace.
