The Amputation of Grief
Amputees report that after they lose an arm or a leg, they have a “phantom limb” sensation – feeling as if their amputated limb was still there though obviously unable to use it. That’s how Mom’s death felt to me: like I had an amputation. She died, very suddenly and unexpectedly, in her sleep at the age of 68. It was just a few weeks after our first daughter was born and I remember saying that I was so grateful that Mom was in such good health so that my daughter could grow up with her. And then she was gone. She and that dream died.
I was a young and very busy pastor and church planter at the time, and I felt the pressure to get through the grief and back on my feet. I needed all my limbs for the job and found myself frustrated that grief had sapped my energy and drive. “When will my arm grow back? I need my arm back”. That was my main question those days.
So I set out to get through grief as quickly as possible. I read all the books and followed all the steps. We even had a tree planted in the Missouri Botanical Garden in her honor. “That will help me get through it,” I remember saying. And yet the energy sapping grief remained. So in a last ditch desperate attempt to “get back to normal”, I booked a flight to Colorado to climb a mountain my mom and I had climbed years before. “I need my arm back,” after all.
On the trail up the mountain, I came upon a mother grouse with her baby in the middle of the path. I stopped and watched them pecking around for food, and as I took one step toward them, the mother grouse got startled and flew away, leaving the baby by himself. And it suddenly hit me. She was really gone. Mom was gone. And I was left without her. And I sat down right in the middle of the trail and wept and wept and wept.
Last week we got a letter in the mail from the Botanical Garden telling us that the tree we planted in honor of Mom had died along with the tag that hung from it that we had written in those days after her death. Everything in me wanted to shut out that news. “It was just a tree. All trees die. Just move along, nothing to see here.” But then I remembered the grouse. And I let myself sit on that trail again. And I wept. Again.
There have been other losses in between the death of my mom and the death of her tree. Other amputations…of people and dreams and friendships and vocational hopes, all along the trail of my life. Maybe you have some of those losses too. If so, here are a few things I’ve learned about grief:
1. It’s utterly messy and unpredictable. There is no predictable plan to follow on how to get through it because…
2. Your arm will not grow back. That was the reality I had to face on that trail that day. The right question wasn’t: “When will my arm grow back?” The right question was: “How do I live now with an amputated arm.”
3. The pain will ebb and flow but there’s no way around it. I’m really good at distracting myself or numbing the pain – sometimes in unhealthy ways – because I hate grief. Hate it. Hate the way it feels and I want all my arms! But we need to sit in it sometimes. And just feel the truth of the loss and weep because…
4. It’s there that we receive God’s grace. On that path that day and on the subsequent days of loss, my tears brought a flow of that grace. As my friend, Joshua Burdette said, “God bottled those tears and calls them sacred.” We worship a weeping God (John 11) and it’s through those tears that we often feel Him weeping with us, knowing that we are not alone after all. He is with us all along the trail.
5. And He promises they won’t last forever. The tag that hung from Mom’s tree had 1 Corinthians 15:42 printed on it: “What is sown is perishable; what is raised in imperishable.” In other words, grief of death or loss does not have the last word. God does. And even though the path is sometimes brutally hard, full of amputations, on the last day we shall be raised and have all our arms again. The Apostle Paul goes on to tell us a truth that stands with us and over us in our loss: “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’”
If you are in a place of grief and loss, I’m here to talk about it if you want. Fellow amputee that you are.
Peace, Jay