By God’s grace, I lived through the next few days. I ensured Mike, my mentor, would be with me that first Monday morning. I didn’t want to meet in a crowded, loud, obnoxious restaurant, and all restaurants seemed obnoxious to me. So, I had him over for breakfast at my house. It was the first of many breakfasts I hosted at my house. It seemed safer.
I couldn’t have faced that first week alone. I needed someone to pray over me, be with me, and try to make sense of life because I couldn’t see any sense in it. I felt like a little boy lost in a grocery store, hoping his mom would come in and rescue him. I wanted someone to care for me so badly, but there was no one.
It was good to have Mike there, but, of course, he had to leave. And then I’d be alone again. Alone is a house that made no noise. It was painfully silent. The silence didn’t comfort me or allow me “solitude,” it just reminded me of what I didn’t want to think about.
In some ways, I was in denial. I knew she was dead, and I wasn’t positive it happened. I was ambivalent, pulled between two opposing thoughts. She’s dead, I saw that, but there could have been a mistake somewhere. A mistake I couldn’t rule out. This was “emotional thinking” but it felt real enough. So, I was confused. My brain is trying to digest the worst event in my life. And that black hole kept nipping at my heels, wanting to overcome me. I was fighting just to fight. I didn’t care anymore. I lost the plot.
There are times when I say God is good to me, and I feel it. And sometimes I don’t even care if there is a God, but he’s still good to me. I felt dead. Nothing. I think it’s these dark times when God shines the brightest, although I saw nothing soft or warm at that time. Everything had sharp right angles. He provided a way through it; I can see that now, but it didn’t make sense at the time. His consistent pursuit of me is why I’m here today. The pain was bigger than I was. And the pain overshadowed my view of God. But God was more significant than the pain, I couldn’t feel it.
Later in the day, as I walked around the cemetery and stared at Deb’s new grave, I felt unattached. Deb was my driving force, the person I made all decisions with. I lived, in part, to love her. I wanted to please her. I wanted to enjoy her dreams. To go where she wanted to go. To get what she wanted to get done. Now, nothing mattered. No one would care if I stayed in my basement and watched endless TV. Having no direction in life is, in some ways, a piece of hell.
The sun didn’t shine much, and when it did, it wasn’t very sunny.
I took that following week off work, assuming I needed to. Everyone told me I should “take some time off,” although I wasn’t sure what to do with that time. At home, I just sat there and felt terrible. All I could think about was her. She was so wonderful, so beautiful. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. I loved the snot out of that woman. She was my world. Now, I was alone. Now, I lived in silence.
Relief Options
The process of grief is the process of seeking relief from the pain. I can choose good or bad options: either God’s long-term plan or immediate relief that requires no plan. Good relief builds me up, creates a future for me, involves God, and has purpose. Good relief makes my patience muscle stronger and grows my integrity. Bad options have me running to addictions that have a wide range of names. These include sports, sex, porn, workaholism, music, fantasy, video games, money, or a thousand other terrible options that tear my heart from my soul.
If I want to grieve with hope, God has offered three things to me:
- The Word of God
- The Spirit of God
- The people of God
These three gifts are the most precious gifts God has given me. With the Word of God, I can know the truth. I don’t have to worry if it is twisted to uphold a certain political agenda; it’s just the truth. And if it’s true, it’s stayed the same for the last 10,000 years. With the Spirit of God, I get to pray and grow to know Jesus personally, with all my flaws. And it’s the people of God that surround me and love me. They are broken, but their love for me is sweet. Their prayers for me are real, and their relationship meets a thirst inside me that I didn’t know I had. It’s not possible to do better than these three.
But, if I wanted immediate relief, I’d preoccupy my senses with fun and end up numbing my heart (so it wouldn’t get in the way of my fun). Grief is painful, and unless I can see the end of that pain, relief can become more attractive than God and his standards. Drugs work, at least for a few hours, but tend to destroy me and all my relationships long-term. Alcohol numbs and can be fun, at least for a little while, until the following morning. These options quickly enslave me in a cage of my desires, never satisfying me, always making me want more. Eventually, these prisons will draw me into the darkness where I am willing to break any standard of morals to get my next fix. I hear these stories almost every day in prison. We are our own worst enemies. That’s easy to see in others; it’s painful to see in myself.
God will allow me to destroy my life and the lives of my loved ones if I choose. I’m my choice. But he is offering me life. Instead, he bent my knee to him and surrendered this struggle to him. He wants me to lay it at the cross where they will evaporate. And it’s at that cross that I find hope from my misguided attempts to extinguish my pain.
Children
The process of managing my mental health is the process of managing my stress. In many ways, life boils down to managing stress. How I seek relief defines my character. It’s a spiritual battle of trusting God’s will versus finding a convenient god. If I seek relief through drugs/alcohol, my moral life will go into the tubes. As the addiction grows in my attempt to seek relief, my priorities change.
Our culture tends to specialize in escaping reality. It’s ingrained in our national psyche: “I have the right to make myself happy anyway I choose.” It’s perfectly acceptable (in our culture) to bend moral standards to fit my desires (as if they are of higher value than my character). We justify our sin by calling in “our right” and claiming the victim’s statement of “my wife died,” as if somehow this justifies our sin.
This battle is real. I want relief. I struggle to hold to my integrity. At times, even when I know it’s wrong, I’m willing to suspend my morals. I just want relief. It’s incredible how quickly I can go from praising God to smothering my faith. I am a wicked man with a wicked heart. Thank God for his everlasting mercy.
I have alcoholism in my family and know the dark path I could be swallowed in. I am a few steps from my destruction once I get into a pattern of drinking regularly. Just because I’m not an alcoholic doesn’t mean I don’t have the capacity inside me to fall into that hole.
I want, no, I “need,” relief. Don’t you understand? My wife is dead. My life is dead. My hope is dead. My future is gone. What could be more justifiable than hiding in a bottle? Who could blame me?
But I remember my children. I can’t go down that path. I couldn’t do that to them. Deb would never allow me to go down that path. Now, I have to remember my children. I am a dad. I am the moral leader in my family, even if I don’t want to be. I need to think of them. That may be why I have so many pictures of my family around me. It’s easy to remember there are eyes on me when I see my family. Life begins to make sense with them.
As these thoughts bump against one another when I go for walks, I realize something about myself. I can have peace in my despair. The despair is terrible; it’s something I have no control over, but knowing God is with me makes the darkness less dark, and the pain gets small.
God is good. And he’s good to me (two different things). He wants to do something in my life. How could I turn my back on him?
I lay in bed and considered the choice of running away from pain. But how? How could I blow off my Jesus after he’s been with me all my life?
The Black Hole
Where did it come from? What’s inside it? Was it there all my life, and I somehow overlooked it? Did the black hole have a different name when I was in my forties? Am I just noticing it for the first time? It’s shrouded in mystery, which makes it even more frightening. I’m pretty sure it’s a place of fear and hopelessness. It must be from Satan.
The black hole is the terrible car accident you want to see but are afraid to look at it, fearing dead bodies on the ground. And if you see a body on the ground, you want to look more (but you don’t want to look). Your curiosity bubbles up, “What happened? Did anyone get hurt? How bad did they get hurt?” I think Hollywood plays on this godless fascination with its horror movies, making us want to see our worst fears on screen. This is not a healthy fascination.
To be clear, I’m not psychotic. I can’t see the black hole; I can only feel it’s presence. I can sense it. And what’s more important, I’m terrified of it. I fear if I fall into it, I will never come back. I wonder if my fear of it increases its power over me.
The hole is a place of dark hopelessness, filled with worst-case scenarios spinning unresolved day after day.
I have weaknesses. Everyone has them. But right now, I’m a composite of all my weaknesses, like one of those collages I made in fourth grade, lots of pictures pasted on one another on a piece of poster board.
I feel like there is an alien inside me, like the black hole (which is inside me and only me), which is a terrible entity that will swallow me up if I don’t do things correctly. And I don’t know how to do this correctly. Still, the fear of falling in it lingers in the back of my mind, like a shameful memory that keeps popping up to make me feel bad about myself.
“O Lord, I’m so weak right now. Help me make sense of this. Help me feel whole again.”
One of my failings is that I’m afraid to cry. It’s something I’ve struggled with all my life. Crying feels like losing control. As morbid as it may seem, crying is like vomiting to me. And I hate to vomit. I don’t want to lose what little control I have over my life. Retching and I have a long history of not speaking to one another. I hate anything coming out of my mouth. Going in my mouth is good; coming out is bad. I go through mind tricks to keep from, as some college buddies have called it, “driving the porcelain bus.”
I don’t see myself as a controlling person, but then again, most controlling people don’t see themselves as controlling. I always thought controlling people like to tell others what to do. I don’t want to tell anyone what to do because I’m so often wrong. My philosophy is: “You take care of yourself, I have enough on my plate.” I make some exceptions for my children, who may be walking in the wrong direction, but I feel this falls under the “fatherdom” category. I don’t want to micro-manage anyone.
But there is no control in that black hole—none. And that adds to my fear. I’m powerless in it. I don’t know how deep it is. I’m afraid if I “lose it,” I’ll never recover.
I’m on the English side of life. When Princess Diana died, English journalists said that the Queen “did a good job” of mourning her daughter-in-law. What did they mean? She didn’t cry. She didn’t lose control. Being emotionally detached from emotions is considered “good” in English culture. I fear I fall under this “crying is a bad” umbrella and experience ” emotion phobia.”
When I hear other widowers tell their stories, they cry, and I just sit there like a lump on a log. Their wives died four years ago; mine died three weeks ago, and I’m not emotional at all. Why aren’t I crying? What’s wrong with me? Sometimes, I feel like I’m talking about a friend whose wife died, not mine. Why am I so detached? Have I become a monster? What’s wrong with me? Is this a sin I need to confess? Will this change in time?
I ask myself terrible questions like, “Am I dishonoring Deb by not crying more? Isn’t it my job to cry every time I talk about her? Maybe I didn’t love her enough. Maybe my heart turned to stone when she died. Why are these guys crying and I’m not?”
Wow, am I a mess? I’m a mess wrapped in a towel of misery. If there is any time in my life I need Jesus, it’s now. “Lord, help me, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I should be.”