Our son Jeff met us for lunch at one of our favorite little shops close to home. Always an assortment of homemade soups, and creative sandwiches and salads. I was hungry for just something basic and asked for a ham and cheese sandwich, but it also came with a bag of chips. Usually the chips go home with me, so I didn’t particularly have a preference, so I told the friendly worker, “Just surprise me.”
Filling our beverage cups, we sat at a small table, exploring the chrysanthemum in the middle of our small, but comfy, space. A little family chitchat, and our lunches showed up. My “surprise” bag of chips were simply “Classic,” until for some reason, I looked at the expiration date, December 14, still a few months away, but it was also the date that would have been my daughter’s forty-ninth birthday. And suddenly, the world stood still, as the memories descended. It was the proverbial “wave” of grief I have often told others can come unexpectedly, and give a good drenching. The waves do lessen in frequency and intensity as our God of comfort walks with us, but still, they come.
The bag of chips went home with me, and they found a place in my study on top of a stack of books and papers. Soooo many years, and still, soooo many memories.
After loss, the years do pass, and the memories do come. We cannot change the loss. We cannot change the calendar, and some memories we would like to ignore or stuff in the proverbial box, because they bring too much pain, and some memories we long to infuse with life and experience its warmth, its joy, its love, just one more time. Grief does change us, both in how we see ourselves, doing life without the one we have loved, and still love, and also in how we respond to our loss. There are choices involved in all of that, and for a season, we may feel totally incapable of choice. We are just fighting for survival, drenched and drowning in the aftermath of mountainous waves.
Prayerfully, we will at some point recognize the hands and heart of God that reach out to embrace us, and help us find the footing to walk forward in our grief, one day at a time, openly, honestly, vulnerably, dependently. As we make the choice to let God embrace us, He will also give us the capacity to make the thousands of other choices we need to make. And our initial choice to let God embrace us won’t happen just once, but over and over and over. And the waves will still come, lessening in frequency and intensity, but choice will become more intentional, more directed at “God, what do You have for me now??? How does a very broken part of me become the beauty of resurrected ashes?”
Yes, Tonia had her forty-ninth birthday. In Heaven, I’m not sure how they count birthdays, and I’m not sure how long Tonia will be the child who sings His praises, or if she looks more like the adult she would have been here. But I am here, and when the waves come, the emptiness of her presence here is felt, but I am also able to choose to reflect on how God has literally brought beauty to her ashes as she has touched soooo many lives in those soooo many years. And, yes, my tears still come, but my tears say, Thank You, thank You, precious, precious Father.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 40:1-3)
