Death and Dying : Thoughts from a Survivor

How do we get over death? When will it ever be normal or okay again?

In 2009, I lost my dad. He was a friend and a parent, always curious about what I was learning and hoping for things in my life that he didn’t get in his own. Because of his love for nature, sports, dogs, good food, and engaged citizenship, I am very much the person that I am today. A beautiful day for me consists of being with friends and family, walking in a beautiful place, and enjoying our backyard with a good cup of coffee. That is exactly how I spent my last birthday in February 2022 and it was such a joy.

At first, I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without my dad. Every single day was hard. Sometimes just making it moment to moment was difficult. The year that he died my husband and I navigated a transition to a new city, unemployment, a nationwide crisis (fallout from 2008 economic crisis), astronomical school loans, a cold and depressing PNW winter, and then a pregnancy. I longed for the person that could both encourage me and the person that could guide me. I felt so sad but I also felt so lost.

I say all of that to illustrate what becomes commonplace or overused: in time, loss does soften but it never really goes away. There is a wrongness to the loss and there always will be; he should not have died in his young fifties from aggressive cancer before meeting his grandchildren, exploring more of the world, or retiring. But eventually, I found my way. He became a light in the sense that I knew what attunement meant because of his life. I found ways to make friends who understood loss and I found ways to speak of this loss as a professional and as a church congregant.

Sometimes things will “flatten” me with tears and deep grief as they did in those early days. It might be the realization that he’s missing something in my life or a song that I haven’t heard since I was a child that he introduced me to. Am I over his death? No. But I am not overwhelmed and distraught like I once was in those early days of 2009. I’m now 37 years old and what I have found most recently is that I wish for his friendship as I grow older. I can imagine us laughing together and I know that cannot happen.

I recommend to my clients to read A Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff. I have found such comfort in reading and re-reading this myself. Perhaps because of the beauty and simplicity of the text, perhaps because it’s all about the bond between a child and a parent who love one another very deeply and unexpectedly have that life together cut short. The author’s child died at the same age that I lost my dad. So while the death was not identical, I felt a sense of parallel process in reading a father’s words when I had no way to discuss this life transition with my own father.

I will conclude with a touching quote from this book. It comforts me in the days just after Easter when I am feeling oddly out of sync with other Christians that I share space with, pondering the resurrection of Jesus with a furrowed brow and a heart that feels broken.

“Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope then it would indeed have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope. Yet Eric is gone, here and now he is gone; now I cannot talk with him, now I cannot see him, now I cannot hug him, now I cannot hear of his plans for the future. That is my sorrow. A friend said “Remember, he’s in good hands.” I was deeply moved. But that reality does not put Eric back in my hands now. That’s my grief. For that grief, what consolation can there be other than having him back?

In our day we have come to see again some dimensions of the Bible overlooked for centuries. We have come to see its affirmation of the goodness of creation. God made us embodied historical creatures and affirmed the goodness of that. We are not to yearn for timeless disembodiment.

But this makes death all the more difficult to live with. When death is no longer seen as release from this miserable materiality into our rightful immateriality, when death is seen rather as the slicing off of what God declared to be, and what all of us feel to be, of great worth, then death is—-well, not friend but enemy. Though I shall indeed recall that death is being covercome, my grief is that death still stalks this world and one day knifed down my Eric.

Nothing fills the void of his absence. He’s not replaceable. We can’t go out and get another just like him.”

I remember the first time I read this. Perhaps some who have not been ruined by deep grief in their life feel afraid to engage in the work of grief. Perhaps this book seems like a downer. But for the griever, it was life. I read that page and set down the book and sighed a sigh of relief, SOMEONE GOT IT.