The student organizers of Agape Latte at Marymount invited me to give their first talk of the year on Tuesday, August 28, 2018. There are slight differences between the prepared text reproduced here and the audio recording.
(Audio only)
Just over five years ago, my life looked a lot different than it does now. I had just finished the third year of my PhD program at Purdue. I had completed all my required coursework, passed my comprehensive exams, and gotten approval from my committee for my dissertation plan. I was ready to hunker down and write. My dissertation felt like a pot just about to boil. I was so excited.
For those three years of coursework, my family had been living in two places. The kids and I were renting an Urban Cottage in Lafayette, Indiana, about two hours south of my husband Adam’s job, which was about one hour south of our Rambling Farmhouse in rural Michigan. Adam lived alone in Michigan and worked in his office Sunday night through Wednesday afternoon and lived in Lafayette with us and worked from Urban Cottage Wednesday evening through Sunday afternoon.
The plan for my fourth year was that we would switch. The kids would stay at Rambling Farmhouse with Adam full time, and I would take on the weekly commute so that I could be on campus to teach and to write in solitude.
Then, in an instant, everything changed.
Just over five years ago, on June 26th, 2013, Adam died. He was killed in a car accident while driving back from a lunch meeting with potential new clients. The accident was caused by an unlicensed teenage driver who ran a stop sign at high speed, struck his car, and spun him into oncoming traffic. She was joyriding with her boyfriend in her parents’ car, and the consequences of her choices rippled outward from the five lives involved in the accident that day to touch hundreds. Adam died instantly. The teenager, her boyfriend, and the two people in the third car involved walked away with minor physical injuries.
The police found the children and me at Rambling Farmhouse in the middle of the afternoon, and my first reaction to law enforcement officers on my doorstep was annoyance. We had just moved back from Lafayette—me just for the summer, and Adam and the kids for good—and the house was full of boxes.
That annoyance quickly gave way to a robotic pragmatism born of shock and preparedness. Adam’s death had been my worst fear. Suddenly, I was living my phobia come true.
The first summer that I lived at Rambling Farmhouse, Adam had to make a short business trip, and I remember being struck by how isolated I was. “If I were to scream, no one would hear me,” I realized, a sobering thought for a girl who grew up in a compact neighborhood where I could watch the neighbor’s television from my bedroom window.
I worried incessantly every time Adam traveled, which was often. We developed rituals. We said “I love you” every morning and every night, even when we didn’t like each other. He called or sent a text as soon as he arrived at his destination and right before he left to come home. Still, I worried. Adam finally said, “So what if I do die? It’s going to happen someday. What will you do?”
We talked about the answer to that question a lot. We purchased life insurance, we invested money appropriately for people our age. We discussed that we both would donate organs and tissues if we could, that we both would be cremated, that he wanted his funeral to be a celebration of the life that he had lived. And I followed the plan. I called our most beloveds and asked them to call everyone else. With Adam’s best friend, I planned a funeral for the Sunday after the Wednesday he died. With my best friend, I unpacked all the boxes to make space for mourners to visit. With my mom, I found all the household bills and made sure they had been paid that month. I made an appointment with our financial planner. And then I ran out of plan.
I ran out of plan, and I felt like I was thinking through thick fog, like I didn’t have access to all of my brain. Even the simplest decisions were hard, and the hard ones were Sisyphean. My beloveds were amazing. They listened while I talked through choices slowly, and, though they offered their opinions and pointed out things I didn’t see, they let me make decisions, but those decisions were hard won. My thought process felt like driving at night in a heavy snowstorm when the snowflakes prevent the headlights from illuminating the road. I could only see as far as the fog. My brain built thoughts so very slowly, and I was powerless to do anything but wait for them to form. Sometimes, I could feel the idea that would fill the gap, but I couldn’t assemble the words. I would stare at a problem, and the fog would just get thicker, and I would have to walk away.
I remember having read somewhere that sometimes a coma is the body’s way of making space for physical healing to happen. I realized the fog was like that, a protective blanket creating space for psychological healing. Despite my occasional frustration at my own plodding thoughts, I embraced the fog and tried to be patient.
Eventually, the fog began to dissipate, but this was a mixed blessing because then I found myself in a wilderness. It felt like I was surrounded by sharp rocks and thorn bushes, like I was standing on a barren landscape without trees or flowers or birds. The wilderness was dark and grey, and the path wasn’t clear. I felt simultaneously hemmed in and exposed.
The death of a highly significant person does not only cause you to feel grief for the end of one human life. It brings on a whole spectrum of secondary griefs. There is the loss of income or household labor and therefore a loss of financial security, the loss of support and partnership, the loss of dreams for the future. Most significant for me was the loss of my identity. Adam and I married in our early twenties and we had become adults together. After twelve years of marriage, I did not know how to be me without him as a partner. Adam used to reflect me back to me, so that I saw myself in his eyes. He was the reality check on the person I thought I was presenting to the world. He could separate the insecurities in my head from the flaws visible to others. He could see the potential that I doubted. The entire landscape of my life was altered in the instant that he died.
It was incredibly lonely. My people were nearby, my beloveds were unwavering in their support, but they could not enter my wilderness, they could not protect me from the rocks and the thorns, they could not tell me where the path was. They could only support me from the outside. And they each had their own grief, too.
There were times when everything I did caused pain. One day, folding laundry ended with sobbing because Adam’s things were mixed in with mine and the children’s. It felt like with every step I tried to take in this wilderness, I was tripping over rocks and falling onto thorns.
In times of tragedy and grief, it is not uncommon for people to blame God. To ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people. To be angry that God did not intervene to prevent the tragedy. Some of Adam’s friends and family expereinced this sort of crisis of faith and they couldn’t understand how I could keep going to church and praying and singing hymns after God had let our lives be ripped apart. I think the frustration reflected in those feelings is valid, but I think they misrepresent the way that God works in the world. God does not promise that our lives will be easy. A commitment to love God and to follow Jesus is not a protection from harm and tragedy. There is no “get out of tragedy free” card for the faithful. God is, however, there with us in the midst of our suffering. God grieves the brokenness of the world alongside us. God met me where I was in my pain and confusion and loss of identity.
My darkness, first the fog and then the wilderness full of rocks and thorns, lasted for months. In that time, though, there were also moments of crystal clear insight, resolutions I knew to be right and necessary. These came like bright beacons from a lighthouse, cutting through the fog to illuminate the path. At no other time in my life have I heard the still small voice of God so clearly. Have you ever seen the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail? You know the way the clouds open up, and God’s booming voice speaks to the human beings? Sometimes it felt like that, but with more support and less snark. In midst of confusion and indecision and flailing about in the darkness, suddenly I would just know.
One of those resolutions was the choice not to return to Purdue for my fourth year. I knew that what the children and I needed was to be at Rambling Farmhouse together and focused only on each other. I could not manage two households on my own, and I could not go back to teaching that fall. I was angry at being forced to make this choice, but I knew without a doubt that it was the only right one. Another moment of lighthouse-like insight was related to the teenage driver who caused the accident. Many of Adam’s beloveds experienced grief as anger directed toward her, and they wanted me to punish her and her family in court. They wanted me to insist that she be tried as an adult. They wanted me to sue the family for wrongful death in civil court. I did neither of those things. I participated in the restorative justice of the juvenile court system in that part of Michigan, and I assured the family that they would not be seeing me in civil court. These moments, moments of conviction in a confusing wilderness, these were the moments I knew that God was with me.
God is actually there all the time. God did not show up for me in the aftermath of tragedy in my life. God had been there all along. I just hadn’t been paying attention. I became aware of God’s presence in my wilderness because I stopped paying attention to everything else.
Not only was that fog insulating me from my own pain, it was isolating me from the world. After the funeral, it felt like we dropped out of time for a couple of weeks. The accident had made regional news, and no one who knew us did not know about it. All of our social obligations evaporated, and we retreated into ourselves. That isolation from the world means space for God.
My children and I, however, are not called to the life of hermits. Eventually we reentered the world, and I took up my research in absentia. We sold Rambling Farmhouse and moved to Arlington, and I finished my dissertation one year later than planned. And in all the noise of these obligations, God’s still small voice is less and less apparent, those lighthouse-like insights don’t stand out against the brightness of the world. The most important thing that grief has taught me is that God is always there.
So, why did I tell you all of this? Honestly, talking about it in public always makes me feel a little bit narcissistic, like I’m using all of you as my therapist. But really, I think we don’t talk enough about death and grief in twenty-first-century American culture. We’ve built an impenetrable wall around death and what happens after and given it over to the funeral industry. We’ve medicated away the feelings that come with this kind of profound change. And so, talking about it is my modest, one-woman act of resistance. When I read the prompt in Gustavo’s e-mail, that I should talk about “what has God done in your life,” the still small voice said, “you have to tell them about the voice of God in the wilderness.” And I knew it to be true.
Before I conclude, I’d like to note that not all hardest times are the same. Certainly other people have hardest times that are more complex than mine, but I think that hardest times can’t actually be compared across lives. I can know intellectually that my refugee neighbors have lost whole sections of their family tree and are now separated from everything they knew, and I can recognize that this is a more complex grief than my husband’s death while my community remained intact, but that experience is still the most awful thing that has ever happened to me.
I sincerely hope that this kind of grief experience—the loss of a person whose presence in your life shaped who you were, the loss of your soul mate, your best friend, your partner, your parent, your child—I hope that this kind of grief is a long way off for each of you. But someday, I’m sorry to say, it will be your turn. Someday, you’ll be grieving a loss that strips you of your identity and shakes the foundations on which you’ve built your life. Someday it will be you. I fervently pray that when that happens, your people rally around you like my people did. I hope they hold space for you to learn to see your wilderness and to begin to find your way through. And I hope that you can see God there, always with you.
You will also experience griefs that has nothing to do with death, and these may take you by surprise. Just over five years ago, I did not know that my life was going to change. That time, change was sudden and unexpected. These days, I find myself at the edge of radical change again, though for different reasons. My temporary contract with Marymount ends with graduation at the end of this academic year, and I don’t know what comes next. The academic job market in the humanities is brutal. There are at least a hundred applicants for every position in my field of study. It is more than likely that I will not find another teaching job in higher ed when this one ends.
There are non-academic jobs that I am qualified for and might even enjoy doing. I’ve even applied for some of them. The more I contemplate this possibility, the more I realize that not being a professor any longer would be as great a change to my identity as not being a wife any longer was. And I’m trying to make space in my busy modern life where the noise of the world can fade away so that I might hear that still small voice again.