Pastor’s Corner June 2014

The following was published in our monthly newsletter, the Redeemer Report.

Honest thoughts about the death of a loved one.

Recently Shari took a picture of my daughter sitting on the memorial stone at my father’s grave. It evoked many thoughts.

Death is a rude and awful visitor. Yes, God has removed the ultimate sting of death because of Christ’s resurrection, but this side of heavenly glory, every good memory of a departed person is accompanied by the aching fact of their earthly absence. When people say grief gets better over time, they are unwittingly referring to the way you start forgetting daily interactions and detailed memories that make you miss the person. The truth about the human separation death brings – It only gets better because you forget so much. We comfort each other by saying the departed person is in “a better place”. That is true, but I am not in a better place. After all, grief is about me, not the person who died. Be honest about that. We Christians are often guilty of trite little spiritual cliché’s because we don’t think it’s right to feel so grieved and conflicted about our loved one’s dying so long after. Grieving has a scripturally allotted timeframe, but the constant, dull, pain of missing a loved one carries no such limited time span.

We forget things we should not, we remember things we should forget, and we often skew past events to fit the way we want to remember. The human mind and thinking process is flawed and feeble. It is a kind gift from God that He allows vivid remembrance of some things and it is gracious how He dulls our memory about certain other happenings.

It distresses me regularly that three years after my father’s death, I cannot remember all I want about our life together. The daily sighting of his grave regularly triggers the sad memory of his death (here I mean both his actual death, which I witnessed, and his state of being separated from me). Sometimes I fight off the sadness. Other times I panic a bit and try to voluntarily flood my memory with good thoughts and recollections. I often think of Dad in one of our recliners with the kids on his lap. The other mental image I like to conjure is popping in at his house, catching him taking a rest on the back deck before puttering in the garden some more. When I am doing things with my sons I used to do with Dad, like going to a sporting event, or even just driving places, I think back on such times with Dad. When sadness comes, I do my best to fill my mind with pleasant thoughts of Dad.

One of the hardest parts of bereavement is the fading memory of a person. Yes, I think of the aforementioned good times often enough, but the cost of going to the same recollections over and over is the loss of so many other events.

Here’s what I’ve come to discover in dealing with my father’s death. You don’t get over it. I believe the pain will turn to joy some day, but right now, there’s no joy in being separated. Our life is very different with him gone. The new “normal” for the bereaved, especially a spouse or children, is painstakingly slow.

With each day that passes, it’s harder to remember. For my sons, how much will they remember? How will my daughter, who wasn’t even two when my father died, remember? Can we remember enough so that she can know Pepa? Yes, I do know she’ll meet him some day. That relieves some pain.

Shouldn’t my faith in Christ be transforming my grieving experience? Shouldn’t I be more positive and strive to center my thoughts on the profound Biblical realities about sure eternal life in Christ and my definite reunion with my father in heaven? Well, on the first question – I am quite sure my faith in Christ allows me to be totally honest about my dismal feelings regarding Dad’s death. Death is an aberration to God’s created order. It’s not supposed to feel natural or right. On the second question, it is the profound Biblical reality of an eternal glory that outweighs these temporary trials that safeguards me from utter hopelessness and despair. How can I endure such times? What would I do if I was not sure about the ultimate consummation of things in Christ?  How utterly awful it must be not knowing the living Christ.

These are my honest thoughts, as I look at my daughter sitting in a cemetery – that she doesn’t know is a cemetery – on a finely carved memorial stone – that she can’t read – sitting six feet above the earthly shell of the man she didn’t get to know nearly well enough and who I am fighting not to forget.

In the Lamb,

Pastor Tony Felich