Hidden Heartache in a Changing Heart
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Hidden heartache has a way of latching itself onto the very atoms of your being, forever becoming a part of you. Sparked by all sorts of sensory impressions, it oozes out, reminding you it is still there, still reforming you. {from Schema of a Soul by Kimberlye Berg}
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I’m finally reading a book I’ve been meaning to get around to. It is the book referenced in the quote above. I was told by my friend who purchased and sent it to me that I would find it to be beautifully and artfully written. She was right. Not that I did not trust my friend, but knowing she is a friend of the author of Schema of a Soul, I thought maybe her assessment of it might be slightly shaped by the fact that they are friends. But I can honestly say that I find it to be every bit what she believed it would be to me… and more.
So many words in it have quietly leaped off the page as I’ve read. I’m already a third of the way through the book just in one night—the first night I picked it up to read since it came in the mail—which is huge for me, since I so rarely create time to read. Being tired and ready for sleep, I’ve found a good place to leave off for the night… right at the end of page 47 which ends with the sentence I quoted above. It’s a good one to drift off to sleep with, especially since half-way up the page {which opens the chapter}, she starts out a new theme on the “aftermath” of her loss, opening with a great quote from C. S. Lewis that speaks so much to where I am right now…
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Not that I am {I think} in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all.’ but ‘So this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’
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I see those words and think well, what came next?… what did he say after that? I mean, as far as I know, he died believing that God is good. I don’t think he ever “went there.” He only talked about the danger or dread of going there.
As for her, I haven’t even read far enough into the chapter to know how this author ties her own words into the quote she so carefully chose to open it with. But I am so curious to see what she’ll say. This writer lost a son. In her book, she writes all that surrounded that loss. Having lost a daughter {though under drastically different circumstances}, I agreed, even before reading, that this might be a good book for me to sit down with. I think I am just about to get into the part in her story that my friend Michele had in mind when she sent me this book. This friend was surely listening when I told her about the parts in dealing with loss that are more difficult than the loss itself, because when she told me about the book, she spoke to that piece of it. I don’t recall her exact words, but she thought I might gain a lot of comfort as I read about the experience of her friend in dealing with grief and how much changes after a loss of a child.
Perhaps the timing of my choosing to read just now is no coincidence, for it is in that very frame of mind that Lewis speaks of above that I find myself. It’s not that loss has made me question if God exists, but rather, just how He works and what I believed of Him… even up to very recently. I realize that it is in pain {which I alluded to a few posts back} beyond or past what we felt when we lost our daughter that I find myself questioning who God is. Mr. B and I often think and talk like Lewis… “so this is what God is really like.” It’s not as though we just started saying it out of the blue or anything. It was gradual. And it started back when all three of us were violently ill with a nasty long-lasting, depleting stomach virus shortly after our baby girl had died. Such a small seed of how could you? it was, that it was barely a recognizable thought. The next of many trials or losses to come along would not reveal itself as “deceive yourself no longer.” And even now, we’re not quite there. Well, I should say, not constantly. Moments of feeling this way do come. But what are you doing to us or with us? only grew… is growing.
Little losses. Then big ones. Most recently, job loss {my husband’s}. Not just job loss, but job confusion. As my counselor pointed out, perhaps this is actually something that will be gain in the long run… the catalyst to a better job, and thus a more structured and stable life. But right now, when we needed settled dust {or thought we did}, the dust is anything but still. And it fills our eyes so that we can not see.
I think that is why my grief is stronger than ever. It’s not even like loss upon loss anymore. It just all feels like one big loss… like life is loss. A chapter or two earlier in this book, the author quoted something else from Lewis. Being an avid fan of his work, I’ve seen this quote before. It resonated with me even long before Anysia came along.
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There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, imprenentrable, irredeemable. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell.
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No… a job or an income are not like a person you can give your heart to or keep it from. But besides the loss of a job—which is still a loss, and one that is more about the hardship it creates at a time like this than it is about heartache—there are other things. I’ve written about some. Recently, it’s tough conversations with people I can either choose to be vulnerable with or lock my heart away from. And where I start to hate grief is in those places where I don’t know if grief is the cause of everything that seems to be falling apart or slipping from my grasp, or if it’s just life… just plain old life that would be happening anyway, even if a baby had not died in my arms.
I guess what I’m saying is, I wonder how this book ends… this book I’m reading about someone else’s unfolding grief. This book of mine—my own words. My own experience. I have wanted to write about grief so many times here. In the beginning, it was easy. The beginning itself was easy—not just writing about it—compared to what it’s like now. After a while, I couldn’t write anything in regards to my grief. Every time I realized I had something to write or the clarity to write it, grief took on an entirely new garb before I could do so.
I’d even write more about this particular stage if I wasn’t sure it would change as quickly or as much as at any other point. Oh… and that “Five Stages of Grief” thing? I’m so relieved to have read somewhere that those stages don’t all play out like some well-constructed theatrical work, because it’s nothing like that… Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. It is not each one unfolding in that order, equally divided among distinct boundaries of a time frame that is your easily recognizable grief. It’s much messier and much more vague than all that. And if {or when} any of those show up, they don’t just show up like the guy at the airport holding the sign up, identifying himself so you know who your ride is. No, these five all blend in with the rest of the crowd. Sometimes you don’t even know which is which. Right now, anger seems to be very prevalent. Sometimes it is in the form of disappointment or pure sadness… or rather, that is how it flows out, though inwardly it’s pretty much just pure anger {or is it pure disappointment coming out like anger??… I don’t know}. But the tricky part is the fact that, often, it doesn’t even feel related to losing my daughter. Often, it’s something entirely different triggering it. And then I’m left reeling… Was that because I’m grieving? Or have I just changed that much? Or has grief, like I once read, not actually changed me, but revealed me? Will I always be angry now?
Or was the delicate balance I achieved to stay standing after the loss of a baby just too delicate to withstand even the smallest new blow? Disappointment in relationships. In a job loss. In myself. Confusion here. Difficulty there.
Basically, I’m just saying it’s messy. I’m tempted to laugh as I read those words, because I know I wrote them once months ago… that grief is messy. Compared to now, I could have run white gloves along the ledges of my heart and mind… my whole world… and they’d come away clean back then. Now?…these days—they are the messy ones, and my once white fingertips reveal a dark gray, thick, dusty film. What must I be breathing in if all this mess is still so stirred and unsettled? I hope this is as messy as it gets. I hope I can eventually just have a healthy respect for grief… neither love nor hate… just respect.
The first quote above speaks of reformation. I always thought of reformation as a positive term. Like the way restoration is positive. But now, in grief, I don’t think reform is necessarily a good thing like restore is. At least not always. Anything can be reformed to worse as much as it is capable of reform for the better. I think that reform is just a fancy word for change. And change, I have.
Like I said, as quickly as I might have come here to write about what grief looked like, it would start to change. Somewhere around late Spring, I came close to writing about grief and what it looked like… assuming that what I was thinking and feeling was and always would be a constant… only ever fluctuating in intensity, but not in spirit or definition. I even had the photo picked out and the quote I wanted to use to go along with what I would write… this one…
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Before reaching that point, I was of the thought that grief changes you. Then I realized, having actually grieved, that I believe it reveals you more than it changes you. Now I’m back to thinking it changes you. Or maybe I believe it’s a little of both. Or a lot of the latter in the beginning. Then a whole lot more of the former before it’s all said and done… and most of it, change you never asked for or wanted.
But this is just me, less than half-way through the book. Her book. My book too.
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Ah, Georgia. My heart so goes out to you. I find myself waking in the night praying for you. Yesterday I had to dash into Target, and something there triggered thoughts of you, and prayers for you. There is a certain helplessness that accompanies watching someone you care about going through grief and trial. For me that gives birth to a cry to heaven, and one that I pray for you often is that your faith will not fail. In the midst of the anguish and the questioning that you will know that God can handle those feelings and thoughts. While He is the God of all comfort, He is not comfortable. No one we see in the scripture lived or expected to live a grief-free, suffering-free life. And our modern, western form of Christianity has done us no service by leading us to believe that ease and freedom from pain and loss are to be the norm. As far as I can see these are merely interludes to the long and bitter pathway we must walk. A reading of the scripture will show that God never lies to us about struggle. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Peter said, “Do not be surprised at this trial you are enduring.” But our eyes all too frequently speed over those words to grasp a hold of the promises of blessing and victory such as, “I have overcome the world.” And while we definitely need to hold tightly to these, we also must grasp them in the context of a suffering, grieving, painful world. It is part of what makes us yearn for redemption and eternal release.
Lewis did that, Job did that, Peter did that, as have so many others throughout time. But it is not something we grasp only on an intellectual level. It is only when we experience it that we understand. It is only when we come to the point that we say, with Job, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him,” or even with Jesus who suffered at the hand of a God of whom Isaiah said, “It was His pleasure to smite Him,” said, “Into Your hands I commit my spirit,” that we reach the point of deep and unshakable faith. Both Job and one of the Psalmists pleaded with God, “Look away from me…” because the ways of God were so intense with them that they could bear it no longer. What it gets down to is not so much the actions of God, but the motives. Why is He doing this? We can wonder about that, but what causes our bitterness is if we begin to suspect His motives are mean, capricious or even evil. When we move from, “I don’t like what You are doing” to “I don’t like You,” we come to the place where not only are we miserable, we have no place to turn in our misery. When we go through these times and come out with our faith intact, it is because we have realized that the only safe place to be when we endure the hard ways of God is in His arms.
You and I have talked before about how hard it is when we have to take a toddler in to the ER and hold them down while people do hurtful things to them. Our heart aches for them. We long to explain to them what they cannot possibly understand about how it is for their ultimate good. But they look at us with eyes that speak volumes of how betrayed they feel at that moment. We pray that their knowledge of our great love for them and all the prior good times we’ve had will get them through and help them trust us once again. I think that is how God feels at times like these–when we suffer and do not understand. When we feel He is the one doing it or allowing it and we feel betrayed. In His steadfast love He holds us down through the trial, and He cannot explain what we would not understand anyway. He fully understands that we feel betrayed, and angry, and in so much pain. He accepts that in us, and loves us through it.
I look forward to hearing about the end of the book, and seeing you write the end of your book, too.
thank you, sheri. i very much and always appreciate your insight and perspective that points toward God and His word. truths i hold to deep down. trying just to write where i am at as honestly as i can, as i know this is all part of my grief. i cling to hope that just as it all changed from what it was months ago to what it is today, it will all change again.
I think I do understand what you were saying, Georgia. I just wanted to encourage you not to fear that by saying it you were pushing back from God, or in danger of losing your faith. I wanted to encourage you that you are walking a well-worn path, trod by many grief-weary believers who struggled with seeing God through their tear stained eyes and aching hearts. I heard a song the other day, I think it was called “I’m Worn” and I think it may have been by 10th Ave. North. I thought of you, and played it over several times to catch and to pray the lyrics for you. I wanted to encourage you that not only does God hold you and accept you and love you when you don’t understand what’s He’s doing, that I, along with many others, hold you in our thoughts and prayers and love.
thank you.
Precious sister, I am so glad to hear that you have started the book and that it has ministered to you. I’ve not dared to ask, since I didn’t want you to feel pressured. May it continue to provide much grace and hope to your weary soul. Praying for brighter days for the Batemans. I love you all so much. Let’s do try to Skype soon. Big hug from Auckland. ❤
thank you for sending it, michele. it’s a perfect book for me… a brief and easy read, but easy in the best possible sense. it’s lovely. sad and heartbreaking, but beautifully written with such an attention to words, and not just facts. i have not picked it up again since i wrote this post, but i’ve been busy with freelance, isaac and painting his closet… and job searching. but i look forward to reading more and seeing where she takes it from the point i left off at on. maybe we can skype over the weekend? thank you for praying. we will always be grateful for those who pray, and even more so for those who tell us they have been praying.
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