(Following is the first chapter of Bertha’s and my book Grief Recovery 101: How to Get Back Up When Blindsided by the Death of Someone You Love. At the conclusion, we will tell how to order the book.)
CHAPTER ONE: THE GRIEF ARRIVES
Grief happens when you least expect it and are completely unprepared for it.
How I became so knowledgeable about grief. (I sure didn’t volunteer!)
My wife died suddenly.
On a Friday morning in January of 2015, Margaret and I had spent an hour at the breakfast table as we usually did.
After breakfast, she went back to bed. Her physical ailments were always warring against her, the pain was constant, and her energy level was never very high. Even walking into the kitchen was an ordeal for her.
Shortly after finishing my blog, I closed the laptop, took my morning shower and got dressed. Sometime around 10 o’clock, I was lying on the bed in the back bedroom reading a novel when Margaret called down the hall. “I’m going to drive myself to the nail salon and get a pedicure. I’ll be back in a little while.”
My last word to my wife of 52-plus years was, “Okay!”
Sometime around noon, Ochsner Hospital called. “Sir, you need to come to the emergency room now. We have your mother.”
I said, “My wife.”
“Sir, we have your wife. You need to come to the emergency room now.”
That’s all they would say.
We were down to one car, since Margaret had not been driving for a long time. Only recently had she wanted to recapture some measure of independence and was driving a little in the immediate area. I called Julie, our daughter-in-law, to come get me. Our pastor’s secretary, Friday was her day off. She was just putting away groceries. “I’ll be right over,” she said.
When we walked into the hospital, the emergency room doctor met us. “We think your wife had a massive heart attack. And sir, she went over one hour with no heartbeat. We know she’s had major brain damage; we don’t know how much.”
Welcome to real life.
As a pastor for over 53 years, I had walked into thousands of hospital rooms with church members and friends. I must have preached a thousand funerals, including for my parents and Margaret’s parents.
But nothing had ever hit me like this.
Nothing prepares you for such news.
The following Wednesday night we signed the papers for them to unplug. Her body had responded to nothing, although the medical team ran a hundred tests and tried all sorts of maneuvers and treatments.
My wife took her last breath Thursday morning, January 29, 2015.
The doctors decided Margaret probably had a pulmonary embolism and not a heart attack. “We’d have to do an autopsy to be sure,” they said. We didn’t need that. The Lord had taken her and she was with Him.
I would do my best to say with Job, “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
As I type this, it has been two years and two months. But the pain is still fresh and will never go away. My eyes tear up at the memory of all of this.
When I read the chapter in which Bertha tells of Gary’s death (chapter 3), I wept with her.
Components of grief.
What exactly was going on inside me, I wondered. What was causing me to hurt so badly and to feel so sad?
I’m not one given to introspection. But in time, I decided my grief was composed of sadness over Margaret’s death, compounded by a lifetime of memories, a good deal of regrets, a touch of anger, and perhaps some fear.
Fully one-half of my grief was sadness over missing my wife. I missed her touch, the sound of her voice, and her sharp mind. I missed her involvement in my life
Margaret was not a writer, but was a great reader, which gave her excellent instincts as to what worked in my writing and what didn’t. So, sitting at the breakfast table, she would want me to read my latest blog. Often, she would listen quietly, then interrupt to say, “That’s the wrong word,” and suggest the one I should have used. We would discuss that, and I would make the correction, and continue reading. If she liked the article, she said so. Her approval was better than any editor’s acceptance check. But she was just as likely to say, “Well…who do you think is going to be interested in this?” Or even, “That’s boring, don’t you think?” I smile at the memory. We all need someone who can question what we are doing but who remains on our team, completely committed to us.
In the weeks after she died, I would come out of a church where I’d just preached and start to call her to say how things had gone, since I knew she’d been praying. But I couldn’t. And I wept.
In the late 1970s, we had gone to marriage counseling. The culprit–the enemy to every preacher’s marriage I ever encountered–was my tendency to put everything and everyone ahead of my family. The stories I could tell, but won’t! Suffice it to say, I had some serious adjustments to make in my priorities to save my marriage and to honor my commitments to God, to this good woman, to my family.
After Margaret’s death when I began writing about her, people would fill my mailbox with notes saying, “You had an amazing marriage” and “I wish I’d had a marriage like yours.” Eventually, I felt the need to share some of the challenges we had faced and problems we had dealt with. To leave the impression that ours was the perfect marriage would only discourage others struggling with the same issues that had plagued us.
Anyone who can look back over half a century of married life without regrets is not being honest, in my opinion. We are all sinners. When we marry, we join ourselves to another breaker of God’s laws. No one gets it right all the time. That’s why marriage done right means an equal amount of forgiving and repenting. I’m not sure to what extent anger figured into my grief, but it’s a big factor for many people.
After her husband died, my friend Jude was so consumed by anger over mistreatment from him and the financial mess he had left behind, she knew she had to do something. “I got two boxes,” she said. “I marked one ‘anger’ and the other ‘thanksgiving. ‘Every time I got angry at Bob for something, I wrote it on a slip of paper and dropped it into that box. Then, I made myself write out two things for which I was thankful and put them into their box.” She had intended to do something important with them, Jude said, like have a bonfire for the box of angry memos. “But Katrina took care of that.” Her home was destroyed by the hurricane of 2005.
Fear was a small element in my grief. How would I be able to manage without my wife? and what if something else should happen now, if someone else dear to me were to die? How could I handle another unexpected tragedy? I was completely drained, with no resources in reserve. Another tragedy would be the worst thing imaginable. I thought of how in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans where I was director of missions for Southern Baptist churches, our misery was compounded by the fear that another storm on the heels of that one would ruin the city forever. Thank the Lord, no hurricane has battered the city since the big one.
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In this little collection of thoughts and suggestions, we will try to point the reader to that One variously called the Resurrection and the Life, the Author and Finisher of our faith, and the Bright and Morning Star.
It’s all about Jesus, from the first to the last.
Simon Peter said it as well as it can be said. “Lord, to whom (else) shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
Where indeed? The old gospel song asked, “Where could I go but to the Lord?”
Perhaps our answer is not unlike the fellow who was told by our Lord that all things are possible if he would believe. “Lord,” the man said, “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
Jesus did. He honored such an honest prayer.
He will help us. He loves to assist the seeking, hurting soul who will humble themselves before Him. When a leper fell at His feet, saying, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean,” Jesus did the unthinkable and touched the untouchable. “I am willing,” He said.
The man became whole.
He is every bit as willing to help us.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a Savior, His name is Jesus, and there is no One else like Him.
(This is not a long book, although some of the chapters are lengthy. Chapter Two is “Coping: What to do now?” Chapter Three is “Bertha’s Story,” followed by “What To Say To a Hurting Friend,” and a final word.
The book is $15. Our address is 203 Garden Cove, Ridgeland, Mississippi 39157. You may send a check to me at this address or use Venmo. @Joe-McKeever-7. If you are able, include $3 for postage. If you want multiple copies–I have a good stock at the moment–we can lower the price a bit. If you need a book and have no money, I will be privileged to give you the book. Just tell me. Thank you.