The Ebb and Flow of Grief

We have what I call birthday season at our house. It starts in early November, when two of us have birthdays one day after the other, and continues through early January, when we celebrate the fourth and final birth date.

Add in Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it’s roughly two months of cake, presents, special meals and the making of warm memories. With the house decorated and holiday music playing continually, it’s my favorite time of the year, hands down.

Since my parents passed away in 2019, I’ve discovered a second—though much less festive—season on my life calendar. I haven’t figured out when to call it yet—death anniversary season sounds crass; parental remembrance season seems too formal.

Whatever title I give it, it starts on Good Friday, which was observed the day my mom died and will forever be connected in my mind with the actual date of her death, and continues through June 14—my parents’ wedding anniversary and the day we buried my dad. This stretch of time—also roughly two months—includes Mother’s Day, both parents’ birthdays and the date my dad died (one day after his birthday).

As I was trudging my way through these weeks for the first time last year, my gratefulness that God called my parents home before the Covid-19 pandemic somehow muffled the intensity of the experience. I wasn’t denying or stuffing my grief; it was more of a quiet realization that God’s timing for our family—as hard as it was to accept at times—really had worked out for their good.

This year, though, the sadness was more acute and my tears were much closer to the surface. On my mom’s birthday, after crying for the second time in one day, I told Randy I didn’t know where all this emotion was coming from.

“You’ve cried about 1 percent of the tears I expected you to cry since your parents died,” he said as he hugged me in the backyard.

Grief is communal in some ways, but also so very individual. Ask any of my six siblings about the way they’ve processed my parents’ deaths and I’m guessing you’d get six different answers.

I’m not a big crier; I never have been. But I am a processor—through thinking, talking, writing, even listening to music. The important thing—for me and probably for you too, when you experience a deep loss—is to keep processing, whatever that looks like for you.

For me, it includes making relevant references to my parents in conversation with friends and family members who knew them. Thinking and writing about their lives in relation to my own. And yes—especially these last few months—letting the tears flow when they will.

There’s a starting point to grief, but I’m learning there may not be an endpoint—not this side of heaven anyway. It won’t always be as heavy or as sad, but in some ways, it will always be there, especially if the person who is no longer here was near and dear to our hearts.

According to author Ronne Rock, who lost her own mom 21 years ago, that’s not a bad thing, either.

“I’ve come to be okay with the unlikely friendship of grief,” she writes in an article for The Redbud Writers Guild. “The wash of it over a tender moment is the reminder that we are made for more than the dirt under our feet. The sound of it in a bird’s song is the reminder that our stories are still being written even as the ink on the page blurs from the tears. The presence of it in dog-eared picture books or fading photos is the reminder that death is the very thing that God uses to plant his new seeds of life in us, the way the soil in the field hides the seeds of hope—hope waiting to be baptized.”

I don’t know what that’s all going to look like in my own life, or yours either. But as we learn to trust the Author of our faith with the details of our stories, I have a feeling the flame of eternity will only grow brighter and brighter in our hearts.

And that can only mean good things for the remainder of our days here on earth.

♥ Lois

P.S. I’m linking up this week with #tellhisstory, InstaEncouragements, Recharge Wednesday, Let’s Have Coffee, Inspire Me Monday, #HeartEncouragement and Grace & Truth.