My New Normal
This is a different kind of post, and a more public post than I have ever written. Jeannette and I were both, by nature, private persons. There are only a handful of close friends with whom I share much beneath the social surface of ordinary interactions. But I have felt a pressing desire to tell more of my journey since Jeannette’s death just over one year ago. This seems like the most appropriate venue.This is a much longer post than any I have made with perhaps more information than many want to read. It contains snippets from a journal I began when we discovered Jeannette had terminal cancer. So it is an informed account loosely connected with reflections on the journey thus far.
[Deep breath]
On March 1, 2013, the day Jeannette died, in the afternoon, after the ambulance had taken Jeannette to the Allegiance Hospice Home, I wrote:
“As we have made this journey, I have unavoidably thought about life alone. I’ve thought about moving things out of her closet, cleaning out the medicine cabinet, sorting through old photographs, etc. When she left today, I felt the loss of everything that went with her. There’s an empty spot on the shelf where her mini-pharmacy sat, organized by morning and evening meds. Her hospital bed is stripped, a skeleton frame and cold mattress. All the lotions and sheets and pads are gone. Even the oxygen machine with it’s tubing and cannula. It feels like it sucked even more of her away with it.
I cried when they ambulance took her to the hospice home this morning. I cried when I saw the empty places she will never need or fill. I have an open geyser of heart-sob that leaps up at the slightest provocation. She fills every inch of our home. It has all known her touch and her care. They are not just things. They are her things and our things. For all that we lived often solitary lives together, it was the together that made it home. I face an agony of emptiness.
She cries to go home. She’s so tired. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy—on both of us.”
I told her once that the very best day of her life would be the very worst day of mine. It was a precise prophecy. She stepped into the presence of the risen Christ. I stepped into unfathomable loss, a shock wave of death’s finality, it’s reality.
King David wrote: “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11 NIV). At 8:30pm on March 1st, Jeannette began to fully experience that joy and delight. I began to experience what I had watched so many walk through, the absurdity and unnaturalness of death. She left with a finality that remains inexplicable.
On April 8, 2013, I wrote:
“I don’t think I really understood death before this—and I’m not sure I do even now. I have killed countless animals hunting and witnessed their dying, but they were other and they were food. As a police chaplain I have been present at homicides and fatal accidents. I have been with families as their loved ones slipped away. But Jeannette’s was different. She was just gone—not there, absent. What she left behind was like a cocoon that sighs in on itself when the butterfly has flown, or a shed skin, or a deflated balloon. She was no longer there—but she has always been there. And missing her grows on me. It grows in me. I am both unaware of her absence and always aware.
A part of me has deflated too. I no longer know who I am, only Whose.”
I had not been unaware of death’s reality. I’ve seen death. But in all the time I was losing Jeannette, I never was quite prepared for the reality of her leaving.
As the days immediately following her death unfolded, I experienced something else that caught me off-guard. I wrote this three months later:
“May 28, 2013
I woke up late, enjoying the delicious sensation of stirring without the crush of the day to press me past the moment. It has been a lazy morning, with coffee and 2 Corinthians 6: “…but in everything commending ourselves as God’s servants…”
Then a fresh cup and completion of Shannon Polson’s book: North of Hope: A Daughter’s Arctic Journey. Polson details her grief over her dad and stepmom’s death in a grizzly attack in the arctic.
…I resonated most with her observation that she feared forgetting. I feared forgetting. She remembered going into her father’s closet and burying her face in his shirts, hoping for some sense-connection with her now forever-absent dad.
I did that.
In the first days after Jeannette’s dying, I had the same terror of forgetting. I agonized at how Jeannette’s memory was sometimes not immediately present, and found myself more than once with my face buried in her clothes, feeling and remembering the textures of the fabrics and what it was like when her skin was inside them, close in my embrace. I wanted to hold her memory close.
In those moments I did experience a fleeting moment of corporeal memory, and then the hanging clothes became lifeless things again—woven cloth that had been unwoven from her use by her leaving.
Jeannette has a more sure place in my memory now than then. We had, from our courtship to her dying, some forty-two years together. We finished seminary, raised two boys, served three churches, and lived together in a long affection and conciliation of two stubborn firstborn wills.
I have been shaped by her. I keep our home in ways still shaped by a desire to please her—not the casual mess that is more native to my impulsivity… She has softened me, refined and reformed me, gentled me.
And I feel the aloneness—missing her—growing inside me, even as the distance from her passing increases.”
Life goes on. I cooked meals and did dishes. I filled the car with gas, mowed the lawn, and did laundry. My days were (and are) filled with the thousand ordinary details of living. And sometimes I felt guilty for moments of not remembering her. It’s quite natural, but it took some time to accept it as part of a new normal.
Guilt has been a frequent companion. I don’t think I have ever felt the anger some experience. But guilt has been quite another thing.
I come by it naturally. I grew up feel wrong most of the time, just waiting to be caught. I deserved a fair amount of real guilt. Depravity worked in me like it does in everyone. My parents had a hard time civilizing me. But coming home began to feel like an expectation of being found out. Guilt is indeed, as they say, “the gift that keeps on giving.”
So I began to feel sadness over my many failures as a husband. On May 25, 2013:
“I went out to the cemetery to see the grave. The tears well up unbidden as I approach, surprising me. I don’t do tears much and these always catch me off guard. It is a solitary thing, our grave plot. One small rectangle of earth marked by a bronze plaque set on a bit of marble. This is where Jeannette’s ashes lie. It is where my body will someday lie. It’s still hard to absorb her not being – here. I am thankful for her every day and live with regrets at not having been a better husband. I suppose that is part of grieving also, a kind of emotional penance.
I wish for her back; wish I could have another chance to be a better man with her. But I suspect it’s only that—a wish without substance. We had worn deep grooves with each other, long habits both good and bad. We knew what to avoid and did mostly.
She is gone. There is no second chance.”
We had a good marriage by most accounts. We were faithful to each other and on the same team. We loved our kids and cherished our grandkids. But sometimes we joked that our marriage would never be written up in a romance journal.
It was a good marriage but a real marriage. By that I mean that two stubborn firstborns used to getting their own way spent over forty years trying to work out our incompatibilities. It wasn’t always fun, but well worth the work. We both grew and changed over the years. Christ did some of his best work in me using her to shape my character.
We knew how to get on each other’s nerves. I could be thoughtless and selfish. I could run over her with my verbal skills and pull inside myself leaving her emotionally isolated. Among other things.
I’ve had a harder time remembering the things about her that were irritating. So I have wished many times I could have one more conversation with her and ask her forgiveness.
I cannot. And it’s all meaningless now in any case. She is, as CS Lewis wrote: “In love.” Everything is put right with her, having joined that great company of “…the spirits of the righteous made perfect…” (Hebrews 12:23 NIV). God has washed all tears from her eyes, even the ones I caused.
I know God has forgiven me. I dare not arrogantly claim I cannot forgive myself, as if my standards were so much higher than God’s. I know when I see Jeannette again nothing of this will matter anymore.
And yet I lament the memories of my failures.
I refuse to drown in them. I wish to learn from them. But I still feel them.
Something else I discovered since Jeannette’s death. While I was not prepared for her departure, there was in place a firm foundation in faith that had been built over our lifetime together.
It was an encouraging realization. The anchor holds. In a world in which death works inexorably, indiscriminately, and indeterminably, hope penetrates despair. Heaven has become almost palpable as I have imagined Jeannette into the scenes which John describes in The Revelation. That is her new normal, and that makes my heart smile.
God’s unfailing love and faithfulness have taken deep root. I even inscribed on our gravestone words taken from Psalm 100: “God’s love endures forever; his faithfulness to all generations.”
Amen.
The grace of Christ has become richer. The comfort of God’s Spirit often mediated by the kindness of God’s people has touched me deeply.
I read once a quote that has stuck with me: “You can’t get ready for a crisis in your life, you have to be ready.”
I’m not sure anyone can ever quite be ready for such loss, but in God’s mercy, everything we had studied, taught and believed over thirty-seven years of ministry was intact. Without thinking about it, I came to realize that I really believed the biblical message. It’s truth and it stood the test of my deepest sorrow.
“How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent Word!”
Again, Amen.
This is getting long. I’ve had ample time to think. The journey continues. God is still faithful. Grief remains a sneaky little rascal, popping up when I least expect it. The hard tears and sharp sorrow have faded into what I call background noise. I still hear it now and again, but it fades.
And I still miss Jeannette. The house is still empty.
People ask, “How are you doing?” I typically respond, “When?”
I stay busy mostly. Mondays take me to the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo where I volunteer as a docent (museum guide). I get to hang out with awesome aircraft of all types and talk about them to our guests.
I have plunged into photography, a long avocation. The challenge and creativity can absorb me for hours.
I have occasional opportunities to preach and to teach which I find fulfilling.
And of course, I have my family. The boys and I enjoyed a fine hunting season last Fall. And the grandkids bring me incredible pride and delight.
In many ways, life is good. I find myself more grateful now than I have ever been. God is good. The journey continues. And for now, this is enough.
