Grief Lessons

Meditation #3

Ed: This article is part of an ongoing series by Robert called Devotions Upon Divergent Occasions. Read his introduction and Meditations #1 and #2.

If it is true that our story is inevitably also the story of someone else’s pain, then my journey through pain and suffering took definite shape when I was eight years old.

September 6, 1969, evening. I was playing with an elaborately constructed Hot Wheels ramp on the stairs of our home in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My dad got a message to go next door. There was a call from the States, fielded for us by our neighbor, who was a ham radio operator. Phone service in Brazil in 1969 was sketchy at best, and the only semi-reliable means of communication we had established with the outside world—including with our family and friends back in the United States—was through our neighbor’s short-wave radio. This meant we could talk occasionally to my sister, Ethel, and my two older brothers, Dave and John, who were all attending university in California. My brother Jim (8 years my senior) and I were still living at home.

Dad went next door to take the call. Mom joined him; this kind of interruption to our life was unusual and she obviously wanted to hear the news.

I don’t remember registering anything until Dad walked back in the front door with bowed head, followed by Mom, ashen-faced and biting her lip. Dad called my brother and me upstairs.

They had heard, through a ragged connection, my sister Ethel shouting:

“John killed! Dave injured! Make arrangements to come home!”

That was it. No context (“They were on their way home from a youth retreat and it appears their car was hit head-on.”). Just unthinkable pain and grief, boiled down into three simple phases, cried out over blurry radio waves. Their second son dead; their eldest son injured and possibly dying. Their lives forever changed; and now they must pack up and find a way home to bury at least one of their sons. 

(This was easier said than done. The  military government in Brazil, embroiled in a  political crisis, had shut down all international travel. Only a few very select flights and people were approved for departure. Miraculously, in 24 hours, we were on one of those flights.)

Upstairs, I was seated cross-legged on the floor, looking up at Dad, solemn-faced and composed, uttering the fateful words: “We’ve just received news that John has been killed in an accident and Dave is seriously injured.” I remember very little of my childhood, but this night is etched in my memory. I don’t remember having many feelings about the news itself. The truth is I barely knew my elder brothers, who were nine and eleven years older. We had an ocean between us and little shared memory. But I do remember the quiet in that upstairs room. Dad doing his best to hold it together for the family; Mom silent, head bowed, lost in her grief. They didn’t weep.

My brother Jim did. He was closer in age to Dave and John, and grew up alongside them. The loss was painful and real to him. He cried, and I vaguely remember that Dad or Mom hugging him. 

These memories—especially of Mom not crying—remain within me.

I remember Dad prayed a prayer, asking God to keep Dave alive and give his doctors wisdom. He also prayed that somehow this tragedy would be turned into good, affirming his faith in God’s presence in our lives. Dad held his ever-present Bible in his lean, veiny hands. He opened it and read a passage. I can’t be sure of what he read, but it was probably from the book of Romans, verse 28, the cornerstone of many a home like ours in times of trial:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

What was certain was that we were called according to God’s purpose—half a world away, doing His work. The rest of my life was anchored in that moment, in this truth: we were part of a chosen few, elite spiritual commandos pressing through pain and loss and tragedy to keep the mission alive. 

(Later, this motivation was aptly captured by the inscription on my brother John’s grave, taken from the foremost missionary of our faith, the Apostle Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day.”)

But back to the night of September 6, 1969. There is one more memory that lingers: I’m sitting alone in my room, retreating into myself as the rest of my family processes their grief with the busyness of packing to leave Brazil. For those of you familiar with the Enneagram, I’m a Five, and I think I can trace my becoming a Five to this night: withdrawing from a confusing world where my needs, especially my emotional needs, were not a priority. Service to God, focus on the evangelical mission, making an eternal impact on the lives we met; these things defined us. My parents—both raised during the Great Depression, both serving as officers in WWII—had no emotional tools to help them make sense of what they were going through, still less to help a quiet son whose natural retreat was inward, to a solitary life of books and imagination. I was on my own, always, even in loss.

Emotional distance from my birth family has characterized most of my adult life. The isolation I felt from them led me to find my identity in learning, in books, in music, in sports. Over the years those closest to me emotionally—who I chose, who were part of my own personal extended family—were my classmates, friends, and fellow athletes. This extended family supported me, laughed with me, cheered for me, admired me. From coaches and teachers I received the recognition and encouragement that were largely absent at home, where the spiritual mission was paramount. 

I was not bitter about this; I don’t remember even thinking about it. It was just the way life was. This is what service to God, living for a higher purpose, was all about. Occasionally I noticed that my parents’ lack of involvement in my life was very different from the way my friends’ parents supported them. I was successful athletically, but it was unusual for my parents to attend my games. They were always happy for my success, but if it came down to scheduling a Bible study that conflicted with watching me compete, well, I would understand. And I did.

The community and family of school friends and teammates is a well-known phenomenon. While this love helped me cope during my formative years, I am only now realizing how crippled I was emotionally. My psychological framework was a defense mechanism against a hard and confusing world. I doubled down on scholastic and athletic achievement, poured myself into close friendships, and lived a life of fantasy when it came to understanding romantic relationships.

And over all of this presided an omnipotent God whose wisdom was unfathomable. If I couldn’t see that an apparently meaningless tragedy was actually God’s hand working all things for my good, well, I had a lifetime ahead of me to learn to love Him, whether I understood him or not. 

I do not understand God in those terms any more. But I cannot shake the conviction that universal love is behind the liminal experiences I’ve had where the Eternal, the Other, God Themselves have broken in upon me, transforming ordinary conversations, ordinary interactions, ordinary walks in the woods…into something extraordinarily beautiful, suffusing my life with meaning and joy and purpose.

In the chapters ahead I trust this love will become more clear to me, and whether I understand it or not I live in the belief that the Psalmist elsewhere affirms: 

“Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.”

The relentless Love that has pursued me now surrounds me, urging me forward along practical paths of love.