On Burying Yourself, and Rising Anew

Grief is laissez-faire in our culture. It’s dismissive, it’s neat, it’s fast, it’s compartmentalized. 

It’s not honest. 

The honest truth of grief is that it is gut-wrenching. It is enraging. It is wild and unruly and superman-strong and it will not submit to our timetables and our niceties and the bows that we try to wrap it up in. 

Honest grief won’t let go of you, no matter how much you will yourself to let go of it. Honest grief takes you to a funeral that is not just of your loved one; it is for your very self. 

I need to say this (forgive me if the words feel ill-placed or too strong in nature). I need to say this because there is someone else right now reading this who needs to hear this. 

If you no longer know who you are, if the ground underneath you feels like sinking sand, if your breath is measured, if your energy has capsized… you’re wrestling with God-honest grief. 

Follow me here: 

Jacob wrestled with a man at Peniel overnight (Genesis 32:22-31). The man seemed normal, if strong (at least that’s the way that the text initially presented him). The man would not let go of him. 

Jacob was injured in the wrestling. Right at the hip. In the very socket that determines gait and walkability. 

Jacob wrestled and was injured and the way that he would walk forward was forever changed. 

And yet, there was blessing. Jacob was given a new name. 

“Your name will no longer be Jacob,” the text says, “but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” 

The wrestle was supernatural and it was human - it was spirit and it was flesh - it was both man and it wasn’t - it was the dead of night that lingered into morning… keep on following me… 

Jacob was changed both in the way he walked forever forward and in the name he was known by from that moment forward, and I’m talking in circles and I’m talking Scripture, and I’m talking funerals, because dear one, you need to hear: 

Grief—  it won’t let go of you. 

Your life will never be the same. 

You will never be whole again, or walk the same again. 

But hear me loud and clear: You will go on from here. You will go on, precious one. You will make it through this. You will find a way to live with the holes in your hip - time will soften the edges. You will survive and your scars will one day shine light through, as the very hands of Christ did after his death and resurrection. 

But I need to tell you something so clear: 

Who you were before is dead. 

You must rise anew. 

— 

Having survived the tragic loss of my dad and the tragic loss of my daughter, there was one thing I knew to be true when I heard the word “unsurvivable” whispered by the oncologist last summer. I knew that I would never be the same. 

I knew that who I was, was all-of-a-sudden dying alongside my mom too. 

I knew it from experience. I knew it from the depth of love. I knew it from the way that I started vomiting, emptying the very hope and essence of who I was into a pit of despair. I knew from the way sleep was stolen from me, and my body stopped healing itself, and my breath stayed shallow in my lungs. I knew that whoever would emerge from this loss would be someone foreign to me. I knew that I was about to bury me too, figuratively, but almost (and so many times) literally.  

It has been that way, every time. It is not unique to the loss of a mom; it’s true of any great loss of love in close proximity and bodily-relationship. 

I came from their bodies - my mom and my dad. My daughter came from mine. 

I cannot bury their bodies, without also burying parts of mine. 

The words that I would whisper when I could catch my breath, in a still and sullen moment with my husband or a close friend, were “I don’t know who I’ll be after this.” 

I feared. 

And I think you might too, dear one. 

—

You are not alone if you do not recognize yourself anymore. 

You are both brand new and you’re also still emerging. 

And this is all terrible, and I’m so sorry that you had to say goodbye to your loved one and that you had to say goodbye to your self, to who you were before, but I know … that who comes out of here will be glorious too. 

— 

It’s hard to believe a body and a brain and a heart that has suffered so much can still be made new - can still sparkle and shine and bring beauty forward and be called glorious. 

But… the phoenix… 

For ages, the mythology around the phoenix has captured imaginations. It goes so far back —  the stories and the hopes and the tales of a phoenix who burns bitterly and then is re-born from the ashes. 

I’m having her tattooed this summer, because like the generations before me, I need the reminder. 

She isn’t myth; she isn’t legend; she is a representation of Christ - who rose from the grave in glory and promised the same for each and every one of us… not just at our literal graves, but in all the graves of our seasons and relationships and lives long before we ever lose them in-the-flesh. 

Here in the heart and soul and brain and spirit, there is resurrection too. 

— 

The Pascal Mystery, they call it. 

And I’ve clung to it for dear life. When the ground underneath me shifted and my plans fell to dust in my hands and my love suffered and died before my own eyes, the Pascal Mystery is all that I could hold on to. It was the only thing that kept me breathing, kept me willing to hold on through the wrestle, kept me seeing through the dark, dismal night to a foreign hope that one day I might live again, that the sun might indeed rise again. 

— 

I hate to get cliche and pop-culture at this point, but true to my own form, here’s a Taylor Swift lyric that has been keeping me alive the last few months: 

“There’ll be happiness after you 

But there was happiness because of you. 

Both of these things can be true. 

There is happiness, 

Past the blood and bruise, 

Beyond the terror in the nightfall…

I just haven’t met the new me yet.” 

These lyrics are for sure about a breakup, and yet every one rings true for the brokenheartedness of grief… 

Beyond the terror of the night and the burying of so many years of happiness, there is still, yet, impossibly and somehow true — the hope of new happiness ahead and a new me and a new you. 

— 

We will make it through this. 

But we have to embrace our newness too. 

— 

Shake off the shackles of who you were before. 

Let the cocoon fall to the ground. 

If they can’t keep up with you, fly ahead. 

You have every right to live. 

— 

Shauna Niequist in her newest and my most favorite book yet on discovering new ways of living when the old ways have stopped working, says that a sign of true spiritual maturity is the ability to say “hello to here.” “It’s consenting to reality - not what you wanted or longed for or lost, not what you hope for or imagine. Reality. This here. This now.” 

—

I am consenting to reality. 

I am a 36 year old matriarch of my family. 

I hold us together now. 

I will parent without my mom and without my dad. 

I will raise 3 of the 4 children my body has bore. 

I will walk my brother down the aisle. 

I will be the one to watch his kids grow. 

I have no escape clause. 

That used to exist. 

I could be reckless and stubborn and wild in my risk tolerance. 

Not now. 

I am security for those behind and around me. 

I sow legacy into my footsteps. 

I know my breath is measured. 

I am injured at the hip. 

This is the new reality. 

And I consent to it. 

I am enough for it. 

Indeed, all along I was being shaped and raised and formed for this moment. 

I don’t like it, but I embrace it. I am strong enough for it, deeply planted enough for it. 

“Hello to here.” 

Hello to who I am now, to the newest phoenix that has risen from the ashes, to yet another resurrection by the power of Christ that held me together through figurative death, to the me that still stands after the wrestle… yes, still stands, even after it all, with a changed gait. 

—— 

“What I found, there in the darkness, there at the bottom of the cold ocean, there surrounded by the bits and bones of the self I used to be, was another self. She’d been there all along, but until now I never needed her. She was waiting in the wings, and all of a sudden, I needed her desperately. She is my next self, the one I’ve been waiting to be all along, without even knowing it. Thank God for her” (Niequist).

—— 

At this time last year, I trembled at another death & resurrection of me. I was afraid of who would come next. Would she be bitter, I wondered? Would she be broken? Would she be too weak to hold up her children? Would she be incapable  — of holding both her responsibilities and her wider famliy’s? Would this loss be the final straw that broke the camel’s back? Would she be able to rise again? 

If I could speak back to 35 year old me last summer asking these questions, I would reassure her and coax away the fear. I would hold her hand and promise, as I do to you now: 

It will never be the same, 

But it will all be okay. 

Your new self is going to be glorious too. 

—— 

Shake off the preconceived and tidied beliefs of grief. It’s not what they say it is (it’s much uglier, to be sure). You can’t dismiss this. You can’t compartmentalize it to one part of your self. You can’t speed it up.

But if you pay careful attention, if you watch real close… you’ll see: 

What you buried, is coming to new life. 

Your happiness that you left behind, is bearing forward future happiness. 

Your love and your brokenheartedness that pierced and scarred you, is beginning to shine light through. 

God is in this wrestle and He’s blessing it too. 

Your fear of survivability and enough-ness, is fading as you make it through yet another day and discover, 24 hours by 24 hours, one measure after another, the strength of your own legs. 

Your gait has changed, but you’re not lost; you’re brand new. 

“Hello to here.”