It’s been almost 6 months since my mom passed away from respiratory failure from ALS. It’s confusing how it can feel both longer and shorter simultaneously. 

God’s Word says he has written eternity on our hearts. There are times, I think, when eternity breaks through into our existence. The death of a loved one is one of those times. Our mind struggles to accept it. I believe this is because God has written eternity into the very fabric of our being. Somehow, our bodies know it’s not supposed to be this way. 

Something is profoundly not as it should be. 

People say quite often, “Death is just a natural part of life.” in some sort of attempt to make themselves feel better about it. But is it? Is it really? I would argue God never intended for us to die. He made us to live forever. There’s something inside of us that remembers this and we try so hard to override that memory when the grief hits and the fear of death comes. Death should push us desperately towards God. Instead we try to brush it off as “a natural part of life”. 

Death might not be a natural part of life, but it is inevitable. We will die not because it’s natural but because something went horribly and tragically wrong. And it’s our fault. We chose this for ourselves back in the beginning. We chose death over God. We chose not to believe Him or trust Him. 

Watching them take my mom away after she passed was excruciating. The next three days I struggled. I dreaded the dark. The sun going down brought on an all encompassing foreboding.

Where I expected comfort from God I was left with silence and darkness. Where was He? 

I prayed hard and often. There were moments when I felt like I wouldn’t be able to bear it. What was this?!

Perhaps it was trauma from being with my mom during her final struggling breaths. Perhaps. But there was something spiritual in it as well, like I could feel some darkness raging just out of sight. 

Where was He?!

There was a wall a million feet high, insurmountable. Did I build it, or did He? There were times I didn’t know if I was grieving the loss of my mom or the loss of feeling His presence. 

I think Sarah Clarkson describes it in words that feel like they could have come from my own heart. I read them a few weeks later and it was like she had a front row seat to what I had experienced.

“…sometimes the evil is so great, and the grief so destructive that we are drawn by our pain into a wild, trackless realm where neat explanations and the trim sermon-sized assertions we used to keep terror at bay no longer protect us. Like Job, we are drawn into the strange bleak landscape of God’s seeming silence as we grapple with the kind of pain that could unravel us all together.” ~ Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth

“I was reminded why I so vehemently oppose the answering of suffering by systems of theological assertion. There is no adequate explanation given in the cold voice of reason to answer our most intimate experience of a loved one whose body disintegrates before our eyes.” ~ Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth

Then a few days later I woke with the sun shining through the bedroom windows and my sweet Lucy babbling away in her baby voice in the bassinet beside me. Her sweet smile and bright blue eyes brought joy to my heart. I picked her up and embraced her in my arms, smelling her head. In that moment I felt close to my mom. And there He was. No longer far away but right there, closer than I had ever felt Him before. My soul was at peace. 

I can’t explain it.

“God doesn’t offer explanation; but oh, He offers His own heartbreakingly beautiful self.”

~ Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth

I know now those three days were something I had to go through. I am thankful I went through them. I know now God wasn’t absent, He was just silent. He was letting me go through the pain so I could come out different on the other side. 

As C.S. Lewis says in “A Grief Observed”, “But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.” 

I wonder if God watches us closely in His silence, seeing us struggle and crying out in the dark, with tears in His eyes. The way we watch our own children when they are going through something hard. We want to step in but if we do then they won’t learn what they need to learn, they won’t grow how they need to grow. 

Does His heart ache in the same way, wanting to take it away but in His infinite love and infinite knowledge and wisdom He knows if He were to cut the pain too short then we would be left no closer to Him than we were before? 

I am thankful for what I went through in those dark few days because in the end God gave me more of Himself. 

My words here don’t even come close to fully describing it. 

My mom’s death changed me. And I am thankful the pain wasn’t wasted.