Friday, September 28, 2012, my son Matthew was 22 years old and a senior at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. That afternoon, we were notified that he had died by suicide.
My knees buckled and my world collapsed. Despite the flood of friends and family to our house, I didn’t know where to turn. One of my dearest friends put her hands on my shoulders and said ‘Just tell me what you need and I’ll do it’. I said, “I need my son back, and you can’t do that” and I collapsed crying in her arms.
That was five years ago this past September. Some might say surely after five years you are through grieving, surely after five years you’re ready to move on.
No, I will always grieve for my son. I will grieve the future he will never have. I will grieve the joys he will never know, the conversations we will never be able to have, the strength and love I always felt in his wonderful hugs. So many things I grieve.
But if I have faith, why am I still grieving? Doesn’t my faith enable me to conquer my grief?
In these last five years, I have come to realize that grief is a process. It is different for everyone; I think my grief process will last for my lifetime. And in her book, On the Mystery, Catherine Keller says Faith is also a process: “Faith is not settled belief but living process. It is the very edge and opening of life in process. To live is to step with trust into the next moment; into the unpredictable”.
There is probably nothing more unpredictable, at least there wasn’t in my life, than the idea of losing a child to suicide. Yet somehow I have kept living, I have kept stepping out into the next moment.
While I was raised going to church every Sunday, and youth group every Sunday evening, I don’t recall ever really examining my faith closely. But I have continued to live,I have continued to step into the next moments. How, if not through faith?
Faith and grief are working together as a process in my life, each in some way flowing through the other. With faith in the beatitude that says “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”, I find comfort in settings such as Faith and Grief gatherings where my grief is allowed to flow and be shared, and in that sharing to be comforted.
Experiencing grief has made me aware of the many little miracles, or mercies, that God sends my way every day. One of my favorite hymns is “Great is Thy Faithfulness”. As the refrain says, “morning by morning, new mercies I see”. As I have grieved, God has sent and continues to send countless signs, in friends and family and nature, to comfort me, to remind me of His presence. “All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided – great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.”
As I said, Matthew was a cadet at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. That meant that the cemetery at the Academy was an option for us. Matthew is there, in Colorado Springs, in their columbarium. At that end of the cemetery, there is a statue of two large metal wings called the “Winged Refuge”. My husband and I were there over Memorial Day weekend, and again in mid-September, for Matthew’s birthday. I stand between those wings and look up at the mountains, and I feel truly sheltered and comforted, confident that God has wrapped his arms around my son as He also wraps his arms around me. Grief and faith processes working together.
So if my grief process will last for my lifetime, I hope my faith process will as well. I trust I will continue to see new mercies, morning by morning. I trust that as I step into the next moment, into the unpredictable, that God is there with me. He won’t keep me from grieving, but He will provide comfort as I need it, to enable me to keep stepping forward.
I thank God for His presence in my past, in my present, and in my future.