Six years ago today, my father passed away on my birthday, his body finally overtaken by the effects of the Parkinson’s he had long fought. Through his genuine faith and his gentle spirit, combined with his love for and help from my mother, he taught my siblings and me how to live…and how to live without him. Therein, I find grace.
Grief, as you well know if you have ever experienced it, comes in varying forms of impact as well as at differing times for each person who finds themselves walking its pathway. Its effects and “stages” are studied by psychologists, ministers, teachers, and counselors the world over in an effort to administer grace to those who have felt its sting.
Through these past six years, I have found myself “completing” various levels of the identified stages of grief, only to hear a song, smell a fragrance, hear a phrase that returned me to a moment of remembering my father’s laughter, his wisdom, his experience-produced ease at shedding a tear from the heart of empathy that had been entrusted to him by his Creator. In these moments, I began to recognize them not merely as grief but as grace-filled memories.
Oh yes, those memories have often caused—and undoubtedly will continue to cause—tears, smiles, laughter, and stories that I will cling to for many years to come. Grief? Yes. But grace in the midst of that grief.
Grief looks different on each individual who wears it. That is why I cannot view your grief through my lens. Because I am able to speak of my father’s death with ease does that mean that I have forgotten, am calloused, take death lightly, or expect you to react in kind. The grace you are experiencing may be seen in the fact that you were able to get through the day without tears or that you were finally able to let the tears flow freely, knowing that the ability to grieve is often a gift in itself.
I recently attempted to share a poem/story from social media with a friend who had lost a loved one around the time of my father’s death. Her reaction was that I was being insensitive to her loss. I longed in that moment to share that this was my way of grieving my loss. Instead, I remembered the grace I had been given and withdrew my desire to launch into a diatribe about how she was not being sensitive to the fact that this story was helping me through my grief, even though my silent bearing of it was quite different from her own need to speak of hers often. We were each finding grace to react in the way we needed to react in that moment.
The foundation my father laid for my own faith did not crumble when his own faith was made sight. Instead, grace stepped in and built on that foundation with the truths of Scripture that proved themselves unchanging about a God Who proved Himself faithful…in life and in death.
So on this day, my sixtieth birthday, I choose to focus on grace: grace in the memories, grace to share these thoughts, grace to recall the joy of my father’s smile and the sweet (but sometimes mischievous) twinkle in his deep-brown eyes, grace to be grateful that I have a loss worth grieving and a birthday worth celebrating.
