So thy succor shall be

I am grateful to be able to see the Lord’s hand in my life.

This weekend the wave crashed down on me again. The same leg is cut off time after time.

These are the waves of grief. I do not feel sad all the time. Generally, I don’t think our human nature allows us to be perpetually down.  I have many good days and enjoy activities and find happiness even as my heart is also wading through this affliction. It is an interesting process, and I most of the time I feel that I have little control of these emotions and am just along for the ride.

A few years ago a friend recommended a blog that I love. It was written by a woman named Kara who had a metastatic breast cancer and passed away a year before Jake. I will write more about what I have learned from her later, but in the year before Jake died her husband wrote several times and his entries were so helpful to me.

I was especially interested in his words as I had the sense that his experience would be my own some day. It helped to give me some idea of what may be my reality and to see that someone could continue living even when the joy of his life was gone.

In that vein I continue to write about my experience, hoping that it helps someone, somewhere as they anticipate what will eventually happen to us all. 

We celebrated another birthday, Lauren’s, and it was bitter-sweet. We all just miss Jake being here with us. The celebration is not the same.

Oh how I ache for his physical presence.  I get on most days well enough, but sometimes it just hits me like a tidal wave and my body aches for him. It is the connection with Jake that I ache for- the expression that was part of our physical affection that bound our bodies and souls as one. I just want him back.

I yearn for the comfort and closeness of my best friend. Not only were we yoked as spouses, but we were each other’s dearest friends, helpmeets, and confidants. There is little I did not know about him and he about me and there was nothing we could not talk about together. Ours was a marriage of communion and a relationship forged on mutual trust, respect and admiration. In my limited experience I don’t think that happens every day.

I read in a grief book how usually in life most of our losses are replaced by some gain. We leave our childhood home to pursue an education. We gradate and leave our friends to secure a job. We get married and leave our nuclear family to form a new family unit. That had been my experience for 33 years. All of my losses were replaced by some net gain in this way. I thought that was how it worked. And yet in the grief book, he explains that catastrophic loss does not function this way. It is a loss of something good with no equivalent replacement.

At this juncture it is nearly impossible to think of how any of this will turn out. I could maybe understand if our relationship had been horrible, or sinful, or reckless how a great loss could be turned for the better. How something good could possibly come of it. But that is not the case. Our life was SO good. Jake and I dearly loved each other. We cared for our children. We loved God and tried to serve him. We saved and budgeted and planned for our future. It felt like we were doing everything right. And then it was all stripped away, stolen, dismantled, destroyed just as the bud was beginning to form.

A friend posted a quote by Cynthia Occelli that I appreciated a lot-

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”

I am still in the destruction phase- if I am growing it is not apparent to me because all around me it feels like my life, my dreams, my happiness are in the past. I appreciate people with perspective. Who have weathered this terrible storm before and can tell me that it will work out. I believe them, even though I haven’t the faintest idea HOW it will.

I try and live day to day, and usually find some happiness in the pursuit. But then, as always, thoughts of the future, of the YEARS and YEARS ahead come creeping into my mind and my heart re-fractures into a million pieces and I come undone. Living for another 50 years without Jake seems nearly impossible when it’s been this hard and I haven’t even lived without him for 1.

I did not know that pain like this existed.

Let me rephrase, I did know that pain like this existed but I did not know what it felt like. I did not know it through my own experience.

Oh how differently I view people, situations, lives that have been lived under the burden of crushing, debilitating, suffocating pain. It is more present than we can possibly begin to understand and I have a new awareness for how many people around me are well acquainted with its companionship.

As C.S. Lewis stated, “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, “Blessed are they that mourn,” and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”

So these were some of the thoughts in my mind and feelings in my heart as I cried myself to sleep on Sunday night. I cannot cry all of the time, but when it hits I cry buckets and buckets of tears until the well is empty and the flow is staunched.

On Sunday night before I got into bed I prayed a simple prayer. I told Heavenly Father how much I was hurting and pleaded that He would help me know, in some personal way, that He was aware of me.

I fell into a dreamless sleep and woke up to a typical Monday morning. I got the kids off to school, started laundry, picked up the house and made my grocery list and shopping run. I had come back and was working on some bills at the computer when I got a call from my mother-in-law. She asked if I was home and said that she had something she wanted to bring to me.

I told her to come on over and kept working.

She knocked on the door and had in her hand the most beautiful bouquet of red roses. I just started to cry. She told me that she woke up on Monday morning with the impression that she should bring them to me, that Jacob would want her to do that for him. She acted on that impression and was a direct answer to my prayer.

My Dad also came by with another bunch of roses and a sweet note and gift card and said that he wanted me to have them as though they were from Jake. I teared up at his love and thoughtfulness and was so grateful for another answer to my prayer.

Monday afternoon our cousin invited my sister and I and our kids to an outdoor ice sculpting event. We were walking around and I ran into one of Jake’s dear friends from high school and his wife and kids. I can’t say what a comfort it was for me to see him- someone who knows and loves Jacob and who was a part of our dating and marriage experience. He was so kind to me and that interaction was another answer to my prayer.

Yesterday I had so many kindnesses shown to me- texts from friends and family, a valentine from my mom, phone calls, more flowers from my sister, a spring bud from my visiting teachers, lunch with a dear friend, a cookie from another friend, and dinner with my sister and her family and was grateful for all of those acts of love and thoughtfulness that bound me up, helped my aching heart, and answered my prayer.

Through these acts, direct and personal and inspired by the Holy Ghost I came to know again that the Savior and my sweet Jacob are aware of me and are trying in so many ways to help.

I believe that there are times where we must experience pain, heartache and sorrow. We have to walk through it and ache and grieve the difficulty of those moments. But I also believe that if we rely on the Savior, and trust in Him and his promised blessings we never have to go there alone or stay there forever. He will send help- the help that we need. And if we have eyes to see and recognize His love, that help will be enough.

Another verse of “How firm a foundation” moved me recently. It talks about how in every condition- sickness or health, poverty or wealth, at home or abroad, on land or on sea—that as our days may DEMAND so our SUCCOR shall be.

For years I have had days that demand great succor from the Lord.  And He has met my demand and succored me with great tenderness in every instance.

I am a witness that Jesus Christ will never leave us alone, never abandon us to our foes, never forsake us in our misery as we cling to Him and rely fully on his ample arm.