Walking THROUGH the valley

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Psalm 23:4

Normally this blog is solely dedicated to my personal reflections that are daily part of my careful and purposeful reading and study of the Bible. But for the rest of this week these posts will be really different. This post will attempt to explain exactly why.

In January of this year, the trail of my life entered the valley of the shadow of death. My wife of 36 years, Joni, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer that had spread to a point that treatment options were only available to manage her pain and perhaps extend some time to us. This was a rapid free fall into the valley with no warning, no parachute, just a hard crash landing into a hard place, with all the attendant emotional brokenness and shock. She died February 17th. But the valley remains… the valley has been the location of my journey still.

My internal GPS wants so badly to navigate through this valley. The map looks manageable. As a pastor and biblical counselor I think I know EXACTLY what the map should look like to journey out of this canyon shrouded in sharp rocks and little light. Indeed, at times the box canyon widens enough to let in me have a view of blue skies above me, and yet this valley ahead seems to stretch uninterrupted into the horizon. And there is only one direction out. It is walking THROUGH the valley. And the valley is made up of GRIEF, MOURNING, and MEMORIAL.

I must confess that time is the element of the journey through the valley that I had not anticipated. And everyone who loses a loved one, in my case, THE LOVED ONE, takes a slightly different route and pace through the valley. I have tried to run at maximum pace a few times with the hopes that just pushing myself harder will get me out of grief and on to great new things. This just creates emotional and spiritual exhaustion. It is because for the first six weeks of this valley, as I cared for Joni, I saw the darkest sights, pushed beyond them, doing things I never thought I would do because they had to be done, and hey, everything I did caring for her in her humiliating sickness and death, was time our souls had together. After her death, I was emotionally spent when I was left alone in the valley. No way could I run. It was stupid of me to try. And there were moments where I experienced full on mental and emotional breakdown… what were brief (thankfully) insanities (including very brief and frighteningly intense breaks from reality), some minor episodes of dissociative, almost catatonic paralysis , honest flashbacks that to this day felt exactly like I had travelled in time, and an awareness that unresolved griefs from my childhood came back with horror movie vengeance. That was the darkest part of this valley and was at it worst in February and March. The valley was a claustrophobic tunnel back then. It is much wider, and I am more aware of the trail back out of the valley today.

In April I began to think through what I needed to do. And I knew grief would just keep coming in waves. So many “first time without Joni” moments hit me regularly. They are like waves or swift current. They pick me up and carry me. I’ve had enough whitewater training to know that I must turn in the direction of the current, fend off the rocks with arms and legs out, and let it carry me to an eddy of peace. And every grief wave has done this so far. It drops me down into a peace-filled memory of Joni and our life together because it was really that good. I have found that through active mourning, that is trying to get ahead of an anticipated event or upcoming memory, the grief is actually kind of fulfilling. It is intentional and under much more of my control. And once I have mourned well, I can create a memorial, whether it is a photo I snap while at a place that used to be one of “our places”, or it is stopping to journal a little about how I feel right now, that memorial seems to take all the energy out of grief’s wave. It slowly collapses then at my feet in the soft sand and I can journey further… faster… through the valley.

This week is a series of mournings and memorials. I knew this week would be rough. June 14th would have been 37 years of marriage for us. This is an anniversary alone, by myself, without her. Nobody wants that experience. I don’t want that experience. The valley has narrowed into a tunnel again and I want to see sunlight. The only way I know to do that is to purposefully mourn, reflect (for me that means to write), and reach peace with the reality that at least for this present time I am humanly alone. And so I have strategically organized a personal retreat for this week.

It began yesterday. I spent the day reading through resources. I want to manage grief well and reading helps. I want to share a couple of resources on grief that I am currently walking with through the valley. One resource is a GriefShare notebook. Last week I joined a local GriefShare group. It meets at a church near me that is a gospel witness in its community. This is a support group for those in grief and it is generally well-reviewed, for me importantly in the biblical counseling world it is a recommended resource by some trusted voices. The group gathers to watch videos and share stories. There was a short prayer at the meeting I attended. The video was insightful. The stories of the participants of course seated around me were heart-rending. My caregiving and counselor heart was immediately wanting to help. I want to be a part of it because I believe moving forward with something like GriefShare will always be a part of my ministry. I am not sure churches are as intentional as we can be in helping this kind of hurt.

But this support group was, at least for me, a real train wreck. It is being led officially by a couple of well-intentioned, rather soft-spoken female seminary interns. I have absolutely nothing against women in this role, in fact they may be superior at it as natural nurturers. They were just so quiet and so soft. It collided with the harsh realities of the grieving. But that was not the train wreck. The train went barreling off the tracks when an older gentleman who was in charge of the opening discussion, the video presentation, and who spoke the most in the “free time” sharing announced that this was his seventh time through the program and he was still very angry at God. He shared how he regularly would get so mad at God at home that he’d drop to his knees, curse at God, scream his anger and unfairness accusations. He shared how he had not been in church for three years because he was mad at God for taking his wife. I thought to myself, “nobody wants to challenge this guy? There is a couple right next to me grieving the suicide of their teenage son just a few weeks earlier and the best this dude can do is share his bitterness and tell us God can handle us cussing at Him?” Dear God in heaven, be merciful to this man. And please, don’t let me ever become him in any category! I hope that wasn’t Pharisaical, but this man’s root of bitterness was springing up to defile many and nobody stopped him from doing it. I spent 40 minutes with him after the meeting trying to point him to biblical lament and telling him I have learned that my anger and self-pity is broken lament that needs to be fixed by biblical lament, using God’s Words to voice my complaint and trusting God is graciously using even my most painful loss to make me better, not bitter. I am still going to attend this group through the rest of the summer. But I think it will be more of ministry to others as it ministers to me. It confirms my suspicions that we leaders in the church need to teach biblical lament and grief to our people.

The second resource has come to me in the most gracious of circumstances, through the recommendation of a new friend who has been through this valley longer than I have. It is a book, written by a Jewish rabbi, and I read through it twice yesterday. It is full of wonderful understandings of the nature of grief, the need for self-care, the need to travel at your own pace, and the power that is ours as we accept the reality of the death we never wanted to know so that we can grow beyond it. “Living When A Loved One Has Died” by Earl A. Grollman has been around for 45 years. It is in its third edition. It is a small paperback… a kind of inspirational book. I read through it in less than an hour. Than I picked it up 30 minutes later and read through it again. And in many ways it has been the most helpful resource to start this week of intentional lassoing of grief. Some nuggets of wisdom:

• Concerning asking “why” this happened: “There is no answer that bridges the chasm of irreparable separation. There is no satisfactory response for an unresolvable dilemma. Not all questions have answers. Unanswered “why’s” are part of life.”
• Concerning the past: “The past still travels with us and what it has been makes us what we are.”
• Concerning leveraging grief for the future: “Try to strike that delicate balance between a yesterday that should be remembered and a tomorrow that must be created.”
• Concerning new relationships moving forward: “Are you using the time to build a life with new friendships? Is there an upward slope of improvement? YOU must help time to do its healing.”
• Concerning the balance of alone time with social time: “Solitude is not loneliness; loneliness is the pain of being alone. Solitude is the glory of being alive. In solitude you find time to think and take stock of your life.”

I am so grateful for this book coming into my life through a new friend’s care for my story. Reading it twice got my first day of intentional retreat off to the right start.

And so my hope is for the valley to keep widening this week. I will daily share that experience here. And if you made it to these final sentences, congratulations and thank you for being a friend who cares with me. I hope one day I will show you the same care if you find yourself walking through this valley feeling alone.