Thanksgiving in Grief

 

Thanksgiving.  How could I have ever known before losing Wyatt that holidays could bring a pain that slices deeper and wider than any knife?  As families are gathered around the table and all the children are present in homes large and small, there is wholeness that can be felt.  The deep sigh settles in as parents look around and realize the joy of togetherness – though life may not be perfect, there is a permeating sense of rightness in the world when we can tuck our babies into bed, safe and sound after a heavy meal of turkey and potatoes, heart light with love, stomachs full and blessed. 

 

That word – blessed.  It has been the cause of much confusion in my heart and much searching. Am I still blessed when my table sits raw with grief as four of us sit down and the empty chair remains?  How do I have a thankful heart when everything in me wants to scream that “This is not fair!?”  When prayers of thanks tend to center around the gratefulness in hearts for wellness, safety and provision…where was our safety that day when Wyatt went to heaven because of a complete freak accident?  The odds of it NOT happening were so much greater than the chance that it could ever happen again.  In fact, the investigation showed that it probably couldn’t.  “Could not be re-created if you tried.”  Really, God?  How am I supposed to feel about that?  Where was our safety, blessing and provision?  What about all the prayers I prayed daily for the protection by His angel armies over my children?  Prone to anxiety and able to imagine every terrible thing that could happen, I used to be plagued with worry over my children’s safety.  That is why I was always “overbearing” with my boys when it came to things that may involve danger.  I was the parent who told Eli as he began driving his brothers around town about the responsibility he held in his hands.  I would look him in the eye many times before he left our driveway and say, “Eli, you hold three precious lives in your hands.  You hold my whole world behind that wheel.  Please drive careful.  Do not get on your phone or play with the music.  Just drive.  I love you.” 

 

Here I sit on my couch Thanksgiving morning.  The house is clean and calm, and the fog has settled deeply around our house on a hill.  The sound of a tractor outside lumbers on as Levi is putting his hand to staying busy and my washing machine hums with its constant load.  My children are asleep upstairs in their warm beds…but one is not here.  There is one bed that sits so horrifyingly empty.  He is nowhere to be found, yet I go to visit him at a grave.  We are going through the motions of living and breathing, and I have been dreading today with all the pieces of my shattered heart.

 

I walk into stores and feel sucker-punched in the gut.  The Christmas music almost brings me to my knees.  Thankfully, the masks help hide tears and trembling lips as I duck my head and hope to not see anyone I know.  Most the time if I try to talk, I will break.  It’s easier to be anonymous and reside behind the plastic veil I wear, so thin, it will crumble the second I am in my car.  The celebration of the season has not reached my heart…and yet the quiet presence of the Lord remains.  

 

I am writing because I feel led to share what today is like for us, a family who is grieving…living through Thanksgiving.  I have been to the depths of Sheol and I have flooded my bed with tears.  I understand the heart of Jacob as he grieved for his son Joseph, “’…and he said, surely I will go down to Sheol in mourning for my son.’  And His father wept for him.”  Genesis 37:35

 

I have questioned how my heart can participate in a day that can almost feel like a mockery to my reality.  When others get to post about how #Blessed they are, I stare at an empty seat at the table.  How do I not allow my heart to grow bitter, broken by life and festering with toxic suffering?  My heart has cried out many times, “What do you want from me, Lord?”

 

In brokenness and utter defeat, I have found that I must dig down to the very bedrock of Truth, past all the things that would distract and keep me from finding the true treasure.  Food on the table – yes, a blessing when others have so much less.  A house?   Check that box.  I am so thankful.  A bed to fall into every night with covers over my head – thankful.  Provision financially and all the gifts we have been given – yes.  Thank you, God.  These are all good gifts!  And now here’s where it gets tricky…what about that thankful heart when health suffers, or terminal illness’ presence is the unwelcome guest at the table?  That hurts.  The family who has lost financially or provisionally can at least say, “We are all together and that’s what really matters.  I can lose it all, but the people I love are what matter.”  Those are the platitudes we use to get through life.  However, when you lose a child, all that falls into a dung heap while you are left covered in ashes with literally NOTHING you can say to make it better.  The Lord has allowed all the platitudes to fall by the wayside, all the things that distract to be burned to a crisp; yet He has asked me to mine down deep with blistered hands and a weary frame.  I must zoom out and adjust my perspective in a whole new way. 

 

For the Chamberlain family this Thanksgiving, we will be thanking God for the gift of His Son.  That is the foundation, the bedrock, the never-changing Truth.  It is simple, and yet takes the greatest amount of faith the Lord has ever required from me.  I will never be thankful that my son lost his life on a terrible day in April, but I can be on-my-knees thankful that Jesus Christ made a way for my son to be ushered into heaven and that WYATT GAINED ETERNAL LIFE.  I won’t be whispering prayers of thanks for our safety or wellness, but I will be telling Jesus I am so grateful He is with me and walks beside me.  I can be thankful that through all of life’s suffering, it is not worth even comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us someday (Romans 8:18). 

 

The Truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ never changes.  He is showing himself to be my Father and my good, gentle Shepherd.  This does not mean that I won’t be on the floor dripping with snot and tears today and countless times in the future.  I will still be dry heaving over a toilet when the grief hits in overwhelming waves, and I am going to struggle on a daily level in the battle over my mind.  It is a constant war unlike anything there are words to describe.  I feel like I took a blow to the gut that day and time froze; I have still not been able to take a breath.  There is no air.  I don’t know how to describe it in any other way.

 

But God.  There is no other.  Where else would I go?  I have searched to the depths, and He remains. 

 

May the Lord fill you with His unchanging truth today in a world that changes like the tide and winds. May you dig past all the wonderful gifts that can distract, and find the bedrock of Jesus Christ that will build your house strong, so that when the winds and the waves come, you do not fall.   With tears in my eyes, I beseech you to love every minute with your children and tell them what a treasure they are.  Teach them to love the Lord their God above all else.  There is not a minute we spent in family devotions that I regret.  Not one.  When you tuck your little’s into bed tonight, thank God for them and then give them fully to the Father who loves them even more than you do.  And celebrate mightily for their physical presence in your life. 

 

For those that suffer in some way alongside our family this year, I hope that you remember the God who is WITH you. Remember you do not walk alone. It seems fitting to end with this Psalm.

 

Psalm 18

I love You, O LORD, my strength. 

The Lord is my pillar, and my fortress,

And my deliverer.

My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge;

My shield, and the horn of my

Salvation, my high tower. 

I will call on the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,

And I will be saved from my enemies.

The cords of death encircled me,

And the torrents of destruction terrified me. 

The cords of Sheol surrounded me; the snares of death confronted me.

In my distress I called on the LORD,

And cried for help to my God;

He heard my voice from His temple,

And my cry for help came before Him to His ears.

…(vs16) He sent from above, He took me;

He drew me out of many waters.

He delivered me from my strong enemy

My Wyatt

How did we get here?  How did the landscape before me become a vast pit of smoking ash, broken shards, and confusion?  I don’t recognize the path laid out before me; it is none I was ever going to be called to walk.  Yet here I am.  Here we are.  We are strangers and aliens in a land that no longer is home, looking toward heaven – the only hope for our pain – and yet continuing to wake up, breathing, day after day with no end in sight.  We miss our Wyatt.  We are here and he is not.  How can this be?  I ask myself that question every single day. 

All of us parents can think of a million things we would rather walk through than to walk through this.  I was one of you – once.  Now, I am a mother who has lived the worst of every nightmare I have ever had in all of life, multiplied and crammed into one horrific day that spills it’s awful poison out onto the rest of our days.  I have buried my heart in the ground.  It is every bit as terrible as you would imagine.  Squeeze out of your heart every last drop of grief and terror you can imagine at the thought of losing your child, roll it and savor it as you would the last drop of water in a never-ending desert and then multiply that by itself.  That is the length and breadth of sorrow upon sorrow we feel every day…missing our Wyatt.  I often say that there are no words to explain this ache, and there are not.  Nor should there be.  I don’t long for anyone to feel this unspeakable loss.  It is beyond comprehension.

Every day we get up and breathe.  Every day we walk forward, trudging through the deepest swamp with only light for our next step.  I go through the daily tasks.  I take care of my family.  I fold my boys laundry and long to touch Wyatt’s clothing, and see it come through the wash… but it is put away in his dresser and sits alone in his closet.  I long for him to show signs of life in our house, so that I can pour my mommy heart into taking care of him.  I have heard it said that grief is just love that has nowhere to go. No way to reach out and connect.  Open arms, empty.

His one wheel sits at the door like it always has.  It gets cobwebs underneath it that I consistently clear, but the one wheel never moves from its place.  It is abandoned, along with his shoes beside it.  His helmet sits on a bench above, untouched.  All I have now are remnants of my child, but never my child.  Not on this earth.  The emptiness is greater than any loss I could ever imagine.  Like the deepest darkest pit that stretches on into forever, there is nothing that really fills it.

I take four plates out of the cabinet at mealtimes…not five.  I buy a little less food.  I never realized how much he ate until the day came that there were so many leftovers from dinners that I had to realign my expectations of food consumption.  And appetites.  Maybe we are eating less too.  I could never keep enough ketchup in the house.  He put it on everything and ate copious amounts of it with burgers, any meat we had for dinner and mid-day leftovers.  But now, every time I open the fridge, the Costco size ketchup sits as a constant reminder that it is still there.  And Wyatt is not.

The middle seat in the car is a foe that stares me in the face.  I can’t seem to escape it.  Five is such a full number…four is…not.  Our very home radiates the ache of emptiness, not because the four in this home are not enough for each other, but because the one who is not here would complete us.  We are a family of five and always will be.  The one that is missing is forever in our every heartbeat, but not by our side in this life.  The one who was goofy, made us laugh, antagonized us all and was truly the fuel to our flame.  The very dynamic of our home has changed without him here.  We all stumble along, dazed and living on autopilot, still shocked months later that this is reality.  We can’t quite grasp onto this existence. 

People have asked me how we are doing.  We are hanging in there.  We truly are.  We are fighting to go on.  We choose to keep breathing and moving forward, but our hearts have not quite left the spot where we saw him last.  We have post-traumatic stress disorder and flashbacks of a day more terrible than visions of what I would imagine hell itself.  The day we fought our hardest to keep him here, while heaven welcomed him.  My mommy heart knows what my eyes saw…he was with the Lord from the moment it happened.  But the problem is, we weren’t.  While the Lord carried him in peace, we breathed and lived through his last day, his last minutes, his last seconds and we have trauma and grief all tangled into an ugly wave that crashes into us at moments we expect it least as well as moments we know are coming like a hurricane gale we can’t control. 

So many things are different in our lives now.  Most television and movies have too many visuals that instantly trigger a horrible memory.  Sleep is an enemy to conquer every night.  Living daily requires more energy than a years’ worth of trouble used to take, and the Lord is asking that our faith be stronger than it ever has been before.  This is what the valley of the shadow of death looks like.

I choose not to sugar coat my words, because that would not be truth.  Being a believer in Jesus Christ and having the FULL ASSURANCE of heaven for eternity does not take away the sting of loss on this earth.  Last week I was reading in 1 Corinthians 15:36, where it states that the last enemy to be destroyed is death.  Yes, to be apart from the body is to be present with Christ.  YES!  I agree and amen!  But that does not excuse our weary souls from walking through the pain and destruction that death causes ON THIS EARTH.  So that is where we are – sojourners clinging to the truth that has not changed in Jesus Christ yet hurting so deeply.  This requires faith.  We believe that we know a God who is good while trusting Him when things on this earth are the opposite of good.  We know that He has the final say – that He has the ultimate victory.  We are standing upon the truth that death will be conquered forever and is in fact an enemy that was never supposed to be on this earth; we contend with it because we are a fallen human race living in a fallen world.  Do I believe that God took my child from me on this earth?  No.  I believe the enemy did that – he caused Wyatt to be taken from our arms.  But I know with every breath unto my last that it was Jesus who picked him up and carried him to safety, and Him alone who can make good out of all the enemy planned as evil. 

There are no cherry-picked answers here – deep is calling unto deep in this broken heart of mine, as I long for my Wyatt, cry open mouthed, breathless, and ugly, weeping for my boy.  There are no easy answers when you walk a broken road, clinging to faith when there are so many shadows and blinding pain that fills every step.  There were no cherry-picked answers for Martha and Mary when they grieved their dear brother, Lazarus who was in the tomb.  Do we ever stop to wonder why Jesus cried with them, even though he knew the end of the story?  He, above all others, knew Lazarus would be raised to live on this earth again, yet Jesus also knew a deeper hope than any we have on this earth.  He knew all about heaven.  Why did he cry?  I think I may have a greater understanding now.  Because the last enemy is death.  Death is sad, death is ugly, and our souls were not really made for death.  There was no death in the garden that God created long ago.

The death that came to a garden at the beginning of time was contended with in another garden.  Jesus knew the end of the story when he prayed through the night in the garden of Gethsemane.  His blood that poured out through sweat wet the robes of the Son of God.  Jesus knew the end of the story when he prayed that night.  He chose to suffer for us.  He chose to walk this earth, a man acquainted with sorrow, so that he could minister to us in our sorrow.  He walked every painful step ahead of us, so that in our deepest, darkest, and most lonely valley, we would never truly be alone or without hope.  Whether we walk it because our own sin put us there or whether we walk it due to the sin that lives in this world, our own deepest valley in the shadow of death need not be the end of us.   And the physical shadow of death was not the end of my Wyatt.  I know fully where he is…and I know who my God is.  The God I don’t understand – the God I prayed to who seems to have not answered my prayers. The God who is allowing my family to ache and suffer through this pain.  That God.  That is the One who still loves us, who still sees us and who holds my Wyatt even now.

I don’t understand.  I don’t think I ever will.  I have been more than heartbroken and confused.  This accident should not have happened.  We are careful parents.  Our kids wear helmets, have speed limits, bedtime curfew, boundaries, and rules.  Wyatt was so careful with guns and obeyed gun safety in every way he was taught.  He did nothing wrong.  The gun discharged without the trigger being pulled.  If Wyatt would have been one half inch to the right, it would not have been tragic.  It was a freak accident.  There are layers to that statement.  It feels targeted.  It feels so unfair.  It feels so lonely and beyond belief.  Where is my hope when the night hours stretch on and panic is so deep in my chest that it overcomes my human ability to contain it?  Where is my hope when I kneel at my sons grave, broken…so very…broken?  Where do I look when my heart can’t seem to stand up yet, so it sits right there with Wyatt- on the mountain, on the ground where I last held him in my arms…

I look to Jesus.  I don’t have answers, but I know my God.  The enemy will take his shots – and he did.  He aimed so incredibly well and laid bare our hearts.  We are bent down in the dirt; all else that could be sifted and shaken has fallen away.  The only thing left is our hope in Jesus, our only anchor in the storm.  There is no more mirage of what life can offer – no amount of fun, money, vacations, fulfilled wish lists, laughter or social engagements will ever take away the ache and emptiness in our hearts.  The fluff in our lives has been burned on the altar of pain, and all that is left is all that will remain for eternity.  Life has become vividly clear and yet shadows of gray all at the same time. There is nothing – NOTHING- here on this earth that will ever bring my Wyatt back. 

But if you ask me to, I will tell you all day long about the reason why we yet have hope.  HEAVEN.  Only because of JESUS.  He reaches out to ALL HUMANITY -every color, race, and culture- and pulls us up from the depths.  He paid the price for all our sin and made a way for us to be forgiven before the God of heaven and earth.  He lovingly clothes us in robes of righteousness not our own.  He bridged the chasm for Wyatt to be carried in the Saviors arms, straight to wholeness and safety.  And if asked, He will do the same for you – for me. 

Our lives are a vapor, and we never know when it will waft up and be done.  Wyatt’s last day was not any different than the day previous…we just didn’t know what was ahead of us.  I have heard that we never really do before tragedy hits.  I can attest to it.  I pray that all my days, I will cling to Christ and not give an inch to the enemy.  I pray that my boys and my husband will follow Jesus fiercely and that the plan set against us for evil would blow back tenfold into the enemies’ face and that we would be a tool used for God’s good.  I pray that we would be quietly strong in the Lord and that though evil come against us, that we would stand.  Not in our own strength, for that has already passed us by, but in the sturdy truth founded on God’s Word alone.  I pray that we would not believe everything we see, when we live in a wasteland of suffering and there seems to be no hope in sight…but that, like saints of old, we would live for a promise and a land not yet given to us.  A land where my precious Wyatt is living now.

My Wyatt was full of adventure.  This picture describes him in so many ways.

How could we know that this was our last Christmas together...

That smile...pure joy.  I know there is joy and contentment in heaven that is so much better than anything the thrills of this earth has to offer.  

This is how I picture him in heaven, probably cruising on a very fast one-wheel through the skies.  

This was the last picture my precious sister-in-law had of Wyatt on her camera roll.  

"Bye Auntie.  Until we meet again..."

Wyatt, our hearts are absolutely broken into irreparable pieces without you.  I really don't know how we go on living and breathing.  The ache is unbearable.  I know you are safe, and more alive than ever.  I just don't know how long it will be before we see you again and I miss you so much.  My heart is fractured into a million pieces.  I miss your hugs, your laughter, your eyes that twinkle, your sense of adventure and your energy that would drive me crazy and make me laugh.  I miss saying good-night to you and feeling your little man-frame try to avoid my snuggles.  Your grin, your gusto that you greeted every day with and your friendship are deep holes of loss in our home.  I don't know how we will do this, but we will try our best to be strong in the Lord.  I am so proud of you, my Wyatt.  My deepest prayer for all your life, above all else, was that you would love Jesus, choose Him as your own and that we could spend eternity together.  That prayer was answered.  I will hold tight and remember this.  With every beat of my heart, I will miss you every single day I am alive. Some day I will get there, and throw my arms around your neck...I will squeeze you so tight and my head will rest right on your shoulder like it always did since you grew taller than me.  We will laugh and dance in the presence of Jesus!  

I love you forever, Wyatt.  I love being your mommy. Some day I will hold you again.