Category: Grief

Messy Theology

Published on by Lindsey Claassen1 Comment

When you believe that your God allows the people you love dearly to die much too early, what does that say about your God, and who you are becoming?

Who would you be and how would you feel and how would you live life if you decided to believe that God, whatever you believe God to be, only allows each of us to die right on time? Regardless of the circumstances of our death.

What if you decided to believe that it could be no other way? That everyone dies at the right time. Even if you don’t understand it. And never will. When you’re in your physical body. Who would you be if you decided to believe that everyone dies at the perfect time? Everyone. — Tom Zuba

I read that quote by Tom Zuba (look him up…what an incredible story of loss and life) a few weeks ago and it has bounced around in my head ever since. Deacon is gone, and what I choose to believe about God because of it is life-changing. While I do (did?) believe that no one dies by accident, guilt plagues me. Guilt has made a home on my shoulder. Guilt walks beside me around the block on a sunny day. It sits beside me driving the kids to school. It stares back at me in the mirror. I can even find it in the eyes of friends and family looking back at me (although I’m certain it couldn’t be found in their heart or mind, it’s only me placing it there). Cause the thing I was supposed to do….the only thing, really…I didn’t do. Protect my child.

In a variety of scenarios it follows me. I didn’t get him to the right doctors. I didn’t push hard enough to get him to that program in Denver to be a part of that asthma study. I didn’t take him to the hospital soon enough. I didn’t find the right combination of drugs. I didn’t see that this time something was different. I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t. It’s in my head on repeat.

What I would have said I believe about God, before losing Deacon, was that He knows the number of each of our days on this earth. That nothing I did or didn’t do killed Deacon. That “all the days ordained for Deacon were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139:16 I would have said all that. But I find myself saying it now and then adding a *but maybe* to it. Maybe if I’d tried… Maybe if I’d seen…. Maybe if I’d called…

I’m on shaky ground. But I think that’s ok. God’s ground isn’t shaky. He’s firm. And he’s letting me fling my wonky theology and wounded heart at him. This time is creating who I am becoming and what it says about the God I believe in.

I’m out of words to comfort myself and put a bandaid over the guilt. I only have God. He’s there while I try to be gentle with myself but fail. He’s there when I know I’m supposed to have hope but just don’t have the oomph for it. He’s there when I practice telling Him that I’m not fine. That this is NOT fine. He’s there.

In the school drop off line when I say, “You feel so far.”

When I’m making beds and say, “I’m not sure how to see You here.”

In the grocery store when I think, “I can’t find You but I really want to.”

Washing the dishes whispering the uncomfortable truth, “I don’t know if I want to find You, but I want to say that this hurts.”

These honest, messy, prayers, brought to Him before cleaning them up. The guilt. The questions about my God. Is He good? Is He there? What do I truly believe the Bible says about life and death? The ache of who I am becoming through this. I’m counting on what’s being created in my darkness and chaos.

And so I ponder again, “Who would you be if you decided to believe that everyone dies at the perfect time? Everyone.” Working on finding out.

Deacon Aug. 2017 ~ 2 yrs old “And Jesus thank you” was how he finished every prayer.

And If Not

Published on by Lindsey Claassen1 Comment

Long-time friends recently passed the nine year mark of their baby girl going to heaven after a year long battle with leukemia. I can take myself back to those days so easily. The shock that Paxten hadn’t made it…that she hadn’t gotten her miracle. The empty, hollow feeling of what now?

I’ve watched these friends learn to live in a world without their daughter for nine years. I’ve seen them crawl towards love, fight for joy, and build a new life that absolutely includes Pax…just not they way they’d hoped and longed. This year had an entirely new perspective for all they’ve been though. This year I couldn’t help but go back to our desperate prayers for her healing. Those same groanings I repeated over my little boy nine years later.

I started thinking how wonderful to be the parent who can proclaim, “God is good! My child is a miracle!” because their child could have died but didn’t.

But even more, the depth of peace, knowing, and love for the parent whose child has died and can say the same thing.

Nine years later, my friends stood and said, God is good. While my heart still breaks for their loss, what an inspiration and hope for my raw and confused heart.

New Year

Published on by Lindsey ClaassenLeave a comment

2020 is the year that ended me. I’ve felt confused, scared, lonely, isolated, anxious, shamed for going out, shamed for staying in. My kids have been in school, out of school, and every version in between. We’ve cancelled trips, family gatherings, church, and restaurants. Political division, racial tensions, pandemic confusion. And that was the easy part. I also buried my son. I have every reason to join the world with a raised middle finger to 2020 as we cross over to 2021. I hope to never experience pain so horrific ever again.

And yet. I find myself wanting to stay here, in this mess of a year that brought unimaginable pain, because its the last year he was in. The last year that will have memories associated with him. The last summer at the lake, last birthday, last meal cooked for him, last time I kissed him goodnight, and the last time I rubbed his back awake. How do I leave that all behind? I don’t know how to step into a year that won’t have one single new memory of him.

I’m not ok even though I’m ok. 2020 taught me that joy and grief can coexist. That I can beg for my own death in the same breath that I pray for life. It taught me grace and rage. It taught me an existence with one foot on Earth and one foot in eternity and that no one dies before their time. Its the last year I will ever have with my beautiful boy in his body. He is Home and its impossible to imagine beginning a new year, continuing a lifetime without him physically here.

In the middle of a good closet cry, a friend texts:

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:18-19

It’s not easy but its there….a new beginning. Not formed by the abandonment of the past, but from the shards of it. 2021 doesn’t change 2020 (or every year before). My past is still real, still filled with love, still valid.

I can’t say happy. Just….New Year.

Choose Mourning

Published on by Lindsey ClaassenLeave a comment

Choose joy, they say. It’s on shirts, bumper stickers, wall hangings, and tattoos. I’ve even managed to muster it up before too. Take a deep breath, a sip of Dr. Pepper 10, whisper a prayer, and choose joy.

That isn’t happening now though. The joy isn’t just hard to find, I sometimes wonder if it even exists anymore. Choose joy. An honest option? Or just another cliché.

  • Tomorrow is a new day.
  • Joy comes in the morning.
  • You can’t have the rainbow without the rain.
  • The sun will come out tomorrow.

The losses of this year scream over me. And I don’t want to be bullied into joy. I won’t be cliched into it. Not only do I not think I can let go of the hurt and ache, I don’t think I even want to. In truth, the more I look at Advent, the more I realize that sorrow and loss isn’t exactly in opposition to it. The world shows the Christmas story as sweet little nativity scenes. Clean barn animals, three happy rich guys with gifts, and the reminder that “joy can even be found in a stable”! But look again and I also see that born into that night was a God who would now have to suffer, lose everything, feel abandoned, experience anger, be rejected, and even cry out in anguish…wondering where God had gone. There’s an Advent I can relate to.

Sure, a cliché can be right. The sun will come out tomorrow. But that doesn’t always mean there’s comfort or help in it. Sometimes I need to sit on the floor of my closet at 2 am and weep until my body aches, my eyes are raw, and as if the sun may not ever rise again.

I can celebrate a Messiah sent but not without also absorbing in pain for what it meant for that little baby and what would come. My soul just wants to curl up and weep. I believe the Emmanuel…the God With Us…knows exactly how I feel. And that’s a place I can find a mediocre of comfort this season. Not from choosing joy….from choosing mourning.

Muscle Memory

Published on by Lindsey ClaassenLeave a comment

One of the challenging parts of the last two months without Deacon that I didn’t see coming has been learning to stop parenting him. My muscle memory for being his mom is so strong. Grabbing his lunch box in the morning, setting his spot at the table, checking for an inhaler in my bag before we leave. Every time I do something that involves him that doesn’t need to be done anymore it hits so hard again…he’s gone.

The need to do for him has been extra loud while shopping for Christmas presents. It was impossible to scan the toy isle and not see 10 things he would have wanted and I would have wanted to get him. So Derek and I did. We bought the monster trucks and hot wheels and obnoxious screeching dinosaurs. I piled them in our cart, took them home, and wrapped them. And while there’s a boy on an angel tree on our town who will get the joy of opening these gifts on Christmas morning, and I need to take them to the delivery point soon, just for now, for a little bit longer, I’ll look at them under my tree and pretend they’re going to Deacon.

Sometimes I internally kick myself for not remembering that I don’t need to do something. But then I think of, with dread, the day coming in the future when I’ll realize I went all day without trying to do something for him. What will that day say about me? So for now, I keep throwing his jacket in the back of the car with the others, adding his favorite foods to the grocery order, and heading upstairs to make sure he’s fallen asleep in his bed and not somewhere strange. It was an honor in the mundane to care for him while he was alive, so I’ll try to find joy in continuing to do for him while my muscle memory is still strong.

The Weight of Grief

Published on by Lindsey Claassen2 Comments

There is a famous sculpture by Celeste Roberge, that, while not her initial plan, has been widely described and shared as depicting the “weight of grief”. After so many years of compounding grief, I look at it and immediately feel a connection to the sculpture. It looks like I feel. 4,000 pounds of sorrow. Each rock representing a facet of all that I feel made up now.

  • Sadness
  • Guilt
  • Confusion
  • Hopelessness
  • Failure
  • Loneliness
  • Desperation
  • Denial
  • Self-doubt
  • Disappointment
  • Loss
  • Bitterness
  • Anger
  • Blame
  • Regret
  • Shame
  • Pain
  • Heartache
  • Disbelief

In clearer moments I know there is more to me that the list above. I know I’m held and seen by Someone who speaks much more truth into me. But the clear moments aren’t all that common yet. And the weight of grief is sometimes suffocating.

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Here I go again…

Published on by Lindsey Claassen1 Comment

Once upon a time I had a blog. It was started with a toddler at my feet and a newborn in my arms. It was started with anticipation and excitement and a nauseating amount of naivete. I wrote to announce our intent to begin an international adoption. I was quite certain that because it was my will, it was obviously God’s will too. Despite two miscarriages, I still had big illusions of control and power over how my family would grow and form. Three years later, that adoption had crumbled at my feet along with hours of time in paperwork, tens of thousands of dollars, and my hopes and dreams for my family. God, once again, saying, “Calm down, daughter, my plans are not for you to force. I am bringing you love and laughter in ways that you cannot imagine.” Me, once again, saying less than gracious things back, pretending that Jeremiah 29:11 was probably just for other people. #slowlearner

And He did, of course. Because He is faithful and true and knows no other way to be. He brought me two more children through challenging but rewarding foster care adoptions and another through a delightfully surprising private adoption. Five babies in all. Five little hearts to teach me so much about life. Things like: just how big a heart can stretch, just how much joy the tiniest of milestones met can bring, just how little sleep a human can live on, and just how hard applesauce can dry on the floor. (cement hard, ya’ll)

In the midst of raising five young children, trying to catch up on sleep, and chiseling applesauce off the floor, the blog faded. I always wished I had kept it up though. It was a form of journaling our cozy little life and when I go back to it now I’m always surprised to be reminded of some little event we went to or funny thing a kiddo said. It was also a way for me to get some of my “big feelings” (as my daughter’s therapist would say) out. Writing has always been therapeutic to me….as though finally spilling the words rattling around in my brain onto a screen helps to tidy them away in my head. And, through the years, friends and family (hi Jamie!) have mentioned that they wish I still wrote.

And so here I am again. Only this time it’s different. The anticipation is gone, excitement is hard to find, and I look back on my naïve life that decade ago with envy. This time there is a heaviness of grief. A darkness has moved in that clouds the color we once lived in and makes taking in air a conscious effort. My beautiful 7 year old son has passed away. Again, I’m left in the corner of a room wondering at God’s plan for my family. So I’ll write…..because the words swirl loudly now. In the car, sitting outside a sleeping child’s room, in the middle of the night, and in the waking hours. Maybe it’s just for me, and that’s ok. Maybe it will be because my family and friends keep asking how I am, and this will give them a glimpse. Maybe it will be because sometime, years from now, I’ll need to look back at how far God has brought me, and this journal is a way of placing stones upon the alter of healing. And maybe, it’s because someday, another mom will bury her baby, turn around and think, “now what?” And if she stumbles upon this space, maybe she’ll feel the tiniest bit less alone.