Three years to the hour that the police drove up the lane in the rain, I find myself unexpectedly reclining in a dentist chair, tasting blood in the back of my mouth.
Don’t ever belittle the huge hole your leaving will leave.
The dentist’s sliced a cut in my gum, opened me up, and I’m lying there, exposed to the bone. There isn’t one single day that I haven’t felt the gaping hole he’s left. I’ve lost count how many times I’d give an arm and a leg just to hear his voice one more time, just to ask him what to do and which way through.
It’s 1092 sunrises now without him, and it’s grief that lays you right bare, exposed straight down to the rawest parts of you, wild and untamed.
That’s what grief is: Grief’s savage, like a beast unleashed. Face the grim reaper, and what can the human heart do but soundlessly rage?
Grief’s weeping and gnashing of teeth is but proof of how deeply and wildly we have tasted of love.
From behind his surgical mask, the dentist muffle-asks his assistant to turn the playlist to something happy, lighter, but it doesn’t really make a wit of difference who’s crooning about love and buying themselves flowers, I can still feel this emanating deep ache, I’m still blinking it back.
There’s a God-shaped hole in the center of every human heart — and there’s a you-sized hole in the puzzle of the world that, in all of human history, God made for only you to fill.
You can try to muzzle grief with a smiling, civilized mask. But grief still lies in wait, crouched behind the most benign moments in time, ready to shred any unsuspecting, ordinary moment with a missing of what was and what will now never be.
Rain on a tin roof — and I miss him singing, “Listen the the rhythm of the failing rain…” Hold in hand an invitation to a baby shower– and he’s never going to get down on the floor and grin huge, pushing John Deere tractors across the floor with any of our grandkids. See a plate of baked beans — and I can see him buttering his bread and winking as he asked for seconds. Grief’s its own kind of endless exhaustion, as you try to keep the grief at bay, as you try to contain the untamed.
Right where I’ve lost my tooth, the third molar in quadrant 2, the dentist’s hovering over me, drilling a hole down into the jawbone. I close my eyes.
Don’t ever belittle the huge hole your leaving will leave.
There’s a God-shaped hole in the center of every human heart — and there’s a you-sized hole in the puzzle of the world that, in all of human history, God made for only you to fill.
And when you lose someone, there are parts of you that you can no longer find.
The dentist may at least have finished the drilling, but there’s this pain that no numbing or freezing in the world can touch and, lying there in the dentist’s chair, there’s this strange solace of feeling physical pain as this sharp, cathartic relief — a lancing, a manifesting — of this deep, interior emotional ache of a heart break.
The dentist stretches out his hand, asks his assistant to hand him the tiny titanium post.
I wince a bit, lace my hands together, bracing.
You were one of the hands of my interior compass, Dad, and the woods are dark and the shadows long and by God, it takes courage, and how are you not here with us for the whole way through? How are you really not ever coming back and how is there time and roads without the rare and uncommon gift of you?
I don’t know if our loss was some punishment, but I know it was Tolkien who said, “A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift’,” and I know it was Stephen Colbert who, through tears, paraphrased that to mean, “What punishments of God are not gifts?”. And I don’t know at all — actually, it’s a gut-wrenching, bewildering wrestle for me — how to count that a gift which I’ve wished countless times had never happened.
Gratitude for the gift of your story – means being grateful for all the pages of your story. Because to tear out some of the pages of your story – would tear up the story of you.
But this, after years of exhausting wrestle, is what I’ve come home to rest in: Gratitude for the gift of your story – means being grateful for all the pages of your story. Because to tear out some of the pages of your story – would tear up the story of you.
To get to love is a gift — and there is no loving without suffering. The only way to avoid all suffering — is to avoid all loving. To be deeply human – is to deeply love – which means to deeply suffer. Suffering and grief is on the way of everyone being truly human.
And ultimately:
What griefs in life are not gifts – if those griefs move you closer to comfort other grieving hearts — if those griefs move you closer to the comfort of God?
Grief is this deep emotion – that’s meant to put your heart in motion – to move you, move you toward embracing others in their grief, and move you toward the intimate embrace of God.
What griefs in life are not gifts – if those griefs move you closer to comfort other grieving hearts — if those griefs move you closer to the comfort of God?
And this tender journey of the last 3 years keeps proving how grief and gratitude are not opposites, but grief is gratitude for what was.
Grief and gratitude are not two different extremes, but rather two different expressions of the same emotion: love. Grief and Gratitude are joined sojourners, on the way of Love.
And if grief is love dying for a way to still express itself – then does grief find some healing when we find ways to keep expressing our love?
Does grief find some healing if we, when we’ve taken all the time we need, then let all the emotion of grief then put us in motion, moving with loving empathy out into a longing, needing world?
With the implant now drilled deep down into my jaw, the dentist explains how the steel post now needs months to merge with the bone. “So just avoid placing any stress on that whole area as it heals,” he nods, his eyes gentle and kind.
And I nod through the freezing, feeling the strings of the stitches there in my gum, and I’m trusting that time can’t heal all wounds like God does.
I wait now through more sunrises, more sunsets, and I never get over how he’s not here, really not here anywhere, how he’s really not coming back to me here, not ever, how his absence is this weight that I feel in my every day.
I wait as steel post merges to bone.
And that post on Calvary’s hill, with those steel nails driven right through, it merges and binds the heart of God to all the willing, wounded hearts and what heals is that God suffers with us too.
Shared tears is multiplied healing and God weeps with us too.
Life breaks our heart in two, and God breaks His heart and gives us His, and right here and now, He’s working to make us and all this hurting world new.
There’s another appointment on the calendar for the dentist to check on the healing.
And that’s you can taste, even now, with every tender moment — all this healing grace.
How do you actually practically find way to heal through loss — in the embrace and comfort of God?
What does it personally look like to turn toward God in the midst of loss — instead of turning away?
In the midst of heartache:
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being that rests fully in the hesed loving kind ways of God?
