Oh, Grief: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

My dad worked as an assistant coach with a man named Chris Apostle, who also happened to be our neighbor when we lived in Edgemont.  Chris was a sleepy-eyed Greek with a sharp wit who could have easily passed for a member of the Rat Pack because he had that kind of cool daddy-o vibe.  He and my dad shared an office and often took recruiting trips together in our little green VW and probably shared a room at the first Motel 6 they could find.  Such was the life of an assistant football coach back in the non-heady days of the 1960s.

Anyway, Chris died in 2003, and when I went to his viewing where he was surrounded by BYU memorabilia, I had the eerie sense that I was looking at my own father's future.  At my future, too.  And I walked away shaken, wondering how I would bear it.

Well, now I know.

I am finding this second spring without my father's large laughing comforting presence to be harder than that first spring when I was still numb.

I brought this up with my lovely friend Jen who lost her mother a year before Dad died.  She sent this to me in an email, and because her words about a church talk given by a Japanese man who speaks English as a second language touched me so very much, I'm sharing them here.

And then this man spoke about the experience of losing his mother.  And he is a scientist by training, and obviously very brilliant, and he was trying to work through some kind of "empirical truth" through gospel experiences to find some way to know for a fact that he would see his mom again some day.  He wanted assurance from the Lord that was irrefutable.  He wanted to know 100% in his heart.  And his talk was about that.

And he said two incredibly beautiful things--even more beautiful because English was not his first language so he structured the phrases in interesting ways.  The first thing he said was that he came to the conclusion that to the Lord, it is much more important for us to have faith, and it is much more important to have hope, than for us to KNOW.  And then the thing he said that I loved the most was:  "The pain of losing my mother never goes away.  But I have learned to carry it more safely."

Carry it more safely.  How beautiful.