Tag: death

Lenten Reflections: Relinquishing My Voice and Choosing Silent Meditation          

We live in a noisy world.  If we happen to be in a quiet place, we bring our noise boxes with us our pockets. 

Does anyone go anywhere without their phone?

Connectivity invites us to constant interaction with others and only the rare, out of the way, unconnected corner leaves us to contemplate our own thoughts or our own feelings. 

Yet we need to seek silence.  We need to sit with our inner selves and reflect on the work of Christ in our hearts. 

If the enemy forces us to give up quietness, we must not listen to him.  For nothing is like quietness and abstinence from food.  They combine to fight together against him.  For they give keen insight to the inner eyes.

Abba Doulas, c. 3rd Century

Grief is brutal.

Dominic’s death and burial so closely following the pattern of Holy Week has led to superimposing my own experience on that of the disciples and Mary. 

When Christ was declared truly dead, taken from the cross and laid in a borrowed grave it surely must have felt as if there was no hope.  This Rabbi, this Miracle Worker, this Man of God who claimed to be the Son of God had not stopped evil men from wrongly accusing Him, wrongly convicting Him and wrongly putting Him to death. 

I don’t have to imagine how that felt. 

Dominic was killed late Friday night/early Saturday morning.  Days of silent waiting filled the space between when I knew and when I could finally see his body. 

If I could have filled that time with distracting noise I would have. 

But there is no sound that can drown out grief. 

I often imagine the company of those who loved Jesus sitting silent in a room together each with his or her own thoughts.  What was there to say?


Today, Chole invites us to fast our voice-spoken and written-and to make space to hear our own thoughts as well as the still, small whisper of the Lord.

It’s no coincidence that communities honor the fallen with a moment of silence. 

In that sacred silence we are drawn together and also forced to face our separate sense of loss, fear, hope-or lack of hope- and mortality.  It is an exercise we frequently shun but should instead embrace. 

Today I encourage you to sit in silence with your own loss, with the hope and light of the gospel, with the promise that every bad thing, every wicked thing, everything the enemy means for evil will one day be irrevocably and beautifully be undone and redeemed.

Have you ever been silenced by a painting, symphony or play? Have you ever been moved so deeply by an experience that words failed you and the only worthy offering was silence?  In fasting our voice we are focusing-not remotely emptying-our minds to behold Jesus with love….Join the disciples today in beholding Jesus in His death.

Alicia Britt Chole

I Wish I May, I Wish I Might, I Wish I Could Forget Tonight…

Driving home in the dark from several weeks of Mama D duty, I was listening to an old-fashioned, very tame (by today’s standards!) BBC Agatha Christie podcast.

Suddenly the previously entertaining and mindless fare took a turn that plunged me into over an hour of mental wrestling.

One of the characters commented on the face of the deceased and said something like he “looked frightened and astonished”, his last emotion etched forever on his countenance.

THAT was enough to send this mama’s thoughts down an unfruitful and completely horrifying rabbit trail.

I wish that at almost eight years I could reach for a switch to shut out unwelcome images but so far I haven’t found one. I wish I could just will myself to ignore questions about what Dom might have felt, thought or said in the last microseconds of his life. I wish I didn’t know as much as I do about what happened.

I wish I knew more about how Jesus takes His beloved to Heaven.

These intrusive thoughts don’t come as often as they once did and I am (usually) better at pinning them down, changing my thinking and forcing my heart and mind to focus on something else.

But sometimes,

in the dark

when I’m especially tired and vulnerable,

they take over once again.

Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday-What a Contrast!

I think I will post this link as long as I maintain the blog because I will always be a voice for those whose lives look more like Ash Wednesday than Mardi Gras.

I will continue to speak out for space in our congregations and fellowships that acknowledge life is often hard, often unfair and often more like a broken hallelujah than a high note.

I am not a member of the Church of the Perpetually Cheerful. 

I am a member of the Broken Body of Christ, limping through this world, holding on to hope with both hands.

Read the rest here: Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday: A Study in Contrasts

Sometimes Sadness is Sanity

Sometimes sadness is sanity. Tears are the reasonable response. Quickness to shush, shame or fix them, can reveal resistance to wisdom.

Zack Eswine

It wasn’t until I suffered the unbearable that I realized how very true this is: Sometimes sadness IS sanity.

Deep grief is the price we pay for great love.

But it’s easy to mosey through most of a life before you’re forced to come face to face with this truth.

Tears are an appropriate and proportional response to loss. Despair is a reasonable reaction to tragic and sudden death. Horror is perfectly understandable when disease ravages the body and steals the soul of someone you love.

So often those who haven’t experienced it want those of us who have to hold the knowledge close like a secret in hopes they won’t have to acknowledge it is true.

But sooner or later death visits all of us.

And when we choose to stand with those who have, through no fault of their own and without giving permission to the universe, been thrust head first into the unrelenting reality of loss, we not only encourage them, we enrich ourselves.

Life is a tenuous and fragile gift.

The quicker we understand and embrace that the wiser and more compassionate we will be.

We Were Made For Life, Not Death

My children grew up surrounded by life and by death.

On our small farm they got to see puppies, kittens, goats, sheep and horses take their first breath. We watched turkeys and chickens hatch-struggling in that last great effort to throw off the shell.

And we also witnessed life’s end.

Every. time. it feels wrong.  Every. time.  it feels like defeat.

And it is–we were not made to die.

Read the rest here: We Were Not Made to Die

Halloween: Not a Fan

Except for a few years early in childhood, I have never liked Halloween.  The combination of darkness and creepiness makes my skin crawl.

And now, this side of child loss it makes me angry. 

Why?  Because for one night (really, for a couple of weeks!) Americans not only think about death, they spend millions of dollars celebrating it.

Not celebrating ACTUAL death-not the absolute horror of being told your child is gone, gone, gone.  Instead it’s a fake, “funny”, silly made-up mockery of a very real, very awful truth.

Read the rest here: Halloween

I Refuse to Let Death Win

I’m not brave by nature.

If I have a choice, I will run every time.  But there are just some things worth fighting for.

My family is one of them.

I will not let the enemy have them.

Read the rest here: I Will Not Be Moved

Leaves Fall

We think leaves fall when we turn the calendar page to Autumn months.

Piles of red, gold and orange land beneath trees that grow increasingly barren until one day they are truly naked.

But leaves begin to fall as early as July-hardly noticed because they drift down lonely, one by one.  

single-leaf

We think people live to the fullness of years.  They begin in spring and pass through all the seasons before the cold winter claims them.

old-lady

But some survive only one season, or two–never enjoying the fruitful harvest of the latter years the younger years of hard work are meant to produce.

Read the rest here: Falling Leaves

There Is Nothing Easy About Death

I wrote this post two years ago after my mother joined Dominic in Heaven. Her passing reminded me once again (as if my heart needed reminding!) that there ain’t nothing easy about death.

Two years later and I’m no more willing to pretend it’s anything but awful even as I’m resigned to admit there’s nothing I can do about it.

I miss you both so very much.

❤ Melanie

I remember the moment I realized I was going to have to summarize my son’s life into a few, relatively short paragraphs to be read by friends, family and strangers.

It seemed impossible.

But as the designated author of our family I had to do it so I did.

Read the rest here: Ain’t Nothing Easy About Death

Birthdays and Wakeful Nights

Today my heart hurts more than usual.

It’s my mama’s birthday-the third one we will celebrate without her here to blow out the candles.

It’s also the third anniversary (do you call it that?) of the day Papa had to call an ambulance to rush her to the hospital.

She never came home.

Our last visit just a couple of weeks before Mama’s stroke. All the grandmas and Ryker.

These past two years have been hard. Mama’s death plunged me back into deep grief for her and for Dominic. It tapped the wound that had begun to scar over a bit and the feelings I’d learned to push down bubbled back to the surface.

I’ve just now begun to sleep through the night again most nights. For much of the past two years I’ve been waking two or three times in the dark to vividly awful dreams-my family in peril and no way to help them is the theme over and over and over.

I know other motherless daughters.

Somehow knowing Mama isn’t available on the other end of the phone or sitting in her chair, waiting for me to come through the door at the farm, makes me supremely vulnerable.

One less generation between me and whatever the world might throw at me.

I know she is healthy and whole, happy and full of joy in Heaven. I know she’s reunited with her own mama, her siblings and Dominic.

On good days, that’s enough to make the missing bearable.

But on days like today, when we should be celebrating another year together but can’t, it doesn’t help all that much.

I miss her.

I miss Dominic.

I miss the me that used to be ignorant of what death steals from the living.

Happy Birthday in Heaven, Mama. We’ll be there soon. ❤