Five ways to support someone during painful anniversaries

Death makes us uncomfortable.  There is nothing we can do to “fix” the reality of the loss, and this often leaves us without words.  “I want to help, but I just don’t know what to do or say.”  This is something I have heard often from those that surround a grieving person.  I believe that the key is to do something.  People often default to silence or distance.  Both responses are damaging. 

Today, I want to offer five reflections on gestures that have been meaningful in this intermediate stage of grief, when the immediate pain of loss has changed into the longer journey with coping.  In his book, Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff writes about coping: 

“We live in a time and place where, over and over, when confronted with something unpleasant we pursue not coping but overcoming.  Often we succeed.  Most of humanity has not enjoyed and does not enjoy such luxury.  Death shatters our illusion that we can make do without coping.”

The passage of time has not fixed my loss.  Grief does not go away although it does change.  Rather, I am learning to integrate the absence of Mercy into my life.  The support of community is immensely important in my journey of coping. 

1. Gifts that say “I remember”.  My dad arrived, unannounced, on my doorstep with flowers “in celebration of Mercy week.”  A friend gave me incense and a candle.  I love the delivery of my favorite almond-milk latte.  One my mantle is a set of 7 ceramic birds; they are a gift from my mother and a reminder that we are, always, a family of 7.   

2. Give me the space of talk about Mercy.  Earlier this month, I had a business meeting with an old friend.  He began our time together by saying, “Jenny and I always think of you and Luke this time of year and your sadness about Mercy.” 

   Sometimes, people fear that in bringing up the name or the memory of the deceased, they somehow make the situation worse.  In my experience, I am already thinking of Mercy and the chance to talk about her, to say her name, feels meaningful.  Matt’s words were an invitation:  an acknowledgement of Mercy’s life and the reality of her loss.  His invitation offered me the chance to say as much or as little as I wanted.

3. Send a card/text/voicemail message.  I live far away from some of my favorite people, but I always appreciate when they reach out.  On February 22 of this year, I awakened to an email from one of my favorite professors.  He has also known the grief of losing a child and his message was a gift. 

4. Babysit my young children.  Over the years, friends and family like Shannon, Natalie, Beth, and others watch my children, giving me space around these anniversaries.  Usually, I don’t know what I want from one of these significant days, but these friends offer me the space to be by myself and be present with my thoughts.  Sometimes, I go to a coffee shop to journal or I take to the local trails to hike.  This year, I went on a thoughtful ramble through Mercy’s cemetery.   

5. Allow me to be fragile.  I meet February with weariness.  I need larger spaces for quiet.  I find myself going to bed earlier, drinking more tea, and staring out the window.  My energy is lower and I sometimes cancel social plans. 

I might not be like this every February; my grief may look different in the decades to come.  Regardless, I need people to come alongside me with a hug and a compassionate look…people that won’t rush me to feeling better or being happier. 

I want to close with this thought:  it is never too late to provide meaningful care.  Perhaps you weren’t there for someone.  Maybe this was a result of your life moment or circumstance and you wish that things were different.  It is not too late.  People need support and care through the many different moments of grief.  You might have missed the opportunity to be an impactful friend/neighbor/coworker in the past, but it is not too late to begin.  Write a text, buy a latte, offer a hug. 

Anniversaries are Difficult

Difficult anniversaries

Anniversaries are difficult for me.  I feel like I never know what I want.  Do I want to be with people or alone?  I feel like I should do something that includes the children, that I should help them mark the days of Mercy.  And yet, doing anything with our brood of four is complicated, emotional, and intense, even in the best of circumstances and I find myself exhausted.

We went away to Bloomington this weekend.  We ate Thai food and hiked one of our favorite trails.  We saw good friends and enjoyed our Airbnb, but we were all one edge.  The children seemed especially whiny and taxing.  Our final day was marred by freezing rain and a child vomiting.  It is a difficult thing:  trying to enjoy time together as a family while mourning Mercy. 

I wish that there were more moments of pure delight, where I could experience the reality of Mercy without the tinge of sadness.  And every year, I have to release the day to be whatever it will be. 

In 2005, I reflected on these complicated anniversaries, writing

February rolls me over, exposing a soft underbelly of grief.  We went to the Great Wolf Lodge again this year.  This is the third year that we have celebrated Mercy’s birthday by decamping to the Cincinnati water park.  Our visit was delightful; Jemima scurried about in her life jacket while Ada and Magnus darted in the wave pool.  Moses was content in our arms, lulled by the din of hundreds of splashing children.  We ate pepperoni pizza in the evening and had donuts and omelets in the morning.  The children slept the sleep of the happily exhausted.  We spoke of Mercy often and brought cupcakes to celebrate her life.  All in all, it was a good time.  And yet, as we drove out of the parking lot and began our wintery trek home, I began to cry.  No trip is happy enough, no experience rich and rewarding enough to ameliorate the terrible, submerged truth:  we are marking the horrible, traumatic, and untimely death of our daughter. 

As the tears fell, I felt weary.  Four years have passed and perhaps there are fifty yet to come.  Each year, February will hold the birthday and the death-day of my Mercy Joan.  The weariness that I feel is not the weariness of the old; instead, it is like the sudden exhaustion of a small child.  I feel myself running, frantic and engaged, from one activity to the next.  When the moment of exhaustion hits me, I am entirely consumed and feel as though I cannot take another step.

I wonder, how do you mark the difficult anniversaries?  What wisdom have you gained over the years? 

I am grateful that I do not mark these anniversaries alone.  Each year, there is a handful of friends and family that meet me in meaningful ways.  I will write about their affecting gestures in my next post.    

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You will not stretch

Photo slideshow of Mercy Joan Mertes. Photos by the exceptionally talented Mark Epler. Song credit: "The Reckoning" by Andrew Peterson. Slideshow composition by the marvelous Greg Pilcher.

First, please click the above image to see the beautiful slideshow from Mercy’s funeral.

The photos were taken by our dear friend, Mark Epler and they are one of my most cherished possessions. 

The slideshow was composed by the matchless Greg Pilcher.  The accompanying song is called “The Reckoning”, written and performed by an artist named Andrew Peterson.  His lyrics eschew easy answers and find resonance with my own faith journey. 

As he cries, “How long…how long until this burden is lifted?” he articulates a wrestling that I feel in my spirit.  Perhaps you have also cried out, “How long?”.  Perhaps you too have been reduced, laid bare by life.  If so, I hope you have space to embrace the complexity, to release yourself to these days that are joyful and troubling and true.

Last night, I was making Valentine’s Day cards for the family.  I carefully cut hearts out of computer paper, decorating the front and filling the back side with things I loved and appreciated about each person.  Each child is so unique, so delightful in their particularity.  I consider Jemima and her big pink sleeping hat, pulled tight around her ears each night.  I ponder Magnus, his large laugh and sprawling stories.  Then there is Ada, arms churning at the end of a cross-country race.  And Moses…Moses with his fierce expressions of both love and fury. 

And then, sitting there at my kitchen table, I felt a surge of sadness.  I wish I was making a cut-out card for Mercy.  How little I know of her preferences and particularities. 

Five years ago, I wrote this:

Happy birthday, little love; you would have been three today.  We would have thrown you a party:  gifts and candles and family.  I imagine the preparations; there are four upturned faces in the kitchen, mouths smeared with chocolate cake batter.  Ada perches by the mixer, unwrapping sticks of butter in her red apron.  Magnus eagerly awaits guests, face smushed against the front window.  Jemima toddles underfoot, content with the chaos and excitement of a full house. 

And you, my phantom child, who would you be?  I try to stretch you like a resistant piece of putty.  I grasp tightly to your eight days of life and tug on the edges of memory.  Are you long limbed and slender or stout like your brother?  How do you wear your curly hair?  Do you laugh from deep in your belly like Ada?  I pull and imagine what might have been but you stubbornly snap back into shape, forever a baby with tubes and wires and searching eyes. 

You are distant but not forgotten.  Ada brings home pictures from school, stick figure renderings of the family.  In her mind, we are a Crayola community of seven, Moses in my belly and you in my arms.  Magnus speaks of you often, his little sister under the stone.  You daily inhabit my memories. 

As the years lengthen, you grow smaller.  There is not enough of you; you will not stretch.  And so, I wait, longing for the day when you will suddenly loom large.  On that great day, when all things are full and new in their wholeness, I will see you as you are.  I will know the timbre of your laugh and the touch of your fingers.  Until then, I lay yellow roses on a snowy grave and wait.    

The sentiment still feels true today, on the eve of her birthday. 

I feel complicated today.  I am both happy and on edge.  I am content and yearning. 

Anger and indecision

“Mama” by Ada June, age 3

The emotions surrounding loss are complicated and disorienting.  The horizon of possibility has been dramatically altered; you glance up and nothing is as it was. 

Making coffee, going to class, cooking dinner, all of these tasks required such effort, so much attention.  Had they always felt so hard?  I couldn’t tell.  Just showering and showing up was difficult. 

These were just the physical tasks of being a parent, a wife, and a student.  There was also my churning emotional world, full of questions and pain.  I felt like a hangnail, roughly catching on the edges of life. 

This exhaustion and confusion manifest itself in particular ways.  Small talk and casual interactions were intolerable.  A few months after Mercy’s death, I wrote,

I have little tolerance for pretense or posturing.  Just being what I am in this season requires so much effort.  Trying to be what I am not would be impossible.  I cannot pretend that I am interested in a range of job opportunities post-MBA.  I cannot muster a false smile or a forced laugh.  Many times, I do not know what I want or what I am feeling…so when I do, I know that I dare not ignore the definitive impulses of my soul.  “Yes, I want soup now…No, I do not want to go to that party.”  There is something liberating in being able to make sense of the small decisions and emotions as the larger ones appear so unmanageable at times.   

I also found myself feeling abrupt, quick to take offense, as this encounter with the Bloomington library on May 20, 2011 suggests:

I was unnaturally aggressive and frustrated with the librarians yesterday.  An accrual of overdue charges from our Minnesota trip yielded an unyielding librarian.  No books would be checked out to me…and no DVDs, despite the fact that the errant items were in the bin.  I was then submitted to a lecture on how this would not be a problem if I just returned my materials on time.  “I pay you fines for my late materials, you should be concerned about customer service!” was my stewing response. 

I will provide a brief rationale for the reason that I went all the way to the supervisor level and left with a handful of comment cards after taking names.  Ada had done such a good job and was so excited to get these DVDs.  I, as her mother, was delighted to reward her…and here we were stymied by a bureaucracy.  They could just go and scan in my books, they could wipe the account, they could even renew the materials (as I later realized online), but no one wanted to be helpful and they were inflexible even to my three-year old’s pleas. 

The whole encounter, which took about ten minutes, also highlighted to me that I am operating on very thin margins.  How much of my engagement with life is through the veil of grief and/or anger?  What was it that made me so ticked at these clerks?  Why could the encounter not roll off my shoulders the way it did for Ada (she was a trooper, barely a peep of protest over the injustice)?  I didn’t really think of it at the time, but I realize that I am vulnerable and, in hindsight, there was a part of me that wanted to fume, “My child just died!  Can’t you cut me some slack and just give her the d**n DVDs?”

At the time, I craved emotional resonance.  I wanted Luke to tell me that the librarian was a jerk and that I had been horribly wronged.  A pitchfork mob would have also comforted me. 

Yet, eight years later, I sit with the question I posed:  how much of my this encounter and my general engagement with life was through a veil of grief and/or anger? 

For the individual that has experienced the disruptive life event, the death or the divorce or the diagnosis, the rejection or the termination, it can feel impossible to have perspective. And although my anger felt righteous, I am glad that I was paying attention, that I had enough insight to realize that all was (perhaps) not as it seemed. Perhaps the librarian was more than an incompetent imbecile. Perhaps the system wasn’t heartlessly conspiring to thwart my travel plans. And, strangely, in that “perhaps”, there was a glimmer of hope.

The physical toll of grief

Mama, Papa, and Mercy Joan

On February 25, 2011, I stood and spoke at Mercy’s funeral.  Her stiff body lay a few feet away, tucked under a multi-colored quilt sewn by my mother.  As I reexamine and reflect on the journey of grief this month, I begin here, in the searing pain of those early days.

Mercy Joan Mertes.  For most of you, today is your first physical encounter with Mercy, this is your hello to my girl…and my soul aches that for all of us, this is a farewell.  Standing here, I invite into the space of this mother’s lament and I wonder:  who was Mercy Joan?  What weight did she have in this world?  And how will I step beyond this moment?

Most of you have met Mercy through photos, e-mail updates, and, most importantly, through prayer.  We knew early on that Mercy would struggle.  An ultrasound warned that her condition was serious, her ultimate prognosis unknown.  And so we waited and we prayed, seeking healing, begging peace, and practicing patience.  Hundreds of friends and family, spread from California to New York to Nairobi, joined with us, loving Mercy and our family through each unfolding day.  Your prayers carried us.  My pregnancy, although overshadowed with uncertainty, was a time of great joy.  Mercy trekked through the hills of Bloomington with us as we marveled at the colors of fall.  She spent hours with Magnus and Ada on the playground, and even went to the ocean.  Thank you.  Thank you for loving my little girl.  I hope that Mercy drew you closer to the God that hears. 

From the first, Mercy Joan was a sister to Ada June and Magnus Emmanuel.  We joyously incorporated her into our family rituals.  Ada and I talked to her constantly.  She became a part of our bedtime routines, with Ada supplying her voice for prayer time.  Mercy even had her own song, the doxology, which we would close with every evening.  Magnus loved to blow on my growing tummy, and I can only imagine that Mercy laughed to hear her brother’s jolly buzz.  Mercy’s eyes were closed through much of her life, but when Ada arrived in her hospital room, she was eyes wide open for more than an hour as her sister sang to her, stroked her face, and taught her how to twirl.

Mercy was also the daughter of the best father I know.  Luke has loved her well through every moment of her life.  I am profoundly grateful that Luke is Mercy’s father as well as my steadfast, weeping companion on this path of grief.

Mercy Joan was my daughter.  She nestled inside me, filling both my heart and my womb.  We went on long, plodding runs together.  Together, we sat through (and passed!) a semester of graduate school.  We read stories to Ada and covered Magnus with tickles.  Each kick and jostle was mine to savor and cherish a secret assurance of the robust life that was within me.  Yet, I knew that the safety and protection of those nine months could not last.  That trembling and trusting day would come, the unveiling of Mercy to a world of wires and tubes, pain and uncertainty.  And oh, how I ached, how I longed to once more wrap her inside me and shelter her from the rasping ventilator and the beeping machines that were her companions. 

Although we knew that bringing Mercy home would end her life, I awaited her arrival with joy, longing to see my little girl’s face.  And the moment was indeed joyous.  A tiny hand stretched upwards to my face, a red mouth open and free from tubes.  As Mercy’s moments stretched to minutes and minutes to days, we were delighted by Mercy.  A walk by the pond, sitting near a bursting fire, nestling in for a night’s rest…and the embrace and caress of so many family members.  All of these memories are ours to cherish for a lifetime.

And in this blessed mess of memories, there is the soul-searing moment of clutching her warm, dead body and weeping over her stillness.  Where do I go from this place?  How will I move through the days, forward from the body of my Mercy Joan?  I have no easy equation, where sovereignty plus suffering equals peace.  My words are few.  Yet, as I mourn and moan, there are two cries that rise up with equal fierceness.  My first call is raw pain:  I hate that Mercy is gone.  I covet her weight in my arms and will mourn her every day of my life.  My second cry is to God.  He has not been far from me.  He cares for me with a mother’s strength and tenderly caresses me with a father’s comfort.  He holds my daughter and He holds my days. 

Oh Spirit, draw near.  Lord, have Mercy.  Christ, have Mercy.   

It felt important for me to speak at Mercy’s funeral.  The eulogy was like a graffiti tag:  Mercy was here.  The day of her funeral and burial emptied me.  Afterwards, friends and family gathered at my parent’s home.  They were there to support me, to offer comfort, but I could not endure another interaction. 

I remember hiding in the TV room.  I crowded between the children and took refuge in a few minutes of The Lion King.  However, even Simba soon began to grate.  I stumbled down the stairs into the basement.  A friend came, set a fire, and left. 

I don’t remember most of what people said to me that day, but I remember the fire that Daniel silently stacked.  I remember the English muffin, lightly toasted with just an echo of butter, that Emily offered the morning after Mercy died.  There were pyrex dishes that appeared, heavy with tomato sauce and sympathy.  Friends cleaned our house and vacuumed out the Explorer.  As words faltered, these gestures were solid and true. 

Early grief is intensely physical.  My thoughts and emotions were desperately recalibrating and my body was in flat-out denial.  Denial reeks of soggy cabbage.  My breasts were leaking milk, yearning to sustain a days-dead daughter, and I soothed the pain by layering cabbage inside my maternity bra.  As a side note, in the long accretion of female wisdom, it was discovered that cabbage leaves ease the pain of engorgement. 

Cabbage was just one more example of resonant, physical care.  Jill, a friend of my mother, faithfully delivered the purple heads, slipping comfort into the crisper drawer. 

Now, when I hear about the car crash or the divorce or the diagnosis, I put on my apron and bake a loaf of bread.  I arrive with a chai tea latte or an offer of childcare.  Especially when the sorrow is fresh, embodied care is immensely impactful.  Offer a hug, clean a toilet, send a bar of chocolate.  Words are important but incomplete.    

I am struck by a question I pose somewhere near the end:  Where do I go from this place?  How will I move through the days, forward from the body of my Mercy Joan? I have no easy equation, where sovereignty plus suffering equals peace.  My words are few.  How to move forward, indeed.  In my next blog post, I look at what happened when the funeral flowers faded and the sympathy cards stopped.