Soulation | Fledge | Responding to a Death

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Responding to a Death
by Susan O. Lawrence

Uncle Bob died last October. The snow started soon after and for two months, we did not see the sun. Autumn disappeared into an early, dim winter, matching our dark disbelief and sudden sorrow.

Diagnosed with cancer in August, after recovery from a major surgery and working to regain strength for chemotherapy, Bob ended up dying from a simple blood clot, just three days after his first round of chemo, while his wife, Pat, was out on a quick errand.

The day after Bob died his brother (who is my father-in-law), Marshall, made my head snap back when he shook his fists as our family gathered for breakfast, "I don't know about the rest of you, but right now, I'm angry. Angry!" Heads around the table nodded.

Anger at Uncle Bob's death is a proper human response, an honest lament of how we feel. My own anger bubbled out soon after when well-meaning church people started showing up. I was sitting at Marshall's, a house right next door to Bob and Pat's house. Bob had picked the property and built both houses on the lake himself, so the brothers and their wives could retire next to each other, play darts together, and look after each other. A woman bearing a basket of fruit came up to us with, "You know, God never gives us more than we can bear." I gripped the arm rests on both sides of my chair: Was I really going to get violent with a senior member of the hospitality committee of my own church? I thought my mother-in-law, Helen, showed great restraint in her dry chuckle and brisk but not unfriendly dismissal of the comment. Later that day, I got an email that read, "Praise God for His perfect timing." I growled aloud at it. Like Marshall, I was angry and knew it.

People grew more quirky in their rush to help the Lawrence family out. On a visit with Pat a few weeks after Bob's funeral, I complimented her on recent contribution to the potluck, a pot of bacon and beans—quite tasty. "Well!" she started energetically, lowering her chin for a confidential remark, "somebody gave me those beans when Bob died." Beans? I know people want to help after a tragedy, but...navy beans? And there was another lady who showed up on our doorstep a day after the obituary ran in the newspaper. "I read about Bob Lawrence, and I had to do something! Here!" she thrust a frozen, rectangular, foil-wrapped package at me, as I tried to process exactly what was happening. She wanted to help, "You're a Lawrence, aren't you?" I nodded. "It's bran bread," and she was off to her car.

As I talk about Bob's death with Christians who did not know him, they quickly question, "Was he a believer?" I understand the thought behind the question—at least, I think I do—but never appreciate the near-dismissal I sometimes feel when I answer, "Well, yes—yes, he was, but you know, we all still miss him."

Pat, who has shown a great deal of poise even in floods of tears, did include the message of comfort in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 in her initial email to friends about Bob's death, "We do not grieve as those who have no hope," and rightly so, though her sadness remains.

One week before Bob died, Marshall preached about Jesus raising Martha and Mary's brother Lazarus from the dead. From the back of the church, I admired my father-in-law for preaching on that text with his characteristic enthusiasm, even while his own brother fought with cancer. He read John 11:25: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies." My gaze shifted from the pulpit to just a few rows from the front. There, Bob and Pat sat in their usual places, fully believing perhaps as never before the promises from John 11. One week later, while Bob experienced the fulfillment of the verse, Pat modeled for the rest of us the continued hope of the promise.

The anger, the quirks and odd moments, the desire to comfort, the deep sadness, each remind me that we Christians are human and must expect to walk through those stages, some again and again, as we process, remembering the hope of the resurrection and the love of God for us. Rereading what Bob wrote in his journal on September 4, 2008, which was included in his funeral program, helps me process what I have lost and what I will, one day, gain.

Peace is a state of being relaxed in His care. Our main concern is not about the temporal outcome but about how we are relating to Him. We get a pleasant taste of eternity.

If you are walking through death right now or know someone who is, let me highly recommend, after sifting through the anger and the goofy well-intended graces of others, to sit in Bob's words. They remind us of Jesus' words and our real human hope: This is "the real and eternal life, that we know the one and only God." (John 17:3, The Message)