Dealing With Grief
Doesn't Stop On VacationWalking on the beach this morning, I followed a couple whose pace matched mine perfectly, longish strides, fast for our ages, but comfortable enough to allow breathy but audible conversation.
I walked alone so I took the opportunity to eavesdrop, a favorite pass-time of mine. From the ease of their chatting I recognized them as a long-married couple. Glancing at their wedding rings helped. They wore the slim starter-bands that couples married a long time wear.
She might have a big diamond back at the condo bought when the kids were grown and out of the financial picture but for the beach, the scant old matching silver rings were fine.
One sentence that the husband spoke shook me up. He said, “They say God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” I knew what triggered his comment. That knowledge took me from this beautiful beach to the sad happenings of this past week. I zoned out of their discussion as I was reminded of the events. Five Sarasota teens were killed in two separate car wrecks just a few days ago.
It’s been in all the papers: five separate school pictures of smiling kids, three boys, two girls. Really handsome kids, star athletes and star students, two siblings in the group, so four families grief-stricken at the loss of their children gone, forever gone.
Juxtaposed with those pictures are pictures of the cars, gnarled and fractured and burned. My imagination must be put on lock-down to keep from making the jump from those beautiful kids to those awful cars.
As an accompaniment to the story are pictures of disconsolate friends marching to memorial services. “Why?” is written all over their faces. The parents have the stunned look of survivors of war; there but not there. Their minds are elsewhere, nattering on silently, rehashing all the parental warnings and wisdom that they repeated and repeated to their good, smart, normal, loving children, now dead.
God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. I hoped that no well-meaning friend had said those words to those parents. Handle? Really? Does a person “handle” horrible events like the death of a child? Or does a person just live through it?
I have a friend whose daughter died of cancer ten years ago. Not a week passes that she doesn’t cry a little over the loss of this daughter. My friend works with a hospice program for kids with cancer. Is she “handling” her grief by helping parents of sick-maybe-dying kids? It was she who told me that there are things that you must never say to grieving parents. “Time heals all wounds,” is one.
“She’s in a better place,” is another. “Life goes on,”is another real stinker. But the most oblivious is, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”
Does a parent who has just out-lived his child want to even think that this deadly car-crash (or cancer or cystic fibrosis) is something God-given?
When a parent is hanging on by a thread and wants to let go, it’s not the time to spout feel-good platitudes. Maybe the well-meaning couple walking on the beach engaged in a deeply philosophical conversation about death and its consequences as they continued their morning jaunt. I only hope that the man's wife disarmed his thoughts about God parcelling out snippets of tragedy with, “Oh, Honey, don’t be silly. But I pray to God that we never have to find out.” That’s what I would have said
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