When Gratitude and Grief Hold Hands

It’s been five months since our son took his life and we were thrown into a sea of grief. I can tell people are still praying for us because God’s deep and beautiful grace is holding us up.

The day after Curt died, I was struck with the thought that a gigantic wall of awful grief was going to hit me. Hard. I knew that wall. It slammed into me the first time when our firstborn baby Becky died on her eighth day of life. It slammed into me again almost two years ago when a third of my tongue was cut out because of cancer. So I know how to recognize the unbidden, overwhelming feelings of loss and deep sadness.

But a second and comforting thought chased down the chilling first thought: The Lord carried me through those times of great grief in the past, and He will carry me again. I don’t need to fear the grief monster because my God is bigger than the grief monster. Thank You, Lord, thank You.

That immediate prayer of thankfulness arose out of a 50-year-long habit that God impressed on me as a college student as I struggled to reconcile why a good God would let polio cripple me. I learned probably the biggest lesson of my life: that He wants us to give thanks not only IN all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18), but FOR all things (Ephesians 5:20). For a deeper dive, I invite you to read my blog post “Giving Thanks for EVERYTHING?” 

I couldn’t possibly know back in those early days of my walk with Christ how the habit of giving thanks as a way of life would shape how I could handle the unthinkable loss of a second child decades later.

Giving thanks as a daily habit began as a step of obedience, but then it grew to become an intrinsic part of my everyday life—to the point that I shoot up many more “thank You” prayers than “please” prayers. And that has never been so true as it has been these past five months.

ALL of my “please” prayers for Curt, as he struggled for years with a deep, dark suicidal depression I could not begin to imagine, have been turned into “thank You” prayers. Every day I tell the Lord how grateful I am that my son is experiencing a level of joy he couldn’t have imagined any more than I can imagine the pain of his mental illness. I thank Him for the massive sense of relief that is Curt’s daily life in heaven. I thank Him that his hearing loss has been replaced with perfect hearing. I thank Him that Curt’s love of music, which was devastating because of that hearing loss, has been ratcheted up to enjoy new kinds of beautiful music (so I read in stories of those who have been allowed a glimpse of heaven). I thank Him that my son’s deep suffering is only a memory for him now, and he has all eternity to look forward to whatever God will allow him to do. I thank Him that Curt can look forward with clear eyes and unskewed thinking, to the next stages of his new life on the other side.

Every day I thank the Lord that I know know know where my son is, and that he is more alive today than he ever was on earth. I thank Him for the beloved family and friends who graduated to heaven before Curt, with whom he is enjoying restored fellowship and laughter and hugs. I thank the Lord for how real heaven is to me.

And because He has taught me how to turn hard truths into a “thank You,” I know what to do with the pangs of loss that inevitably strike me every day. When I see Curt’s handwriting on my recipes from the tweaking we did together when cooking, a fresh wave of missing him washes over me . . . and I’m able to say, “Thank You for all the help he gave me in the kitchen over these past 17 years of his living here.” When Ray and I wince at needing to find caregivers for our dog Lincoln when we go out of town—something we never needed to do because Curt never went anywhere—I’m able to say, “Thank You that he was our built-in dogsitter for all those years.”

When I see his computer components gathering dust in a corner, or when we need computer help, I’m able to chase the pangs of missing him with, “Thank You for the gift of having an IT genius in our home all those years.”

It might be easy to scoff and think, “You’re just sugar-coating this horrible loss of your beloved son. Get a grip and face your grief squarely instead of trying to paint it with rosy colors.”

But I am not a stranger to grief. I’ve endured a number of very big, very painful losses. I seek to be honest and authentic in this hard place we are in, but my reality is that gratitude softens the blow of grief. The Lord demonstrates His goodness to me in so many ways every day, I can’t help but see them because I’ve grown more sensitive to recognize what I call His “hugs and kisses.” Those hugs and kisses are one way He comforts me in this hard time.

Because gratitude and grief CAN hold hands.