Grief Mansion

Grief Mansion 

By Sally Slevin

Part One

I had seen the signs but refused to draw the conclusion. Then one day in spring of 2003, I saw something I couldn’t ignore. Struggling to think of a benign cause for jaundice, I finally blurted out, “Steve, you’re yellow!” 

Tests revealed that my dear husband had pancreatic cancer--the cancer at the hopeless end of cure. As we prayed for healing, God transformed our faith. We determined to trust Him, His good and perfect will, even if for Steve--as for Habakkuk--the fig tree did not bud. Through the cancer journey we found the Lord to be our strength. He drew us to a high spiritual mountaintop even as Steve seemed to wither on the vine. But by summer’s end our Lord took Steve home. 

He took me through another transformation called grief.

My grief experience was not a neat series of stages such as Kubler-Ross wrote: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance. Grief descended upon me, snatched me up, and swept me away. It held me captive in a dark and mysterious place. I could only feel my way along Grief Mansion’s dim hallways, stumbling through endless rooms but never seeming to find the way out. I desperately wanted my life to be normal again. But I was trapped. In time I learned that each room had been purposed for my healing.