Bills and Wills

Grief is the process we grow through when we experience a loss. I experienced grief not as a series of stages such as Kubler-Ross wrote about, but as though I was the captive of a creaky house with many rooms.

The first Grief Mansion room that I found myself in was called “Busyness.” Here papers mounded high on desks with unseen tops. I was not prepared for the avalanche of paper work that followed Steve’s death. I couldn’t avoid it. Bills, wills, and certificates of death. There seemed to be no end. Busyness gave me purpose and focus in the midst of confusion. In a strange way, it dulled some of the pain.

I observed that men in grief especially love this room. “How’s Larry doing?” “He’s staying busy.” I watched a grieving neighbor cope with his daughter’s tragic death by pouring himself into months and months of major house projects. “Busyness” looks good from the outside. In our culture, the average person expects you to be over it in about six weeks.

"The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love," from Zephaniah 3:17

Times of Drought

I had seen the signs, but had refused to draw the conclusion. Then, one Saturday in the spring of 2003, my husband and I sat down to share a cup of coffee. Suddenly, in the light of the living room window I saw something I couldn’t ignore.

“Steve, you’re yellow!” I said nearly dropping my cup.

My mind drew blanks as I struggled to think of benign causes for jaundice. “It can’t be anything serious,” I kept assuring myself; Steve’s doctors had said they could find nothing wrong. A hasty visit to the ER revealed that “something” was very wrong. A biopsy revealed that my dear husband had pancreatic cancer, the cancer at the hopeless end of cure.

In the months that followed, the Lord transformed our faith, teaching us to trust him through a time when “the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines…the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food…” as Habakkuk wrote.

We learned the stubborn trust that says: “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.” (italics mine).