Reflections of My Time in LA

A couple of months ago my family in LA found out they had to move. So I went home to help for a few days. Only, I surprised them:

What made this move unique is that it was the last place Mom lived. The last house where we enjoyed her company, ate her cooking, and relished in her homemaking. Mom has been gone for two and a half years, but moving away from her last home was another keen reminder that we’ll never again experience her in this life.

Many changes happen in life. Most of them we can do nothing about. We can kick and scream, hold grudges or turn an indifferent face towards them, but ultimately we still need to experience change.

It kind of shocked me how okay I was with moving. I guess having my own family and no longer living at home makes a difference; but still, I expected more grief. More of that feeling like you’re losing hold of something you deeply love and can’t do anything about it. But that’s not really what I felt.

Perhaps, it’s because there were so many other current and more urgent problems to deal with. Or maybe it’s because the only thing that really holds any of us to the place is that Mom lived there (the house was rather old and needy). Either way, there wasn’t a lot of emotion that went into the move. Not for me, at least.

Grief comes and goes in waves. You can never force yourself to feel grief. Neither can you eliminate when you do feel it. But you can ignore it. And sometimes we inadvertently cope with pain by ignoring it.

Some might think I should be over the pain of losing Mom. But something this move has led me to realize is that I’m not sure I’ve ever fully grieved. I just ignored.

There was always something new and more urgent to plug into: marriage, parenting, processing a decision about moving, anticipating the move when we decided to go, another child, starting my first year of teaching. Now, suddenly, I don’t have that “next thing” to focus on and when I find out my family has to move and that again, “I’ll never see Mom,” the grief that I ignored from two years ago comes rolling back like a ten-foot breaker and this time there’s nowhere to go with it.

You will face things in life that either bring pain, confusion or disappointment and the number one temptation you’ll feel is to ignore it. Sleep it off. Take on a new hobby. Avoid talking about it. Praise Jesus more. Joke a lot. Like maybe it will go away. But that’s not how it works.

Every experience that brings about grief needs to be brought to our Heavenly Father. You need to see Him identify with you. To realize that it’s possible to go through what you’re going through and still find life.

I’m not sure I know yet how to process grief. Loss still doesn’t make sense. What is God up to? But my desire for my family and I, and for every one of you who caught in a sea of turmoil, is that we may “know the love of God which surpasses all knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God.” That’s the only sure thing we can cling to. So do it. Wrap your arms and legs around the love of God and allow Him to fully fill you.

“Catastrophic loss cannot be mitigated by replacements. One cannot escape it simply by finding a new spouse, a new job, a new life. A convenient passage to a new identity is usually out of the question.”

“We are deceived by our longings for what we once had, because we cannot have it that way forever, even if we regain what we lost for a while.”

[Quotes by Jerry Sittser in his book, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss]

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