The Death Day Approaches

February is a month for endurance.  I am much closer to overwhelm and sadness in these short, late-winter days. 

We are approaching Mercy Joan’s birthday, February 15, and her death-day, February 22.  She would have been thirteen this year.
 
Many of you know me from a stage or a conference room, where I appear professional and talk easily about empathy and human-centric skills.  But in today’s newsletter, I want to give you a snapshot of a younger, desperate and grieving Liesel.
 
Why?  It could land somewhere between pretentious and vulnerable to think that you might be interested in reading a word more.
 
But we are meaning-making creatures, drawn to stories.  In my work, I have research statistics, client testimonials and case-studies, but the truest thing I have to offer, always, is my story. 
 
Those early month-and-years found me exhausted, sad and desolate.  I haven’t always been the person on the stage, carrying forth with three key takeaways.  And maybe that is a comfort.
 
If you prefer listening, enjoy this favorite episode from the vault where I share.

What are those desperate first few weeks like?  The ones where you have to show up to work and act like everything is OK?  You can get a flavor for the dislocation and the exhaustion of my story in this email that I sent out eight weeks after her death. 
 
I was supported well, you can see, already, the many people whose care is the foundation of the work I now do.
 
Also, my grief was all tied up with questions about faith and God and meaning.  Whatever is helpful to you in my musings, I hope it remains.  And whatever is not, I hope it just passes through/away.  My journey is my own.
 
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April 2011 
Yesterday marked two months since Mercy’s birth.  Thank you to the many who have called, delivered meals, mailed cards, and uplifted us in prayer. 

Sorrow is a place of isolation and confusion.  I feel like a stranger to myself in many ways, unknowable and unpredictable.  I can find it difficult to honestly answer the question, “How are you doing?”  It is as though my inner self has been rearranged, familiar furniture shifted.  I stub my toes and run into doorjambs, trying to make sense of the new arrangement.  And if I am so ill at ease, how could I possibly give someone else a tour?  And yet, I know that I need to try…to try to be known in this time.  I want to let you in, those that make up an extended community of family, friends, and the wider Body of Christ.  And so I will try.

After Mercy’s funeral, we took a trip to Tucson.  A friend of mine graciously offered her home to us for the week.  The desolate landscape, full of cacti and thorns, was a welcome change from the melting piles of slush that are Indiana February.  Tucson allowed us space to be still, to sit and settle.  Ada and Magnus spent long afternoons by the pool with popsicles dripping down their chins.  Luke and I sat on the back porch and watched the sun set by the fire.  We rested. 

We returned to Bloomington after almost of a month away and began to unpack our bags, organizing the interior of our home and our souls.  We were folding and stacking shirts in the same manner that we tried to sort memories. 

As I looked at my schedule for the final seven weeks of the semester, I chose to only take one class.  I did not tell my iPhone of my decision and, on the first Monday of term, kept receiving reminders about a spreadsheet modeling class I had dropped.  As the reminders for quantitative regression analysis in K507, Room 1050 arrived, I was sipping a mug of hot chocolate in my kitchen.  Good decision, Liesel! 

The space in my schedule has allowed me to pause over memories, to not move quickly by questions, and to have long, uninterrupted stretches with Ada, Magnus, and Luke.  We play pirates and make treasure maps, stain our fingers kneading homemade play-dough, and spend slow hours at the park.  We are hiking again, watching in wonder as spring riotously unfurls across the hills.     

Life right now reminds me of my jeans.  The other day, I wriggled into them, barely stretching the denim up over my expanded hips.  The button rides right under where my scar sits, belly still distended.  I am uncomfortable.  The zipper is stretched to the max and I cannot help but think, were these once my baggy jeans?  I do not know when I will stop needing to artfully camouflage these last signs of pregnancy.  Mercy Joan has left scars and the signs of her remain. 

A sadness walks with me daily.  I feel it in the park, when I see babies tucked in slings.  These mothers seem almost unaware of their babies as they shout at the toddlers on the slides; they are confident that the infant will be there when they glance down, that the child will be there tomorrow and the week after.  In these moments, I don’t just grieve the loss of Mercy.  I grieve the loss of this breezy confidence.  I have lived the truth we all fear:  there are no guarantees regarding our children.    

How I wish that Mercy would have lingered, that her body was whole and healthy and with me.  I wish that I was bleary eyed from midnight feedings, stained with spit-up and complaining about newborn diapers.  Were we really a family of five for a week in February?  Did I really sing all three of my children to sleep?  Eight weeks have already blurred the edges of those memories. 

I am grateful, grateful for the time that we had with Mercy.  I knew her in my arms, her fingers wrapped around mine.  I traced the curve of her nose and kissed her mouth.  She was a GIFT from God and her life prompts thankfulness.  I stand on firm ground, knowing I will see her again when all things are made new.  Yet there is a sorrow and a weight and a questioning. 
         
I am meeting God on new ground in a rather desolate place.  I can taste Mercy in my prayers, she inhabits each thought I have about God.  What has happened with Mercy says something about who He is.  I feel a groaning companionship with Jesus in the Garden as He asks that the cup be taken from Him.  Ultimately, it is God that He asks for deliverance and ultimately, it is God that answers Him with a no. 

I know that God is more than what has transpired with Mercy.  He has been with me on the chaotic streets of Nairobi, in the joy of my wedding day, in the pages of my college textbooks.   Beyond my personal experience, He is the God of the monks in middle-age cathedrals and the martyrs in the Coliseum.  I know that He is wide, but right now, for me, He is the God of this particular season of grief and I have to know Him here. 
           
At the end of long days, I want to collapse.  I want to crumble into God, to feel His shirt pressed against my cheek as I burrow down deep.  I want His beard (because God has a beard according to every picture I have ever seen) against my hair.  I want familiar textures and touch.  I don’t want to be distanced from Him with abstract, flat language or with words that soar so high that I have to stand on tiptoe to see them. 
           
And yet, I wonder if I still know Him the way I thought I did.  I feel the urge to pull back and hold Him at arm’s length, to reexamine the lines of His face.  I want to strike Him to feel His weight, to try out what I thought was familiar and solid.  I fear that He is altered in some way, like his dimensions have shifted.  I want to look over His shoulder to see if He is hiding something.
           
In this season of prickly questions, He has not been far from me.  This God, my God, although at times incomprehensible, has been close and Emmanuel, a God with me.  He has held me close and been tender with me.  The image that I have returned to often is of a shepherd leaving the fold to seek that lone, lost sheep.  I have felt the sting of thorns and the rising panic of being lost.  I have felt night falling in unfamiliar places.  And yet, He has found me.  My prayer for these weeks has been that God would let me know that I am loved, that He would show me His love through each interaction and encounter of my day. 
           
You can pray that we as a family would rest in His love, to KNOW and to FEEL His care.  He is big enough to absorb my questions.  He is patient enough to sit with me in my sorrow and His resurrection hope is my deepest comfort and final rest. 
           
You can pray for Ada June as Jesus leads her and ministers to her in her own season of grief.  She speaks of Mercy almost daily, sometimes going up to strangers at the playground to declare, “I had a baby sister named Mercy and she died”.  In quiet moments, staring off out the window, she will say, “I miss my sister; I miss Mercy.  I miss her rosy, rosy cheeks.” 

About two weeks after Mercy’s death, Ada began to direct me in a game.  Ada would pretend to be Mercy, stripping down to her undies and saying, “I’m baby Mercy!”  My role was to be big sister Ada, taking care of Baby Mercy.  “I’m not going to die!  I’m going to be alive and be your sister!” Ada (aka Baby Mercy) would tell me.  And then we would play:  we would play that Mercy grows up and that she wears fancy dresses with Ada and they go to the park. 
           
I cannot speak for Luke and his own personal journey of grief.  His sorrows and comforts are as particular to him as mine are to me.  I am grateful for him in this season, thankful for his love for me, for Ada, for Magnus and for Mercy.