Reflecting on 10 Years

Today marks 10 years since my husband Mike’s death. This is one of my favorite pictures. I like to think of him with this smile and the children climbing on him, not sure if he might break out in an Elvis voice or John Wayne. For years he wasn’t able to find this smile or anything carefree. It’s taken a lot of ups and downs for my heart to move past his troubled soul and settle on this picture of him in my memories. 

Today is a day that largely lives in my memory as last conversations and fears and numbness. As a conversation with my children that I know overpowered their innocence with uncertainty and grief.

I feel like I had one golden moment of wisdom before that conversation. It came from God, I guess, because I sure didn’t know how to do anything in such an overwhelming moment. Except to love, and I committed my heart to being honest with my children in all things, right from the very start. I committed to being sure our story was rooted in truth, as hard as the truth was for all of us to understand. 

Our conversations about death, suicide, and our own story would be as honest as our hearts could comprehend as each of us have grown. So we started with small truths told and retold in ever increasing understanding as questions arose. Anger, sorrow, laughter, losing memories, shoring them up. Years of ongoing conversations that I hope continually move their precious souls to more and more understanding and acceptance of an absence. An absence that feels perfectly “normal” to them, but one they know makes us different.

I’m so very very proud of the resilient and compassionate hearts that have grown in Travis, Elisha and Maggie as they understand and live their own story. I’m amazed at them sometimes and how comfortable they are in being who they are. How they pull me along in so many areas I should be leading. To shepherd their journey is the greatest challenge but greatest honor of my life. I could not be more proud of the young men and young woman they are becoming.

For my own journey through grief and growing as a single mother, mine is a story of God’s utterly relentless mercy. A mercy so full we can hardly know and describe it. Day after day. Through mistakes and sorrows and uncertainty, and anger and disappointment, financial and practical needs, victories large and small, and joys. And peace. All of it. His mercy is sure. This decade is my testament of His GREAT compassion and mercy.

I’m thankful. For Mike and the place he held in my life. His humor and servanthood. His love of the outdoors and baseball. For the peace he found, if only through death. 

I’m thankful for the stereotypes our experience has challenged in me. And the compassion that’s grown for other single mothers and families in crisis who don’t have the same resources and support that I’ve been privileged to have. We truly don’t know the realities of others. Despair and hopelessness are often hard to recognize. Our calling is to love mercy. To be as lavish with it as God has been with us.

To love mercy. More and more.

*****

In 2012, approximately 40,000 people in the United States died by suicide. Mike was one of them. In 2020, that number was 45,979. Each of those deaths represents a family like ours, desperately learning to heal from a lifelong wound. 

In July 2022, the FCC expanded “988” nationwide as a toll-free suicide prevention hotline through all US phone and text services to connect individuals to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for 24/7 access to trained counselors and mental health resources. For more information about the Lifeline and 988, visit 988lifeline.org. 

If you are thinking about suicide, call or text 988.