Becoming Human

I never knew.

I never knew the depth of the pain of losing someone you adore. Grief was a casual visitor in my life, never allowed past the front door, always kept at arm’s length. I knew Grief in other settings, whenever Life handed out failure, disappointment, unkindness, or rejection. But compared to how well I know Grief now, he was no more than background noise in a room filled with other ambiguous voices.

Now Grief has his own room and overflows every trash can in my house with used Kleenex. He’s a sloppy guest.

I didn’t know the complexity of my own humanity until Rob died. How I hate reading those words, Rob died. Here are more that I hate reading—when Rob died, part of me died, too. That makes some people recoil, wanting to rush to the bleeding wound and apply a tourniquet. But tourniquets kill, did you know that? Rob told me that once. You apply pressure. You don’t shut off the flow of blood to other healthy cells or they’ll die, too.

Grief is the pressure. Tourniquets shut down emotions.

I knew I was born a human, but somewhere along the way, as I spent literally years homesteading a pew, I adopted an Us and Them philosophy. I’m not proud of this. It’s humbling to even write that here and certainly it will offend some. It offends me, too. I lived a secluded life surrounded by people of the same faith as mine, secure in my salvation, unsure of how to share it or even interact with Them. I hoped that as I drove to and from my pew throughout the week that my good example would rub off and the curious would follow me and discover their own pew.

I even thought that knowing God as intimately as I did would keep me insulated from suffering. I had my own versions of sorrow, of course, consigned to the ups and downs of marriage, child rearing, family dynamics, financial pressures, and conflicts with others. This seemed to me to be enough suffering to qualify me as having lived a human life on planet earth. I was sure God agreed. I learned it from my pew.

I thought being human was bad. After all, Jesus came to save us from our sins and give us a new life. I became born again—raised to walk in newness of life, as the pastor said when he lifted my soggy self from the baptismal waters. I was a new creation. The old was gone, the new had come.

See where the confusion came from? What I forgot, and maybe what wasn’t emphasized to that audience of pews, is that Jesus came in the flesh. He set aside His deity and became human. A man of sorrows. Tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. He came to be a suffering servant. To be human is to experience suffering.

In my defense, because I’ve lived my entire life trying to protect myself when no one else would, I’ve always sought safety. It was my number one priority. I fell in love with Rob because he made me feel safe. He was the most patient person I’d ever met, and I felt safe in his love for me until the end of his life. And then I didn’t feel safe anymore. I felt lost. Abandoned. Confused. Angry. Alone. Shocked. Misunderstood. All the things, all at once, over and over and over again.

I didn’t know who I was anymore. Was I still his wife? Was I still a McLeod now that my connection to his identity was gone? This week I found out Target canceled my Redcard, even though I applied for it on my own, because they learned that Rob died. Even they believe I am nothing without my husband here. It’s not just the relics of a misogynistic society that keep me feeling untethered. It is the literal truth that Rob and I were one, just as God said we would be.

I lost half of me the morning Rob died, and the other half of me is still on life support.

This is grief. This is suffering. This is how people live in loss, but most of the time have no way of telling you what it looks like or how it feels. But on the other side of the pew, in a world of turmoil and hatred, jealousy and greed, innocent people pay the price for being human and they know what it means to suffer. Rob knew that. He saw it firsthand. He spent his life in a career field that set him smack in the middle of other people’s worst nightmares. He rarely told me about any of it. He didn’t want me to worry. He wanted me to feel safe.

Now I live in my own nightmare. I wish he was here to comfort me.

Maybe you’re wondering what the point is. I understand. I’m searching for the right words at your expense. I believed Rob and I would live to the end of both our very old lives together, kick off at the same time because I wanted it that way, and arrive in heaven hand in hand. And if that didn’t work out, I was sure I’d go first because Rob was healthier than me and I didn’t want to suffer his loss. I am absolutely stunned that I have been left here without him.

That’s what I wanted to say. The ongoing hurt of loving and missing my love and my life is unlike any pain I have ever before experienced. Believing, and constantly being told by other pew warmers, that God would have to heal Rob if I believed it hard enough created a slough of confusion in my life that no one should ever have to endure. It wasn’t true. It made this loss harder. God is not a genie. And I am not above being human.

I was not immune to the suffering of my humanity simply because I was good at warming a pew. Or because I have belonged to Jesus since I was nine years old. Or because I have tried to let Jesus live through me. Stayed as far away from danger as I could get. Loved my family and friends. All the things. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said. No matter how hard you try to avoid it. He didn’t mince words much. I didn’t want to believe it could happen to me, becoming a widow. But it did.

There’s no shame in being human. Now I know how it feels.

 

 ^“I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, that you shall weep and grieve . . . You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy . . . Take courage. I have overcome the world for you.”

 John 16:20, 33 Amplified