The Wall

Microsoft has been at it again. Commandeering my laptop at night while I’m asleep and messing up all my open files. Rude. If I didn’t need the internet so badly, I’d shut this thing down every time I’m finished with it instead of leaving it to its own devices.  I remember well the simple years before the world wide web even existed. Now we’re all caught in it.

I put everything back in its cyber place and re-opened the row of documents I’ve been adding to for weeks. They’re my journals. All the pages where I process more of the grief that replaces itself every time I think I’ve cried it all off or written it all down. It’s a bottomless well. Or as experts describe it, a hole in my life that will never shrink. Instead, I will slowly learn to build a new life around it. A life I never asked for and never wanted.

I don’t know if exposing my thoughts on a public blog makes me a narcissist or an idiot. I don’t post all the things I write because I’m not sure how they’ll land with my audience. That’s a good way to go out of business as a writer, worrying about what other people think of the things you have to say. I’m working on that little confidence issue.

Three years ago. Unbelievable. I am now beginning the fourth year without Rob beside me. It hurts to even write that here. I am so tired. Tears still flow easily. Too easily. I wonder why I bother with mascara every day, although wearing it means I’ll pretend I’m fine and won’t look like I lost a fight with a three-year-old makeup artist.

I’m here again because I had another argument with God this week. It was a lot like the kind Rob and I used to have where I verbalized how I felt and he didn’t. One-sided, it left me feeling like I was talking to a wall. No explanations were given. All I accomplished was offloading more pain.

I could go all religious-speak here and chastise myself for not having enough faith to simply trust God, but He made me and knows me and never seems offended by my accusations or queries. I think deep thoughts and ask hard questions because holding all that in will only make me sick. Or explode. Ain’t nobody wants to get hit by Eula shrapnel.

Sometimes you don’t know what to question until your world blows up and sorrow fills the void.

I told The Wall that I don’t think our traditional concept of Heaven is fair. The need for such a place comes up quickly when someone’s life evaporates right before your eyes, stopping all forward movement in its tracks. Left behind as that train pulls away from the station, we find ourselves holding a bag filled with shattered dreams and confusion, shouldered with heavy responsibilities and tormenting regrets. We’re eyewitnesses to the broken hearts of our families, and unable to fix a thing while our loved one is sent “to his reward” and “a better place” where “there is no more suffering.”  By contrast, we’re still here, devoid of reward in a diminished place where we now endure enormous suffering.

This is so hard to articulate, but I know it’s natural to want to make sense out of something that is senseless. Last week I was shopping with my sister when the heart-wrenching voice of Michael Bolton flooded the room. I told her I had to leave because the words of his lament were tearing me up, but it was too late. They rang in my ears on the sidewalk outside and I cried anyway.

Tell me how am I supposed to live without you
Now that I've been lovin' you so long
How am I supposed to live without you
And how am I supposed to carry on
When all that I've been livin' for is gone

It didn’t matter that the song was about a different kind of rejection. It’s the question we ask in loss. It’s hard enough to stand by helplessly and watch the love of your life die without wondering if there's a reason he found relief and you lost your entire world. I’m wrestling here. Afraid to say what I’m really feeling. How dismissive it feels when a man is promoted to the spirit world while his wife is left behind and the situation is described as "better." There. I said it.

But there’s more. If when people die and go to heaven, they are protected from seeing the pain we still suffer here on earth, how much more abandoned can I possibly feel? How much more rejected? Or less than? It’s like I need to cry out, “Unclean!” I’m only human. We were in this together and now he is gone. I cannot help but feel that I am being punished for something I don’t even know I did. I know that’s not how God works, but that’s how grief and guilt do.

The why’s haunt me.

The Wall didn’t say anything. Just stood there listening. Very smart. So, I held the floor and kept verbalizing, sorting through my feelings, searching for words. Like right now. I don’t know if I’m making this complaint clear. Or, perhaps, it’s offensive. Fortunately, The Wall understands me and did not fall on me in judgment.

It will take years for me to learn to rebuild a life for myself that I never asked for and never wanted. Years. This isn’t everyone’s story. It’s not everyone’s perspective. It’s not even someone else’s complaint. It’s mine. The answers to why someone dies when they do are insufficient because they’re simplistic and one-size-fits-all. They’re also a guessing game.

Rob wasn’t trying to “go to his reward.” When he got sick, he called it the fight of his life. Until that happened, we were side by side in the middle of doing life together, 'flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone', settling into our new home. He was changing his passwords to ILMW—I Love My Wife. He loved his wife, he loved his life, he wasn’t suffering here until he got sick. Now we’re the ones suffering. It’s a life sentence.

So, I asked God about all of this, accusing Him of punishing me without probable cause. I challenged the accepted belief that when people go to heaven, they cannot see what’s going on here anymore. That they’re cut off from us and we’re cut off from them because there’s no bad news allowed when you live with God. We interpret Scripture to back up this point, referencing “no tears in heaven,” for example. But that’s not the context and to be honest, the Bible doesn’t give many literal details about heaven. I think God wants to surprise us when we get there.

I don’t think we understand death. We don’t understand grief. We don’t even understand God’s heart.

Here’s where I landed as I stood there talking to The Wall. Rob got sick and his body could not recover, but his spirit and soul are in perfect condition as always. More than that, he has the privilege now of seeing what’s going on here from the same perspective that God has. No longer does Rob have partial knowledge—First Corinthians 13* says that now Rob knows fully what’s going on. I’m pretty jealous of that. It means that Rob knows the answers to the questions that remain unanswered for me right now. No surprise there. He always knew more than I did.

Seeing what we’re dealing with here on this planet could not possibly bring tears to our loved ones in Heaven, because time does not exist there. There’s no guesswork anymore. No reason for prophecy. They don’t need hope. They don’t even have to walk by faith. They have perfect vision. Perspective is everything. They have the huge advantage of having stepped outside of time and this limited dimension and, in the presence of the All-Knowing One, they see what we only hope for right now.

Which is why I hope. Even when the tears cascade like a waterfall and my heart cramps in missing him and loneliness is both teacher and companion. Even when I pound my fists against The Wall. I hope. I endure. Maybe someday I will thrive.

I know Rob knows what I’m going through here without him. I know he prays for me and for our family, his family. I no longer believe he and all the others who love us are so removed from the connection we have that we are left on our own in the rubble. It’s just that he also knows that The Wall has my back, too, and that our separation is a temporary situation. Relatively speaking.

There’s a line in the movie, The Princess Bride, that comforts me. “Death cannot stop true love,” Westley told Buttercup. “All it can do is delay it for a while.” Then he took her in his arms and she stopped crying.

^*8 Love never fails. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. ¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The Wall never falls because love never fails.  

With thanks to Michael Kogan for the use of the wall seen above. The original photo can be viewed by clicking on this link:

Avila | michael kogan | Flickr