I know I can make it there without you here. But, boy, I wish I didn’t have to.
Yesterday, I thought I was okay. I remembered how hard it was, how much you were hurting, how tough our relationship was at times. I’m glad that part is over. But I still wish you were here for me—how selfish—and for Alli and for our kids. I wish you were a phone call or a FaceTime away. I wish I could believe that you’re looking down and cheering from heaven. I think you’re probably doing something better, consumed with the glory of doing what your soul was created to do. If you’re cheering us at all, it’s toward the true finish line, eyes fixed on the Author and Perfecter of our faith.
I know I can make it there without you here. But, boy, I wish I didn’t have to.
The death of a parent is like losing the backdrop to your life halfway through the play. These people were the tangible reference points to where you came from and who you’ve become. They’re your biggest earthly influences, for better or worse. To continue living motherless or fatherless in a world that’s full of them feels, for a while, like walking around with your skin peeled off.
Yet, like sin itself, losing parents is common to man. If life goes as we have come to expect it in this broken world, in the order of time, each of us will bury our parents. We will have been prepared for this, or so we thought, by saying goodbye to pets when we were kids and to grandparents as we grew older. As the Mandalorian might say, “This is the way.”
But none of these losses is made easier by being commonplace. None of us is ever ready to witness the slow demise of a loved one or a sudden shocking departure. No—losing my mother’s presence on this earth has blown a chasm in me that will never be closed. I was not at all done being mothered at age thirty-three. I see now that I never will be.
But this is to say that death is something we will all face. Sometimes it springs on us. Sometimes it gives us years of warning and worrying. Too often, it comes out of order, taking a child from a father, a mother from a young family, a friend from college days.
It is an utter tragedy when children die, full stop. It is shocking when young adults in the prime of their lives are taken, when spouses and children are left behind too. And it is an odd sort of shock to lose parents in their fifties or sixties.
They were almost so many things: almost retired, almost on that vacation, almost or, in my case, only briefly a grandparent. They had a good many years; they should have had many more.
In my inner circle of friends, I am among the first to go through this losing of a parent, though I know I will not be the last. I had been walking with the possibility of Mom’s death for more than two decades by the time it came, but I still kept it at bay for as long as I could. When her death had come and gone, I emerged from the fog with a new perspective.
Weeks later, a friend was talking about her father who had treated her cruelly growing up, saying she didn’t care if he ended up in a nursing home when the time came. My entire body bristled in response, and tears filled my eyes. There is nothing inherently wrong with the ’round-the-clock help many families require to care for loved ones, especially when their end stages stretch over many months or years. What made me ache was the indifference in her voice, which I know was a cover for so much pain.
“I know it will be hard,” I told her, “but if I’ve learned anything from walking through those final days with my mom, it’s that you don’t want to miss it if you have the chance.”
As believers in life after death, we have the opportunity to love even those who have not loved us well, to the very end. We can extend improbable grace because, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you [and your loved ones], not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
People change in unimaginable ways when death draws near, and we can be changed too through witnessing it. At least two of my grandparents were saved in their final days. People showed up to have the conversations and, by the work of God’s Spirit amid deadly diagnoses, they were ready to receive it.
I am convinced that walking with our parents through their deaths is one of the kindnesses God has woven into our reality, stained as it is by sin. Just as we tend to become aware of our parents’ fallibility before our own, we can rehearse our own mortality by being confronted first with theirs.
We don’t need to wonder if we are “called” to walk with our parents through the sunsets of their lives; 1 Timothy 5:3-4 notes that such care is a primary outworking of godliness and “is pleasing in the sight of God.” Rather, engaging in this process offers us a hands-on form of sanctification as we seek to serve at life’s end the people who gave us life. That’s not to say it is easy. The dying process does not cause the difficulties in our parental relationships to disappear. Rather, it tends to expose them. But what is brought into the light can, by God’s grace, also be dealt with, endured, and forgiven. Maybe it can even begin to be healed.
This is also true of all opportunities to draw near to the dying. Yes, it may come at a cost. It will take time and emotional energy to sit in the ash heap with your coworker as her new cancer diagnosis sinks in. It may stir up fears about the safety of your own child to put yourself in the shoes of the one who recently lost hers, to weep alongside the Spirit that groans with us in prayer.
But there is richness to be reaped here. Whether you offer the ministry of presence or of dropping off presents on the front-door stoop—just don’t stay away. The darkest corners that seem the farthest from God are the places He delights to be and to work. These are also the places He desires to send His workers, for, to tweak a phrase from Matthew 9:37, the harvest is plentiful, but the co-sufferers are few.
This rehearsal of hardship is also necessary preparation for each of us, one that many of us miss out on in an effort to avoid thinking about death at all. But fully facing our loved ones’ mortality helps us live within our own limitations as humans. I trust it will also help each of us, one day, face our own walk across the waters with more courage, remembering the faces of those who have gone before.
Adapted from We Shall All Be Changed by Whitney K. Pipkin (© 2024). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
Photo Credit: ©Patrick Schneider/Unsplash
