It’s a strange time of life when you start attending the funerals of your friend’s parents, and watching your own grow more frail. It’s one of those defining moments of adulthood that rails against that internal part of you that still feels a child. It’s even stranger when your own friends, people your age that you’ve known for years; or even people you’ve only met a few times, are the ones being laid to rest.
I watched my sister go through it just a couple weeks ago. A lovely gal, one who radiated genuine love in the way fake people try to emulate, lost her battle to cancer. I listened as my sister grieved and helped her children grieve. I witnessed many loved ones post their thoughts and prayers and emotionally-burdened words online in an effort to find peace together.
Then last week I opened an email. In it was the memorial service information and a picture…of my friend. We went to the same church years ago. I listened to her cry and yell when her husband left her. I welcomed her into a single women’s Bible study I led when she felt out of place in the married women’s study she had been in. I helped her find a new job to support herself.
But the thing we had most in common, aside from our love of the Lord, was the pain we lived in. She had been in an accident and suffered from chronic pain and chronic migraines. I lived with both of those too. We often compared notes on what brought relief and what didn’t. We shared our fears about trying to deal with pain when there was no one to help us. We both knew what it was like to be looked at by others who didn’t live with chronic pain. The ones who thought, if it was a good day and you were managing well, that you weren’t really in that much pain. The others who would, when you weren’t dealing well, rather be anywhere else than near you. We both knew the power of a positive attitude, and how much worse the pain seemed when you allowed yourself to think of it as never, ever going away.
I didn’t find out until the middle of her memorial service that she had killed herself. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to stand up and say, “Wait, what? She what?” I wanted to run out of the service, and I did leave as soon as I could. I’ve never been good at processing emotion in front of other people. I drove off to a parking lot and cried and screamed and sobbed. She just got married. She seemed so happy. Why? What could have robbed that from her?
But I knew. I knew from the number of times they mentioned how much pain she lived with at the service. I knew from the friend who said, after I mentioned she lived in chronic pain, “That’s why. It was the pain.” But mostly I knew because I’d been there. I’d been in that place. When you are lying there in so much pain that you have to focus to breathe and you can’t find one position that gives you relief and the best of the medication you’ve been prescribed does nothing but make you nauseous. I’ve begged God to just take me home.
I think that’s what’s been the hardest. To know that place, to know exactly where she was and to know that I’ll be there again one day, or many days…and to know that sometimes, in that moment, nothing else matters but ending the pain.
It’s the thing that makes me long for heaven the most. “…He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev 21:4 NAS). No more pain. No more death. No more.
Findingmyselfinhim's Blog 