by Kate McGrath
Every person’s grief journey is different. I’m sharing part of my journey in hopes that someone will find something useful in their own journey. I have been helped by many fellow wayfarers as I travel.
“I have the easy part; I only have to die. You have the hard part; you have to live.”
My little sister, Meghan, looked at me earnestly through her brown eyes, as we processed the fact that she was not going to get better.
She was always wise beyond her 31 years, but her 16-month battle with cancer had transformed her into a saint who would never be canonized.
She had come to realize and accept that her life was not her own (I Corinthians 6:19), and that there is more than one kind of healing. She loved telling people about how Jesus had healed her soul through her illness, even though He had not healed her body.
She believed her heart was whole because of her cancer.
I was reading the Gospel of John during Meghan’s battle, and noticed that Christ’s encounters with people were not always the same. I came to believe that Jesus interacts with every man, woman and child according to what he sees in each heart. He knows what each heart needs to be made whole, and then acts accordingly, always with eternity as the goal.
At least this is what I felt the Holy Spirit showed me in preparation for my only sibling’s death.
During those long nights of wrestling with our Great Healer God, I also heard a question, “Is it better for Meghan to be healed or to be in Heaven?”
And, indeed, as Christians, we know that for those who are forgiven by Christ, death has lost its sting (I Corinthians 6:19-20) — for the one who is dying.
That person has reached the end of a long, weary exile in a broken world and is enjoying a home going. This belief was affirmed for me as I watched my sister’s last breath, and first felt complete joy — followed by months of devastating sadness.
You see, my sister and I had watched my mom pass away from a sudden stroke just six months previously.
I have never had more certainty that there was truly a Heaven than when the woman from whom I came left earth. I can’t explain the knowing, but it was palpable.
My sister said she felt the same way, as well. She lived only 6 months more than my mom, and this knowing was an anchor for us all in those dark seven months when I lost three of the most influential woman in my life from across three generations.
Yes, death loses the sting for the one who is going to be with her Savior. But there is a deep sting of death for those who are left behind.
As Christians, it can feel traitorous towards our King to say something like that out-loud. We know that we are to trust his will, and lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-8). Being mad, or even simply sad, feels like we are defying that truth.
Actions speak louder than words, but, what about emotions?
We, the grieving Christian, sit in Bible studies, and someone says something like “When you trust Jesus, there isn’t any room in your heart for fear and anxiety”. We nod in agreement because, of course, it is true, and at another time, we would have said something like this, too… but now… now inside we are screaming with frustration trying desperately to will ourselves enough self-control to control our anxiety.
Our anxiety has taken over because now we know that any day you can wake up and go about life just like every other day before, but in an instant, everything changes and you go to bed that same night with one of the people you love best gone from the Earth.
That sudden, acute experience brings out one kind of anxiety. Meanwhile, watching a loved one slowly die, bit by bit, fearing every phone call will be THE phone call for months on end, trains your body in another kind of anxiety (this is the kind of anxiety I developed watching my sister die).
As Christians, it feels so wrong to feel anxious, sad, mad… it feels like we are telling God he doesn’t know what he is doing, even if we really do believe he does. At least that is how I felt. So I pushed my anxiety down to the deep places of my soul. I barely acknowledged it for months.
For me personally, all this anxiety, all these conflicts between how I was feeling and what I thought I should be feeling as a Christian, converged on my body.
In my mind, I believed the Bible, I believed God’s sovereignty, I believed my loved ones were safe and whole in Heaven, and I had felt God’s presence in incredible, tangible ways. Intellectually, I had peace. But my body was a wreck. I was sick to my stomach all the time with gastritis, which made me fear that I was dying, too, which increased my anxiety and brought on more symptoms.
I also had to face another prospect — my father also became very ill when we found my sister wasn’t going to get better. He developed a bleeding ulcer and had to receive eight units of blood before he was stabilized. Watching that made me keenly aware of the toll emotional trauma can take on one’s body. I noticed every pain in my body and feared it was life threatening, just as it had been for my father. Heart burn, tension down my left arm, tingling in various places, sciatic pain, foot pain, knee pain, head aches… my body was in a constant state of tension. I even started to have ear ringing and random bone pains. Eventually, ALL of my symptoms could be traced back to anxiety.
There was so much to process, and I was trying to raise two little ones (and lets face it, parenting can be hard at the best of times), trying to be a wife and trying to continue with a precious few of the activities that were part of my old normal.
But trying to push through and pretending things were normal when they were not certainly wasn’t working. Indeed, it was making me sicker.
I somehow knew my brain was the true problem. I thought I needed to retrain it to stop being “so crazy.” Now normal things that used to make me have butterflies — like public speaking or hosting a dinner party — triggered major anxiety symptoms.
I had to spend a weekend away with strangers, something I’ve done countless times in my life. Usually in such circumstances, I would feel nervous excitement, but this time my ears were ringing the entire time away! I knew I was sick and needed help.
So I went to a therapist.
The first time I did EMDR (Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing) with her, I walked into her office with a limp. I did the EMDR therapy and walked out with a normal gait and no pain! My fabulous therapist and I spent months exploring every symptom.
Bit by bit, as we unpacked the emotions behind the symptoms, they began to go away. It took several months, but we got there in the end. I took magnesium supplements and probiotics, but managed to rid myself of the other symptoms without medications because I was attending to the cause of the symptoms.
Here are some of the things I learned:
Anxiety symptoms can be caused by unprocessed grief. Because my sister was in the hospital weeks after my mom’s death, I never had the opportunity to grieve Mom properly. This was the source of my first batch of symptoms. Once I learned this, whenever those symptoms presented themselves, I took time to feel the grief, process it, and be sad in a controlled way, rather than allowing my body to be controlled by the grief. That was one step toward health.
Some of my anxiety symptoms were actually repressed anger. I was angry that my new reality didn’t include my Mom and sister. And I thought this anger translated into not trusting God’s plan for my life. So I shoved it down so deep that I wasn’t even aware of my anger and frustration.
I thought it was wrong to be sad or angry, until I remembered that God is protective of his children. Sin and its effects deeply sadden him. He felt sad and angry, too, that his good plans for mankind (my family included) had been destroyed by sin. That includes when sickness destroys. Emotions are just emotions.
Ephesians 4:26 says, “In your anger, do not sin.” God expects us to feel anger and it’s okay. It’s what we do with the anger that matters. As I recognized my anger, it began to recede.
I Peter 5:7 says, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” He cares for you! This isn’t simply, “don’t be anxious.” It’s because He cares for us that God doesn’t want us to be anxious. He wants to free us. I had to imagine myself throwing the anxiety on God; that helped me heal.
When I was acting like life was normal, and wanting life to get back to normal, I was holding myself back from healing. I had to stop chasing a past normal that would never again be, and accept that I am simply never going to be my old self.
Death of a close loved one changes you. And that change made me feel guilty. When I wasn’t able to “be myself” during holidays, or when I lost my temper with others because my emotional bandwidth was small, or when I realized that my 3-year-old son had never really known emotionally stable parents, the guilt became crushing.
I felt like such a failure when my husband helped me with “my chores.” He was trying to love me by serving me, and I only felt guilt. I felt so much failure as a wife, a mom and as a child of God. When I finally named that failure and gave myself the space to “be different” and to work through my emotions, I almost immediately started getting better.
I had to stop striving. I remember hearing during a Bible teaching that we please God by our surrender, not our works. Later that same teacher said, “Notice the passive voice. It doesn’t say, ‘Go transform yourself. Rather it says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind’.” We don’t transform ourselves. We submit to God and he begins to transform our minds.
I noticed that I HAD to take time to sit in God’s presence, because those were the days when health was restored. If I skipped time in the presence of God, my mind would slip back into its old patterns and I would have the same symptoms I was struggling with return. Spending time with God was an essential part of my healing. He is our Great Healing God.
Grieving as a Christian is complicated.
There is so much depth to the realities of life and death, so many nuances and so many mysteries. All this complicates the grieving process in subtle ways. But I have learned that God truly can turn our mourning into dancing. Today, almost all of my anxiety and grief symptoms are gone. But they still pop up unexpectedly, triggered by weather, objects, songs…
Finally, I had to create a sacred space to process, to be healed and to be transformed in the renewing of my mind. This involved simplifying life to the bare necessities and giving up things I didn’t want to. It involved allowing myself to be “abnormal”. People have told me that you can’t shortcut grief. I learned the hard way that this is true.
When I stopped fighting grief and learned to appreciate it, to view it as an opportunity to learn about the mysteries of faith and life, my grief journey changed.
I started dancing, one step at a time.
Kate McGrath is a wife, mother, daughter, and friend living in Baltimore. She loves cheering on her husband, Steve, when he is performing on the drums and reading good books aloud to her children, Cecilia and Vincent, while snuggling with them.
(This article was first posted in 2018).
