Sunday Morning Meds--Darkness

 

. . .all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” 

Psalm 42:7

Lots of my students affix Bible verses to their e-mail messages, but the message that sticks with me every time I read it belongs to Colleen, a secretary, whose notes always end this way: “***You cannot really live until you are ready to die***”—including the asterisks.

I can’t know all the reasons why she has attached that particular line to her e-mails, but I think I know one of them: she lost a child. Some might disagree, but, as a parent myself, I can’t imagine any single event in any person’s life being more devastating.

Years ago, when I was a toddler, an aunt of mine was killed in a freakish car accident. I know how hard that death was on my mother, but I never knew how awful it must have been for my grandma until another woman told me a story that happened just a few years later, the story of her own brother’s sudden death. She told me that she’d never forgotten how my grandma was the first to visit her mother after her brother’s death. They were neighbors, so her visit made sense. But I knew why Grandma went to visit there right away, even though I didn’t know my grandma’s grief. She walked across the street and through her neighbor’s back door because she knew exactly what that mother was going through. She could bring real comfort. She’d been there.

I’ve never known that depth of grief. In some ways, when I look at these words from Psalm 42, I realize I’ve been blessed with innocence and serenity because I’ve been spared something of the worst.

Just now I stood outside and remembered telling myself, a quarter century ago, that, should I die on the airplane I was boarding, I could live with that—that I knew my wife and little children would go on, that they’d be cared for, that, with time, life would continue on its way without me. I told myself that, like all things, I too must pass. That realization on a stairway into a jet is a moment I’ve never forgotten, an affirmation, in a way. What I knew, were I to die, was that I could live with who I’d been.

Nothing’s changed. A quarter century later, I stand by that determination. I honestly believe I can meet Colleen’s challenge because I’m okay with the life I would leave behind me.

But what I know now, for the first time in my life, is what a blessing that is, that affirmation; and I know it because now I know something of the ravaging horror of depression, of those who can’t say it. Depression has taken hold of someone I love as much as Colleen loved her son; and even though I don’t know personally the terrors the poet David describes in this line, I do know, and love, someone who does. I’ve seen the tremors from those breakers. I’ve felt the waves of darkness storming.

I can only hope and pray that he, like so many others who suffer this darkness, can take heart from this line in an especially memorable Psalm because King David offers us this, for sure, some company in grief—as this psalm might have for Colleen, for Grandma’s neighbor, for Grandma herself, for all of us, not to mention my mother in her son’s trying days. To know that David knows profound sadness, fear, and despair—and God himself knows, the Father who himself lost a son himself—just to know that is a breath of blessed assurance.

We’re not alone. That’s the theme of these lines of David’s story. Even though there is darkness, that He is with us, all of us, is no small comfort.

That’s the single story of the Bible, I suppose.