I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Joy of Grief



Surrounded by grass and stately trees, I stood one September day years ago in Victoria Memorial Gardens in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. My family and I had gathered to lay to rest my mother, Edna Marie. She had lived 96 years on this earth, and although she was a person who enjoyed life and family and especially grandchildren, there was a cloud that blocked the sun of her happiness for much of her adult life.

Mother suffered from grief. Not outwardly; she hid it well. But there were events in her life that caused her heart to ache. A devastating illness that hit her daughter, my sister, when she was five. A 1947 Plymouth sedan that crossed the center line of Highway 3 near Essex, Ontario. A lapse in family loyalty on the part of an important member of our family. The death of a granddaughter at the age of two. These events spanned four decades. There were many good years in our family life between them. But they seemed to hold a grip on Mother that could not be lifted. This grief seemed to predate these events. It was as if Mother was grieving over something from her youth that kept being reinforced with every family challenge and tragedy that entered our family history.

I was so intrigued about that grief my mother experienced that I wrote about it. I researched family history and read documents and letters from my family that I had never known existed. The resulting book I called Windsor’s Child, because I was a child when many of these things happened, and because we lived in Windsor at the time.

For the past year, I have been working on editing a book for a friend I knew in Lincoln Park, Michigan more than four decades ago. The Internet had brought her back into my life after all those years where neither of us had any idea where the other was. In July, 2010, my wife, Linda, and I met with my friend in a restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan to discuss the possibility of me helping her get her book in a publishable form. I agreed. That book is now published.

The book deals with grief, the same kind of grief my mother experienced all those years. My friend, Barbara Forsyth, calls her book Joy Comes in the Mourning. Her premise is that God wants to take our grief, our mourning, and turn it into joy.

Barb certainly has experienced her share of grief. Cancer took her father from her when she was only twelve. Later, she and her husband laid to rest their firstborn only a few days after his birth. Just six months before she met with my wife and me, Barb said her final goodbyes to her mother. And in between these events, Barb has had a continuing ministry to people she knew through her school where she taught for forty years, and in the neighborhood of the condo she and her husband share in Ontario, California.

I wish my mother could have read Barb’s book. I wish she could have read my book. Both contain the challenge my mother never seemed to understand. God wants to take our grief and turn it into joy.

However, since a couple of days before I stood by her grave, in September, 1998, I know my mother found God’s answer to her grief. I now know what caused her grief, and I now know that she has found God’s joy in His presence. There truly is joy in the mourning for Windsor’s child.