Category: Grieving

At precisely 5:30pm on Thursday afternoon, on the eve of a three-day holiday weekend in which all things were closed the next day, our furnace began making a screeching grinding sound that echoed in the vents throughout the house.

As Bryan and I stood in the kitchen assessing the nature of the sound, we both had That Look on our face. It is That Look that recognized the time of day on that particular holiday weekend, during that particular week where temperatures were at a record low for the Puget Sound Area. It was That Look that recognized how OBVIOUS it would be that a furnace would begin making such grinding noises at this particular moment in time.

A few minutes later the grinding stopped, and we went about our business of the evening.

Off and on all weekend we stopped and held our breath as the grinding came and went. We waited. We hoped. We crossed our fingers. We prayed the furnace would last through the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon – New Year’s Day – I got a call from my sister, Jody, who reported that Gordy seemed to be slipping away, letting go. She said I should think about coming home soon, and that his daughter, Pam, was already on an airplane.

Even though Gordy had been diagnosed eight months ago, this plunge still took me by surprise. Just a week earlier at Christmastime he was up and about, visiting family and eating lutefisk. It seemed we might get another month with him at least.

Upon hearing this news I did what I always to do cope… I started doing things. I cleaned, I packed, I researched airline ticket prices, I rearranged plans, I organized the kitchen cabinets. I kept moving.

Meanwhile, the grinding furnace got so bad that on Sunday afternoon we shut it down from the circuit breaker.

It was cold that weekend. Seattle was experiencing record-breaking low temperatures.
We borrowed space heaters from friends and shuffled them around the house with us. We slept in ski hats and wools socks.

Monday morning, January 3rd, was a regular morning. I woke up, I took a shower, I fed Ruthie breakfast, I called someone to fix the furnace. Around 11am the phone rang.

I recently read an excerpt of Carole Radziwill’s memoir, “What Remains,” in which she describes what happens between the moment an event happens and when you find out about it, how she was sipping a glass of wine and reading Pride and Prejudice as her friend’s airplane spiraled downward into the ocean.

I was sleeping when Gordy died. While he drifted off into the peacefulness of the early dawn in his own bedroom, I was completely unaware that something significant was transpiring in my life, that I was losing the man who had anchored me throughout the confusing years of my childhood.

In the morning when I awoke, when I fed Ruthie breakfast and called the furnace repair guy, I had no idea that I had just experienced a loss.

At 11:00 a.m. when I picked up the phone, my mom was crying on the other end. Through her sobs I heard her say, “Gordy is walking the streets of gold.”

I was standing in the laundry room where I had been loading the washing machine. I was crying, and the doorbell rang.

Almost every significant event throughout Gordy’s illness is somehow tied to a major home maintenance project. When I first received the news that Gordy had cancer, Bryan and I were meeting with contractors who were bidding out the remodel of our basement. And now, as the news of his passing was still sinking in I walked a sales representative through my house pointing out air vents and faulty duct work.

People die. Life goes on.

Never before in my life – and probably never again – will that fact be made more clear to me.

Yesterday we finally turned on our new furnace for the winter season. It purred ever so quietly, and the air blew through the vents with a force of confidence.

I felt warm, and I remembered.

The other night as I sat eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with fresh peaches on top from the local farmer’s market, I was reminiscing of Gordy. He loved summer fruit, and he loved peaches with ice cream. I think blueberries were his favorite cereal topping, but for some reason as I sat there eating peaches with my ice cream, it had GORDY written all over it.

God, I miss him.

He had a way of getting excited over simple pleasures, like summer fruit and corn on the cob. I have memories of him marching into the kitchen with frisky determination, rubbing his hands together as he planned his attack on the fruit of the day.

Some days it was strawberry-rhubarb. He would cook batches of it on the stove: fresh rhubarb from the garden, strawberries, a little sugar to mellow it out. I couldn’t WAIT for strawberry-rhubarb season. I would spread it on my Wheaties, we’d have it on pancakes, and it was just the right amount of tart to put on vanilla ice cream.

Gordy knew how to savor.

I’ll be honest: resolution gives me writer’s block.

As an introvert, I write to process through the fog in my mind. Once the wave has swelled and spilled over onto the beach I can think of nothing else to say. To recap how high the wave became, what kind of splash it produced, and how far it creeped onto the beach is to report – and I am not a reporter.

Gordy has died.

Despite his having cancer, his death still came as a surprise to me. Not in the sense that I was denying the seriousness of his illness, but in the sense that just one week prior to his death he had been visiting relatives and eating lutefisk.

There was a funeral; there was family drama; and there were unspoken territories marked. But to recap that today seems like reporting.

And I am not a reporter.

Perhaps someday I will process through what all this has meant. Maybe I will even explore why it seems my grieving has died with Gordy.

But for now it is all behind me, and as much as I try to poetically script my thoughts into poignant essays, it all comes out as mere recorded events.

And I am not a reporter.

So I will quit trying, and let the grief catch up to me again.

Have you ever felt like a sermon preached by a pastor was aimed right at you?

That he spent all week thinking about you, your life, your issues, then said to himself, “I’m going to preach a sermon for her?”

This morning’s sermon – preached by Pastor Mike — seemed particularly powerful to me. Again, there’s a lot of hormones running through my pregnant body these days which tends to cause crying over just about anything, but he really seemed to hit on some things I’ve been pondering.

From the time Gordy’s cancer went really downhill – when the tumors were found in his brain and the reality check in my head said this was the beginning of the end – I began to feel numb.

At least what I thought I felt was numbness, but the more I began to think about the Christian’s role in death the more I realized that what I felt was peace.

In Philippians 1:20-21 Paul says, “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

Pastor Mike punctuated that passage by saying that in life we live FOR Christ, and in death we live WITH Christ.

Do we as believers value that Biblical Truth? Do I value that Truth?

Of course I don’t want Gordy to die. I want him to live so my children can grow up and know what a kind, gentle, and giving man he is. I want my children to know the man God used to restore me from a bitter and confused childhood. I want more time with him, to be teased by him, to be irritated by him at times for still seeing me as the teenager I was when I left home, to show him what kind of mom I’ve become because he loved me so unconditionally.

I grieve everything I will lose in his death.

But in death, he will gain so much.

And that is what I believe has given me peace.

When Simeon saw the baby Jesus at the temple on the day of his dedication, just eight days old, he said, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).

Simeon was an old man who had waited his entire life for God’s promise of a savior to come, and when he saw the Christ child he knew the fulfillment of this Promise had been delivered, and he could die in peace.

How much more should we be at peace with death, since we know the end of the story? We know that Christ conquered death so we would not be mastered by it.

God is not like the plumber who was scheduled to work on my house, who postponed twice, then on the third appointment he never came and never called. He overbooked, or lost his calendar, or forgot to pencil me in, or misplaced my phone number, or whatever his excuse. I don’t know, because he never said. To this day he remains unseen and unheard. Needless to say, he will never work on my plumbing because I will now find a new plumber.

God shows up. God is with us. God is comforting me in my grief, and he is comforting Gordy as he travels on.