July 2 (today... I should be sleeping) marks nine months since you left us; the same amount of time I carried you in my body. I miss you. Maybe more now than in those early days following your departure. Then everything was colored by your absence. Now it sneaks up on me... I'll go to share something or send a picture and remember and it's like taking a sucker punch to the gut.

As an only child, playground games were foreign to me. I clearly remember the first time someone (one of the "cool" kids) asked me to join in on a game of "crack the whip" during recess. Naive, I joined the end of the line of children holding hands and was told, "don't let go." By the time it was over I thought the bones and joints in my arm and shoulder had surely snapped.

The grieving process reminds me of that playground game.

We're almost four months in. Despite my best intentions, my son's ashes are still planted in the center of my home on an antique cabinet that once housed an early-era TV or radio (I'm not sure how old it is). He may stay there indefinitely, but I do plan on finding him a more suitable container, or at least a more suitable bag for the temporary container from the crematorium. I thought a Crown Royal bag might suit him (Jack Daniels doesn't make bags), but I can't find one that's large enough.

As the immediate family left behind, we're riding the waves. Up one day, down the next.

What has surprised me is the "crack-the-whip" effect of day to day events:

My little rescue Westie is having some health problems that could be terminal... WHIP-CRACK negative 100.

A new grandbaby, hallelujah!... WHIP-CRACK positive 10,000.

Work stress that should be neutral is a WHIP-CRACK negative 50.

A minor event in the life of the youngest child that should be a negative 10 or 15 becomes a negative 75 or 80. WHIP-CRACK.

The death of another local young person—who knew my boys—to complications from the flu due to preexisting health problems is at least a negative 90.

I've had multiple days of permeating sadness and mind-boggling loss. I expected that much. But this emotional crack-the-whip is exhausting. Anxiety and gratitude compete for every breath... and there's no escape from this playground game.

It's as if everything is amplified... the good and the bad. Maybe this is living outside the humdrum, day-to-day existence I've come to accept as normal. Maybe I should view these extremes as a blessing.

Meanwhile, I cling to my bit of driftwood amid the shipwreck and hope for the best.

Death does not negate the promises of God. That's hard to accept in the face of death, but I still believe it's true.

For now, I expect the roller-coaster of emotions to continue.

Perhaps I'll learn to enjoy the ride.

All the books say the three-month mark is especially hard after a death. We're rapidly approaching that date, and I can see how this may be one of the uglier parts of loss: AKA REALITY.


The reality is that Ethan—son, brother, friend, more—is gone. We'll not see him again in this life.


Pictures bring reality to the forefront and are hard to see now. Watching videos is still out of the question, but I'm thankful they exist and are there for me when I'm ready to watch them.

Spiritually, supernaturally, I believe with all my heart that he is OK.

Friends and loved ones have reminded me that "our days are numbered" on God's calendar. When the Grim Reaper pops out of your particular advent calendar window, that's that, the jig is up. According to my calculations, Ethan had 9,478 days on this earth, almost 26 years.

It's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, but there it is.

I do believe in an afterlife. I believe God has a plan that is full of overwhelming mercy and grace we tend to be too small-minded, critical and judgmental to comprehend. (Let everyone in??? No way!!! Where's our wall???) I also believe—and science agrees with me—that energy cannot be lost, only changed. What that energy changes into is subject to interpretation (and all our interpretations are probably inaccurate on one level or another.)

What's hard now is the realization I'm not going to see Ethan's sparkling blue-gray eyes twinkling over a joke again, or his bright smile telling me everything would be OK, except in pictures. I'm not going to get to pester him about his dreadlocks, his braided beard, his weird tattoos, or his strange attire (he never failed to shock me with a new, strange accessory or outfit in 25 years). I won't get to argue with him about philosophy or religion or whether humanity is worth trying to save. I'll never cuddle his children (he had an appointment for a vasectomy scheduled, I found out after his death), and I'll never be the mother of the groom at his wedding. That said, I know his spirit/soul visited me in a dream after his death. We argued vehemently about how long toenails should be. Believe me, if the subject had come up in the flesh, the conversation would have been the same.

I keep running across random FB posts and think, "I should share that with E!" And then I remember he won't see it unless he's surveilling social media from the ether. Somehow I think (hope) he's beyond that inanity.

When will we ever be closer to grasping the weight of the afterlife, the eternal, the love of the Creator and the time to come after death? When is the veil between eternity and reality ever thinner than now, in the midst of grief?

That doesn't make talking to God or resuming a prayer life any easier. When your prayer journals are clogged with promises and pleas for the safety and protection of your children, and one of them dies anyway, it's a little challenging to return to your doctrinal theories. I'm trusting God understands my hesitation and will lead me in the way I should go, whatever that looks like.

Ethan was a torch. Not just a bright light, not just a flame. He was a TORCH. To ignore his absence is impossible. At the same time, I have four grandchildren and one on the way in February. I have much reason to rejoice and to celebrate. My three living children deserve all the love and care and comfort they can get this year. I want to do more for them than ever before, yet I know there's nothing I can do to ease their pain. As an only child myself, I don't even fully understand their loss, and I'm aware of that.

I miss my Ethan, in all his crazy personas, many of which caused me untold stress, embarrassment and fear. I'll miss my firstborn son for the rest of my earthly life. That said—and this may sound awful—I don't miss WORRYING about him every single day. I don't miss fretting over his future or wondering if his next sword-swallowing gig would be his last. But I do miss HIM: his presence, his calm spirit, his ability to argue for hours without losing his temper. I hate that he's gone and that his "numbered days" ended before he'd accomplished all I believed he was capable of, but I know that's no excuse for the rest of us ceasing to live life to the fullest. He wouldn't want that, not for any of us.

I was going to skip making penuche this year because it was his favorite Christmas treat, but now I can't skip it. If I don't make the penuche, I'm letting death win. So I'll make the penuche, for him and for Vanoy, who gave me her recipe before she passed from this realm, and we'll call it good.

Ethan was the last baby delivered by Dr. Burke at Aspen Valley Hospital in 1992.

I said the words aloud three times this weekend: "since Ethan died."

Those words are like lead shot falling from my lips. They drop into my heart, cold and hard. I know he's gone, but saying "he died" adds a strange permanence and flatness to the situation, a way of dragging me into reality.

It's been four weeks today since I last saw my oldest son alive.
I hugged him, told him I loved him.
He looked odd to me, through my maternal view. I asked him if he was sick. He said no, he was fine, but to my eye, he looked "faded." Something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. That was a Thursday. He ran the delivery route, then returned to his college classes and retail job. Sometime around midnight the following Monday, he died in a single vehicle accident on top of a mountain some 70 miles away from me.
One day I won't remember in weeks or months, I hope. One day I'll just remember my son without remorse. Honestly, I've been grieving him—a piercing and a tattoo and an over-the-road job at a time—for a decade.
I want to remember Ethan with joy, not with the mind-boggling, gut-wrenching message the county coroner brought to my office midday on an autumn Tuesday. I always thought my husband would be the one to get "the call" I've always feared. (yeah, you crazy cult religious peeps, "that which I have greatly feared has come upon me." Here's your lovely justification and way to consider yourselves immune to destruction. I feared, and so I suffer, and you can count your blessings.) But, back to reality, everyone knows where to find me, so I got the notification. We go to the same church and chat at commissioners' meetings. When she asked for a private meeting I was expecting a juicy county news scoop. My adult daughter left the office to give us privacy. The coroner, seated in my cheap folding chair, asked if my legal name is Samantha Turner, and if my husband's legal name is John Turner, and if we have a son named Ethan Alexander Turner. That's when I knew something was seriously wrong.
Jail? I thought. He's been arrested for doing something stupid.
And then I remembered to whom I was speaking.
He'd been in an accident sometime the night before, on a high mountain road with which my husband and I are intimately familiar. It was our high school party road some 30 years ago. Ethan's body was found early Tuesday morning, ejected from his vehicle in a rollover some 113 feet from the road. He'd only owned the SUV he was driving for 24 hours, his third car in as many months.
Oddly, I slept soundly through the night that night. I'd always thought if something happened to my children I'd KNOW. I'd wake up. I'd have a panic attack. I didn't. Someone else had to tell me my child had died.
Initial reactions? Thank God his little brother wasn't with him. Thank God no one else was with him. (If someone had been with him, he probably wouldn't have wrecked... he was responsible for everyone, just never responsible for himself). Why wasn't he wearing his seatbelt? DUMBASS.
For the first few days, I felt like I had a bad case of Tourettes Syndrome combined with the stomach flu. Both reappear periodically.
Now, some weeks later, when I can't escape the feeling I've fallen into an ugly parallel universe, I scour the initial accident report from the state patrol. They have a little diagram of the accident in which the location of the body is shown as a tiny burrito-shaped bundle, like a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Somehow the accident report makes it real and practical and is oddly comforting. Maybe that's my journalistic nature coming forward. Just the facts, please. I can deal with facts.
In the early days after the accident, a telephone call from the coroner told me the cause of death was "aortic laceration." There are comprehensive YouTube videos about aortic laceration for the morbid among us. I know because I've watched them all. I haven't decided if I'll request the full autopsy report. I can't decide if knowing all the details will be less traumatic than the horrific things my writer-brain imagination has conjured about his demise.
Meanwhile, thank God for my husband, who called all our family members and took care of all the other dirty work. I'd had to call him and that was bad enough. I couldn't say "Ethan's dead." I said, "Ethan's gone, and I need you to come to the office." He took care of all the hard things, the things I couldn't have endured, while I continued working, and for that I'm grateful. When you own your own business, and it's a weekly newspaper, there is no such thing as "bereavement leave." There's just being bereaved and going to work anyway. Suck it up, peeps.
People have been wonderful and kind and supportive. It really does help, the way stanching arterial blood flow helps an accident victim. Just when we think we'll bleed out, someone steps up with soft words and comforting food and physical hugs and encouragement.
We made it through the memorial, held on what would have been Ethan's 26th birthday, Oct. 20, 2018.
And now we return home, and we continue to deal with the "detritus of death," words that came to me the morning after the news. Death is messy.
My daughter took on the responsibility of memorializing her brother's online accounts, my husband and son went through his personal effects, and we're still stumbling across the random reminders that hit like a sucker punch to the gut: the CD of his wretched thrash metal music left in my car CD player; his phone number in my "favorites" list; is ashes in a temporary container in my living room because I can't bring myself to move them and I twistedly enjoy having my adventurer safely under my supervision. (I took the container with me to the memorial service, safely buckled into the backseat of my car. Poetic justice.)
We will never be the same. This I know.
There is a word for a person who loses his or her parents: orphan. There is a word for the person who loses a spouse: widow/widower. There is no word for the parent who loses a child, or the sibling who loses a sister or brother, or the grandparent who loses a grandchild. There literally are no words. I'm still a mother. I still birthed four children. One of those children is no longer with us. There's no easy way to explain that in casual conversation.
We will always love him. But we refuse to allow his loss to define us, individually or as a family. He's in us, and we love him, but his loss will not be the fulcrum of our lives. He would not have wanted it that way. If Ethan wished anything, it would be that we would, as his knuckle tattoos reminded us, "LIVE FREE," and that includes not allowing his untimely death to define the rest of our lives on this planet.

Talking about a serious subject ... when grief tries to take over. Not a fun topic, but one we must be aware of and able to respond to in healthy ways, whether for ourselves or in ministering to those around us.

photo by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton via PhotoRee

A 19-year-old man from our small community died this week, overcome by an avalanche while snowmobiling in the high country. He was a year behind my daughter in school and a year ahead of my oldest son. I see his mom every other week as part of my work for the local paper.

My #2 son (age 16) sent me a text this afternoon: "What do you say to people when they ask why God didn't stop ____ from dying? I've been asked a couple times today."

The cheap, easy, cop-out answer is something like this: "God knows best" or "God needed another angel in heaven" or "He was so good God wanted him home now." Most of us recognize those answers as ringing false on the inside.

So how do we answer the impossible question, WHY?

photo by ☃ via PhotoRee

It's not an easy answer. Not multiple choice. Not true or false. It's like one of those convoluted algebraic equations that covers half the board and still doesn't come to a conclusion you comprehend.

What did I tell my son? God made man with a free will to choose what he/she does and where he/she goes.

Just as God will not override the free will He gave mankind, God does not override natural law or spiritual law. If we decide to go somewhere, we go. If we decide to do something, we do it. And God allows it. We think that's perfectly just and fair and right. Until someone gets hurt, and we wanna know why God didn't do something about it.

God doesn't MAKE us accept Jesus. He doesn't force us to tell the truth. He doesn't send a supernaturally guided raindrop to extinguish every lit cigarette, or something to jam every gun aimed at an innocent victim.
If He did those kinds of things at random, He would be obligated to do them for everyone, or else He would not be fair or just.

And His fairness and equity is just a part of the overall equation.

God is not only omnipotent (all powerful), He's omniscient (all knowing), and omnipresent (without time). In other words, the equation that adds up to our lives includes variables we can't see because we are trapped in earth suits with limited knowledge, limited power, and locked into a specific, and short, frame of time. These are the variables that figure in to the equation of their lives. What spiritual laws have been set in motion? What physical laws were in place? Most of the time, we simply don't know. And we hate that, because WE WANT TO KNOW.

 .
However, if you knew all things, on every level of past, present AND future, your brain (which gets confused reading through the IRS instructions for the 1040) would probably spontaneously combust. In conclusion, if we can't answer WHY, we should at least be able to answer WHAT.

What do YOU believe? I hope that young man was a believer in Christ Jesus as Savior and Lord. I believe he was, based on the insight of his friends and family. That being the case, He is not lost or MIA. He's in heaven with His Lord Jesus, as alive (or more alive) than you and I.

photo by !ºrobodot via PhotoRee

WHY did this happen? Remember those word problems in math class where you simply lacked enough information to answer the question? Yeah. I simply don't know enough information to give you a reason. But this I do know: Jesus has it covered.

All those whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life (not according to their works, but according to what -- or in whom -- they believe), need not fear death. It's merely a transition from one state of being to another, like falling asleep. We will see them again. Probably sooner than we think.

My prayers go out to this sweet family in their time of need, trusting God to intervene in the course of grief and sorrow and reveal to them the absolute truth of heaven, of life in Christ, and of the vapor that is this natural life. May they find comfort in God's Word and among their brothers and sisters in Christ.

© Copyright Carol Walker and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

The last 72 hours have been an emotional roller coaster for my family.
My daughter, who celebrated her first anniversary July 10th, had a positive pregnancy test Wednesday morning.
We were thrilled for her and our son-in-law.
Today, she miscarried.
Shortly after leaving the doctor's office, she texted me and said, "I don't know how I'm supposed to respond to this."
You know what? I don't know how to respond, either. I don't even know what to say to her, my own child, beyond, "I'm so sorry."
I had planned to post a poll today: "What should my grandma nickname be?"
Instead, I find myself in a state of shock, not just hurting for my daughter, but hurting for the multitudes of friends and family whose miscarriages took place "under the radar," and wondering how many women out there are still suffering in silence.

• Those who have endured the pain, loss, and confusion alone because they didn't have anyone to turn to for comfort or counsel. 
• Those for whom the twin demons of guilt and shame crept through the fog of grief and sorrow to torment them further with self-doubt and fear for the future. 
• Those who felt as if they were somehow at fault - as though they had failed - and didn't have someone around to tell them any different. 
• Those who have been offered empty platitudes and casual reactions.
• Those who suffered at the hands of insensitive medical personnel shuffling them through a cold, clinical system. 
• Those whose husbands or boyfriends lashed out in anger (or worse, relief) because they couldn't process their own emotions about the experience.

If any of those descriptions are yours, my heart goes out to you. May God reach out and bind up the broken places in your heart with His divine love and mercy and grace, and may the sweet spirit of the Lord whisper words of comfort, encouragement, and peace in your ear.


"He heals the brokenhearted, binding up their wounds." Ps 147:3 TLB

"You have seen me tossing and turning through the night. You have collected all my tears and preserved them in your bottle! You have recorded every one in your book." Ps 56:8 TLB

"Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. 
Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever."  Ps 73:23-26 NIV