After You Read

You have just read Love Given and Taken.

This chapter begins before grief.

I want you to know that because it would be easy to read everything that comes before the accident as background—the part of the story we have to get through before the terrible thing happens. It wasn't background to me. It was my life.

There was Jeff in his metallic-gold Mustang. There was a ridiculous double date involving cottage cheese and applesauce. There was the way he looked at me through the rearview mirror. There was the song he played because he loved the way I walked, including the very things I had been teased about. There was the certainty we somehow shared when we were still so young. Marriage. Plans. A miscarriage. Jeffrey. A home filled with a father who called his baby boy precious.

Then there was an accident.

As you think back over the chapter, don't hurry past the love to reach the grief. Let Jeff be alive in the story before you know him as the man I lost.

Notice what became vivid—the ordinary details, the private jokes, the things that made this particular person this particular person.

Let the Love Be Part of the Story

After someone dies, it can become strangely easy for the death to take up all the room. People ask what happened. We tell the story of the illness, the accident, the hospital, the last days. Dates become markers of before and after. Even a life full of ordinary, funny, intimate things can begin to be narrated toward its ending.

I didn't want that to happen to Jeff on these pages.

Before he was the husband killed in an accident, he was the rude boy who cut my mother and me off in the high-school parking lot. He was the boy who nearly exploded with laughter when my date ordered cottage cheese and I panicked and ordered applesauce. He was the young man whose affection asked me to believe that the things about myself I had been mocked for could be loved. He was my husband. He was Jeffrey's father. He was someone who kissed his baby and called him precious.

None of those things make his death less terrible. They simply belong to the story too.

Something to notice: If you were going to tell me the story of the person you loved—not the story of how they died—what story would you tell?

It might be funny, irritating, tender, or completely ordinary.

Notice Where Love Is Still Moving

The accident took almost every choice away from me at once.

I could not remember what had happened. I was physically immobilized. I was told Jeff was going to be fine and then told, abruptly, that he was dead. I wasn't there when decisions were made about his life support. I couldn't see him at the mortuary. I couldn't go to his burial. I never got to say goodbye.

And my three-month-old son was somewhere else, critically injured.

When I finally reached the children's hospital ten days later, a neurosurgeon tried to prepare me for what I was about to see. He told me about brain hematomas, fractures, blindness, enlarged ventricles and optic-nerve damage. I heard him, but the words did not land.

I just wanted to hold my baby.

When I reached Jeffrey, I wanted to nurse him. The logistics were absurd: my full-length metal brace, his tubes and wires, the machines surrounding him, nurses trying to make our two injured bodies fit together safely. Then he nuzzled against me.

In a life that had suddenly become almost unrecognizable, I was still his mother. He needed to feel me, and I needed to feel him.

I don't tell you this so that you will look around your own life for something good that remains. This is not a gratitude exercise. I only want to notice what happened in mine: almost everything around me had changed, and love was still moving through me.

Something to notice: Is love showing up anywhere in your grief right now?

It may be in longing for the person who died. In caring for someone. In letting someone care for you. In anger because something precious was taken. In a pet curled beside you. In keeping something exactly where it is because you cannot bear to move it.

Love may also feel indistinguishable from pain, or impossible to feel at all.

When Hope Feels Dangerous

While I was holding Jeffrey, something happened that I resisted.

A hymn began playing in my mind. I did not want it there. Its words spoke of healing and deliverance, and I understood immediately how dangerous those words could become.

Jeff had just died. I now knew something I had not known in the same way before the accident: the thing I could not imagine losing could actually be taken from me.

Hope was no longer innocent.

What if I believed these words and Jeffrey died anyway? What would happen to me and my faith?

I was frightened by the possibility of believing. I was also aware of a warmth and comfort settling around me. Eventually I sang the words to Jeffrey. I described it later as daring to believe.

That was my experience. It is not an instruction to you.

Loss can change our relationship to hope, trust, faith, optimism, and imagined outcomes. Once something unimaginable has happened, imagining another good thing can expose us to the knowledge that it too could be lost.

Sometimes hope itself becomes vulnerable.

Has loss changed the way hope feels to you? Dangerous. Foolish. Impossible. Necessary. Comforting. Infuriating. Something else entirely.

Notice what is true.

Before You Go

Love is given before anything is taken. Then much is taken without my consent or preparation. And in the middle of what has been taken, love has not become unreal. I am still loving Jeff. I am still reaching for Jeffrey. I am terrified of hoping and, in that particular moment, find myself hoping anyway.

I didn't understand any of this as a pattern while I was living it. I was simply inside my life.

The point is not to turn a life into a pattern. It is to notice what the story makes visible.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

If you were going to tell me the story of the person you loved—not the story of how they died—what story would you tell?