The following is from the opening of my book, God Is In the Doubt:
June 2018
A sunny June morning, I took my wife and ten-year-old daughter to church like most Sundays, then came home and changed clothes in preparation to buy a Volkswagen Super Beetle. My love for these cars has not subsided since my first one, a baby blue 1972, when I was in college twenty-nine years earlier. I put the cash in my pocket as the doorbell rings. Two cops stand on the porch.
Their words send me reeling backward, a gut punch. My back slams into the wall. The two words felt like bricks pummeling me. He’s dead.
A piercing wail forces me to turn. My wife has collapsed in the doorway. She tries to rise while also holding our daughter back, who screams. “What’s wrong?”
I look at the two cops who just confirmed we are Caleb’s parents.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
I have always said I died when my son died.
As those cops spoke, and my back hit the wall, my life left my body the same way the air left my lungs. Who I was is gone. Not changed. Not different. Gone. Look at photos of me before and after that day. My eyes are dead. Whatever was behind them left when Caleb did.
My smiles are forced. Most of my interactions with people are performances because they cannot handle who I am now. They need the version of me that died on that porch, and I do not have him to give. So I fake it. I play a role in their world while mine collapsed years ago.
I can still find joy and peace. Those moments exist. They come in the quiet, though. Sitting alone. A sunrise that catches me off guard. A memory of Caleb that makes me laugh before it makes me cry. Those are my good days.
On bad days, I do not want to see anyone. Not friends. Not family. Not even my wife. I am sullen. Introspective. Crying. Yelling at God. Cursing the life I have been left with. Begging for answers I will never get. Bad days are a darkness that others cannot enter and I cannot escape.
Most days are neither. Not the raw fury of the bad days or the fragile stillness of the good ones. Most days are a persistent ache that permeates everything like a weight strapped to my chest the moment I open my eyes. It does not lift. It does not shift. It sits there, pressing down on every thought, every conversation, every mundane thing I try to do. Brushing my teeth with this weight. Driving to the store with this weight. Pretending to be fine at dinner with this weight.
I was watching one of those weight loss reality shows where they strap extra weight onto the family members of a morbidly obese person. They want the family to feel what it is like to carry 600, 700, 800 pounds through the day. The large person walks around in their body and nobody understands. Nobody sees it. But when you strap that weight onto someone else, suddenly they get it. Their knees buckle. They cannot breathe. They cannot climb the stairs. Ten minutes in and they are begging to take it off.
I watched that and thought: I wonder what would happen if we could do this with grief.
Strap it on. Let them feel it. Not for ten minutes. For a day. For a week. For seven years with no option to unbuckle it and set it on the floor.
But here is what I know. The physical weight, as crushing as it is, has limits. Your body reaches a threshold. Your muscles give out. The weight is measurable. A doctor can tell you exactly how many pounds are destroying your knees, your heart, your back.
The weight of grief has no number. No measurement. No threshold where your body simply gives out and the pain stops. It is not physical, yet it is more real than anything I have ever carried. It presses on your chest until you cannot breathe. It sits on your mind until you cannot think. It wraps around your throat until the words will not come. And it does this every single day with no promise that tomorrow will be lighter.
Physical weight can be lost. Diets, surgery, exercise, discipline. There is a path back to something manageable.
There is no diet for this. No surgery to remove the grief. No twelve-week program to get back to your fighting weight. You carry it or it carries you, and most days you are not sure which one is happening.
The people on that show take the weight off after a few minutes and hug their loved one and cry and say they understand now. They commit to helping. They show up differently.
Nobody straps on my weight. Nobody can. And if they could, they would not last. They would crumble in minutes and beg for relief. Then maybe, just maybe, they would stop asking me if I am doing better. Maybe they would stop expecting the old version of me to walk through the door. Maybe they would look at me and simply say, “I see you carrying that, and I am not going anywhere.”
That would be enough.
Be First to Comment