When Tragedy Strikes: Rebuilding Your Life with Hope and Healing after the Death of Your Child
211
When Tragedy Strikes: Rebuilding Your Life with Hope and Healing after the Death of Your Child
211eBook
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Overview
After the death of a child, there is no closure. It is like learning how to live with an amputation—you are forever changed and need to learn how to live a new “normal.” There can be a feeling of desperation to find someone farther ahead on the path who can understand the crushing pain that makes you feel like you can’t even breathe at times.
Laura Diehl was plunged into that place with the death of her daughter, and meets the deep need to connect with others who have experienced what cannot be put into words. When Tragedy Strikes is the raw account of her journey from deep darkness back into light and life, extending a hand of hope to those traveling on the path behind her, who need to rebuild their lives after the death of a child.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630477790 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Series: | Morgan James Faith |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 211 |
| Sales rank: | 594,859 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Our Becca
Three years ago today, I buried my daughter. The pain of watching my sons — who were twenty-seven, twenty-two, and sixteen years old — being pallbearers for their sister's casket is beyond what can be put into words. (I also have a husband and another daughter, who was twenty-five at the time.) Becca was one day short of being twenty-nine years and six months old, and was married, with a daughter who had just turned nine years old.
Becca was a vibrant, strong-willed child. She loved life to the fullest, and we are still finding out how many people she touched with her life. She had a great laugh, a deep love for God, and an anointing for leading and writing worship songs. She also knew how to accept people unconditionally. She was a fighter and a testimony to the faithfulness of God, even in the worst of circumstances.
It's sadly ironic that what was used to save her life at three years old turned out to be what caused her life to be cut short at twenty-nine. When Becca was three years old, she had bone cancer in her left leg. Her tiny little leg was amputated, and she had nine months of chemo. Several years down the road, the medical industry discovered that one of the drugs given to her had long-term effects of heart damage.
When we first had her checked, she had moderate heart damage, so they began watching it. As she reached the end of her teen years, the heart damage was heading from moderate into severe. Becca married young, at nineteen years of age, and became pregnant shortly after the wedding. The pregnancy put a strain on her heart, and she ended up living at the hospital while they monitored her. She was given only a 50 percent chance of surviving the labor and delivery.
I remember crying in my husband's arms as they took her back to have the baby early (since her heart couldn't handle the pregnancy much longer). I told him, "I know that I know that I know I trust God. I don't understand why I'm crying like this." In his wisdom, he knew exactly why I was crying. "Because we don't know which direction we're going to have to trust Him for." He was right.
Becca lived through it, and so did our little granddaughter.
But from that point on, the heart issues escalated. She ended up at the Mayo Clinic for open-heart surgery for her valves. It helped for a couple of years but became a constant struggle for the doctor to have her on the right medications to keep her heart functioning properly.
In April 2010, my husband and I were in Tanzania doing children's ministry, and we got a call saying we needed to come home right away. Becca needed immediate heart surgery.
We flew home as soon as we could and, upon arriving at the hospital, found out she was refusing to have the surgery until we were there. They wanted to give the right side of her heart a pump called a VAD (Ventricular Assist Device) to keep it going. She needed to be put on the transplant list but was not healthy enough, so the VAD was considered a "bridge" until she could go on the list.
The next eighteen months were a roller coaster ride I cannot begin to describe in full detail, so I will just give the major events.
The Whirlwind Begins
A week after being dismissed from the hospital from getting the VAD, she had a stroke and had to be flown by helicopter back to her hospital (University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison). From that point on, Becca was very limited in her mobility, used a motorized wheelchair, and needed help with almost everything, including getting on her portable bedside commode and washing up. (She grew up using a prosthesis, but as the heart problems escalated, the extra fluid from her heart issues caused her to gain too much weight for her leg to fit. So at this point she only had one leg and an almost useless left side of her body.)
Becca spent more than two-thirds of her last eighteen months in the hospital, including most holidays. She had at least a dozen ambulance rides and two more med-flight rides. The first one was because she caught the driveline of the VAD on something, slicing it, which caused the pump inside her to short out. That was horrible to watch, as the pump running her heart kept shorting out and jolting her. They opened her back up to remove the pump, because the driveline could not be repaired. By then the left side of her heart was having problems, but they could not give her a pump for both sides of her heart due to her individual circumstance. When she was healed from the surgery, she was sent home.
The third emergency medical flight occurred two months later. She was in the van with her husband and just fell over in her seat with Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD). He pulled over, called an ambulance, and they actually got her heart started! At our local hospital, Becca was put on ice (which is done after severe cardiac arrest in which the patient is unconscious, to help the body in several ways, including lessening damage to the brain) and flown back to Madison. There it was discovered she had also had a brain seizure. She was in the hospital for several weeks, and from that point on she wasn't the same.
About a month later, I took her up for an outpatient procedure and they ended up admitting her as a patient. At one point I had to call the nurse because Becca was getting delusional. Before I knew what was happening, they whisked her out of the room and took her to the Trauma Life Center. It is where the worst of the worst patients are taken, such as severe crash victims. Several hours later I finally found out she was in septic shock (blood poisoning), which only has a 20 percent survival rate. All of her organs had shut down and she was on total life-support systems. But, believe it or not, we saw another miracle and her organs began functioning again; she was eventually taken off all the life-support systems and released from the hospital.
Three days later, Becca ended up back in the hospital for a routine IV treatment for fluid overload. She was going to be dismissed from the hospital the next morning, but on the night of October 12, 2011, her heart finally gave out and she left us to go to her eternal home, to live forever with her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Does it shock you to say I felt blindsided? God had given us miracle after miracle after miracle with her. I fully believed that she was either going to get healthy enough to receive a heart transplant, or God was going to miraculously give her a new heart without any surgery.
When I look back, I realize she knew she was going. I was away on another ministry trip at the time, and she kept asking me, on the phone from the hospital, when I was going to be home. I would ask her if she wanted me to come home early, and she would say no. But then she would ask me again when I was going to be home.
When I landed, I went directly to the hospital and spent two or three hours with her. I am an ordained pastor, and while I was there she wanted me to take my anointing oil and anoint her and pray over her. She specifically wanted me to give her a kiss on the forehead. And my last memory of Becca is the blessing of her lifting up her hand to return the "I love you" sign that I was giving to her while leaving the room. I knew something wasn't right, so after I made supper for the family, I decided to take the hour drive back to the hospital. I hadn't even gotten out of town when my sonin-law called to say that she had coded (her heart had stopped) and they were trying to get her back. So my return to the hospital ended up being to see her body ...
Goodbye, My Daughter ... for Now
To be honest, I don't know where to go from here in writing this chapter. I am sitting here in the silence, with tears streaming down my face, trying not to sob.
Broken — that's one word to describe how we feel as someone who has lost a child.
1. no longer whole; in two or more pieces
2. out of order; no longer in working condition
3. not kept; not honored or fulfilled
It sounds like a pretty good description of who we are now, doesn't it? We are wrecked, fragmented, shattered, cracked, smashed, and damaged — all synonyms of broken.
That is also the description of who Jesus came to save. Salvation isn't just the prayer that gets us into heaven. It is a continual process. Salvation comes from the Greek word sozo and means "to save, to deliver or protect, heal, preserve, be made whole." Most of us will look at that and want to scream, "Why didn't God do that for my child? I wish God would have saved my child instead of me! I can't bear this horrible pain!" I'm not going to give you any clichéd answers or start quoting scriptures to answer that question. But I will share with you my experience and, as we go along, share the things God has shown me when I asked those kinds of hard questions.
Now you know my story. So with that, let's get started. The first thing on my list is probably the hardest, but everything else seems to build on it. Let's check the very foundation of forgiveness.
CHAPTER 2The Foundation of Forgiveness
When a child dies there can be so much unforgiveness it completely paralyzes a person. Many people — including strong Christians who have known the Lord for many years — find themselves angry at God, struggling or even refusing to forgive Him for allowing their child to die.
Sometimes we have to forgive ourselves, for a whole variety of reasons. We may also blame people who played a part in the final chapter of our child's life.
I think all of us have been surprised and hurt by family and close friends who seemed to abandon us when we needed them more than ever. I personally experienced a traumatic chain reaction that actually shocked me as much if not more than Becca's death itself, and call it the "domino effect". Or you may find yourself in a place similar to that of my youngest son, who discovered he had to forgive his sister for leaving him. (This is especially true when a child has committed suicide. I can't even begin to imagine how that leaves a parent feeling.)
Let's take a few minutes to look at these different types of unforgiveness together, starting with the need to forgive your child for leaving you.
Forgiving Your Child
Maybe this is a new thought for you. Maybe you have had this anger inside of you and didn't know where it was coming from; now this thought has opened your eyes to see what you couldn't before.
Not everyone has unforgiveness against their child. And many who do have a hard time admitting it. It sounds so awful and horrifying, but now you can be relieved to know you are not the only one who has felt this way. If this is you, I have a question to help you think about releasing your unforgiveness. Did he or she do this on purpose to hurt you? I hope the answer to that question is quite obvious, no matter what the cause of their passing was. Next question: Does anything good or even remotely constructive come from being angry at your child for leaving you? I think the answer to this question is obvious as well.
I understand how the pain of loss can be twisted into raw anger. I understand how wrong it is for our child to leave this earth ahead of us. But let's be angry at the situation, not our son or daughter who is no longer with us. If you want to get to the place where you can move beyond death and be able to live again, you will have to let go — to forgive your child for going on without you.
There is power in our words, much more than we seem to realize. Oftentimes, something we are thinking doesn't become a reality until we either hear it said or we speak the words ourselves. So I want you to forgive your child out loud for dying. Go ahead; it's okay, and you need to do this. It will probably be very painful, but in going through the pain you will be taking a step toward healing. Say it once; say it a hundred times if you have to. But say it.
___, I forgive you for dying and leaving me here without you.
You may feel an immediate release, you may feel a deep stabbing in your heart, or you may feel nothing at all. But forgiveness is not based on a feeling, just like the love and care you gave to your child was not always based on a feeling. You love him because he is your son. You love her because she is your daughter. And in the same way, you forgive him or her.
Forgiving Others
I don't think there is a grieving parent who hasn't been surprised by some of the people they used to be very close to who are no longer a part of their lives. Have you had people either "unfollow" or "unfriend" you on Facebook after your child died? I have. These are people I thought would be there for me, but they don't call, they don't contact me, and when I make a feeble attempt to reach out to them, they either respond in a way that is very awkward or don't respond at all.
In our time of pain and fog, it can cause even more pain (as if that's possible) to have friends and family members pull away — like "rubbing salt" in our already gaping wound. Such actions cause many grieving parents to isolate ourselves even more than we do already.
There are so many reasons given for our friends and family reacting this way. The one I've heard most often is that being around us creates a fear in them that they could lose one of their own children, and so to ease their own pain/fear of that thought, they shut us out, often without realizing it. Another reason is that they don't know what to say or do, and to avoid the risk of hurting us they decide it's better to stay away and be silent.
Does it really matter why they no longer want to be a part of our lives? What if their reason doesn't make sense to us? Are we going to argue that excuse out of them? Would knowing their reason truly make us feel better? Do you really have the energy and perseverance to try to help them understand how much you need them right now? I sure don't.
The best thing we can do is to forgive them and let them go. In doing that, we release ourselves to begin to heal from this wound our friends and family did not intentionally give us. Once again, I encourage you to speak your forgiveness out loud. Let the forgiveness and the healing begin with your words, allowing the feelings to follow either right away or gradually, however it happens.
I mentioned the domino effects that were more shocking to me than Becca's death. One came when my other daughter totally rejected me, her dad, and her brothers. Some people in her life whom she loves and trusts were very influential in this.
At a time when our family was very fragile and vulnerable from Becca's death, my new pastor and his wife decided something was deeply wrong with me beyond the grief of losing my oldest child. The more I submitted myself to them and what they thought I needed for help, the further I went into depression. The grief became even heavier and the darkness blacker. The oppression was suffocating. I can't begin to describe the place I found myself in. I would spend hours and hours closed up in my tiny prayer room under the basement stairs, crying, resting, praying, crying, reading my Bible, journaling, crying, worshiping, even sleeping on the floor, and more crying.
One time when Dave and I went together to see the pastor and his wife for help, they told Dave it was his fault the family was such a mess, causing lots of confusion and tears. We found out later from our daughter that this conversation was secretly recorded and played for her to hear, to prove how unstable we were as her parents.
Around that same time, I also found out my daughter believed I wished it was her who died instead of her sister Becca! (I have since learned this is a common response of siblings as they watch the depth of their parents' grief.) I was totally stunned by that and could not convince her otherwise, especially alongside the confusion being brought into our family by this pastor and his wife, who by then had become my daughter's best friend.
As things escalated, our daughter hardly ever came home, not even to eat or sleep. This caused me to try even harder to "get her back." Since it was obvious to everyone I was getting worse instead of better, my daughter moved out of our home and in with the pastor and his family. The pastor's wife told me via a text that I was not welcome at church anymore — until I was ready to make things right and take responsibility for the division I was causing (based on some very serious false accusations).
My three sons and daughter-in-law refused to stay away from me as they were being told to do. Because they and my husband strongly disagreed with the pastors, and instead defended me, our daughter eventually broke off all communication with us.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "When Tragedy Strikes"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Laura Diehl.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Our Becca2 The Foundation of Forgiveness
3 The Garage of Tears
4 The Family Room of a Support System
5 The Bedroom of Rest
6 The Personal Care Room
7 The Kitchen of Usefulness
8 Looking Out the Window of Fear
9 A Spiritual Fireside Chat
10 Sitting on the Porch of Your Identity
11 The Pillars of Thoughts and Words
12 The Cornerstone of Trust
13 Putting on the Roof of Hope
14 Adding the Swimming Pool of Joy
15 The Support Beam: A Word from Dave
16 Out in the Driveway. . .Where Do I Go from Here?