I haven’t been able to write for over a month now. Friends and family know, but I should share here too. My husband, previously known on LLtW as “Smister,” took his life on December 27, 2020. My picture above is a picture I took a few hours before it happened. I was frustrated with him about a disagreement and had gone for a walk and noticed two tree trunks together. One all bent over. As I sat there looking at them I felt like it was the two of us, a picture of how I always leaned on him and he was so supportive and strong. He was an amazing man, and certainly brought into my life by God. I had no idea it would soon be just me, unable to lean on him anymore.
There are many things I want to tell you all. And I will over time. God has allowed me to enter trauma, as I was there when it happened, and immense grief, as he was truly the love of my life. But God did not create my pain, He allowed it so something so much greater would come from the ashes. I have been learning so much about God’s huge love and empathy (due to Christ’s experiences as a human) towards His children, and mankind as a whole, too. Though my heart is broken into thousands of fragments, I am so excited to let you see how God heals me and can heal you too. I will be working on a grief series as I continue my series on anxiety. Trauma is something that can be worked through too, so you will notice that I say PTS instead of PTSD intentionally.
My husband was an amazing picture of a loving leader during our time together, and though he abandoned me that day, that decision, huge as it was, was only one among thousands of good choices, and I will remember him for who he was as a person – an amazing one. I look forward to seeing him again in the future – not just in Heaven, but also on earth during the millennial reign and later on the new earth God will create! Our separation is so painful, but it is not the end. And I still have so much to write about marriage that I learned in our short time, and that we learned in our years of dating and courtship ahead of time and finally got to practice.
I also know the bitter pain of widowhood too, however, and I do look forward to sharing how to embrace even such a stage of life as this (Phil 4:11). Though my experience is not the same as most widows, having a much shorter marriage than most (less than 5 months), there are many things I can understand – loss of security (emotional and financial), physical pain from grief, deep despair, having to organize a funeral and speak while not feeling like you can even breathe, those moments of forgetting and remembering all over again, flashbacks of good and bad times, being afraid to crawl into bed all alone at first, and so much more. But I also know, from my counseling studies, that there is not only light at the end of the tunnel, but also life to be lived in the middle of the tunnel where it is darkest. Grief is a passage, not a place, but it still has to be lived in for a while. I do believe that there are right and wrong ways to go through grief, but I’ll talk more about them later. I have begun to say “Je vois la vie en noir” when I hear “La vie en rose.” But even though I can’t see anything in the tunnel, I am moving forward. Light is coming. And I might even see la vie en rose again someday. What matters most right now are the truths I can count on: God is with me, God experienced separation because of death too, God is for me, God is busy and isn’t just sitting around watching my story like a soap opera, God isn’t going to abandon me in the wreckage of all the dreams I ever had, and God has a plan for my life. He wasn’t taken by surprise.
Did you know that the secret to happiness is contentment?
Did you know that the secret to joy is hope and faith in God?
I didn’t really know how to put those two into words or how to even find them until this happened. I studied Philippians for all of 2019 and I still didn’t understand joy and I just wanted to be happy. I just didn’t get it. But now, through tragedy, it makes total sense.
I will be leaving all of my old posts as they are, I’m not going to “edit” him out. I will be updating a few other sections though – you have probably noticed that I will be going by my own name now. I thank you for your patience as I navigate my new life. I’m so thankful I have a good Guide to lead the way.
