Austin's Blog

My son has been gone a few weeks now. It is Valerie, Addison, and myself once again. A thought crossed my mind the other day and went something along these lines, “This is fine. We are simply back where we were. We are three again.” The reality is though, that is just not true. We are not three again. We will always be four forever, despite one having gone on before us. Grief is like a bomb going off & leaving behind a massive crater. Beautiful flowers, trees, & other plants will grow there in time but the landscape is forever changed. It will take years for it to be beautiful again. Even then, it will never again look like it once did before. We are not simply back where we were. As Valerie said weeks ago, “We are different now” and that is exactly right. How could we not be?

I thought as well once (once because I dare not entertain unrealities), “If given the opportunity right now would I go back and remove the last 366 days and never meet Gabe to avoid this pain?” The answer of course is no! I would not trade the last 366 days (and the nine months of joyful anticipation that preceded it) for anything in the world. Why? Because we love him. Because I love him right now. Grief is simply a testament to the immense love you have for someone who has gone on before you. I would rather feel this wound though than have never known it at all. Grief is the price of love. There is just no way around this pain when you love someone. C.S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

The vulnerability, the brokenness, and the “wrungness” of our hearts are real because we don’t just miss what we had; we miss him. And we loved him. The pain of loss does not outweigh the pleasure of love. The pain of loss exists because the love has no other choice but to move forward loving in this loss. As Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff said in Lament for a Son, “If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over. Grief is existential testimony to the worthy of the one loved. That worth abides.” We know this is temporary. We are watching, waiting, and weeping until the temporary is swallowed up into forever.