Austin's Blog

After church Sunday, a brother stopped in the parking lot and was checking on us. With tears in his eyes, he said, “I’m sorry we all get to move on and y’all can’t. There are no words.” He told us he continues to pray for us and invited us over to dinner this week. He is correct—we cannot simply move on. We won’t. How could we? Our job is simply to endure this agony and that endurance is precisely what God wants. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve — even in pain — the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.” If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving. He will never not matter. He will never cease to be my sweet and precious boy. I will always be the father of Gabriel Austin DeArmond. I feel his absence. How could I not?

We have begun to forge a new normal. We are not unaware of what is to come. The rawness or edge of this pain may dull in time but the grief will be present until the day we die. Grief is like a bomb going off and leaving behind a massive crater. Beautiful flowers, trees, and 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. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross agrees saying, “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” Nor should we want to. This is, indeed, like an amputation! Healing will come but the son of my right arm is gone. God can heal us in such a way that will not desecrate his preciousness or profundity, but the full healing of this won’t come until later.

For now, there is a mixture of sorrow as well as joy, gratitude as well as ache, emptiness as well a divine fullness. There’s both good news and bad news in our grief these days. Anne Lamott remarks, “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” We haven’t begun to dance just yet but believe we will one day. The Lord will bestow on us in time a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. As Elisabeth Elliot says, “Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God’s story never ends with ‘ashes.’”