Maybe this is not the best post for a Monday morning, but when you read it, I hope it will motivate you and give you a new perspective about life and death. In one of my recent posts, I wrote about Finding Hope in the Midst of Grief. At the time the disaster had just occurred in Surfside, Miami— not too far from where I live— where 97 bodies have been recovered from a condo building that collapsed.
I wrote the post intending to give some hope to anyone who read it, whether they had any connections to the building or not. Little did I expect that my family and I would soon be enveloped in our own grief. Seven days later, my daughter came to my house to tell me and my husband that our grand-daughter had died the evening before in her sleep.
Tyla was gone. Like a vapor. No warning, no inclination that anything was wrong. A healthy, beautiful, brilliant twenty-year-old nursing graduate cut down as suddenly as that building had collapsed. Her dreams died with her and so did some of mine. I was crushed. How would I go on without her? I raised her and her twin sister and her brother after their mother passed away just as suddenly. For a few years I became mother and grand-mother to those children. My grief was inconsolable .
So, yes, I experienced all the stages of grief I talked about in that post: the shock, the denial, the anger. I searched, along with family members, for answers, but none came. The autopsy revealed no cause of death, but they are still doing some tests, the results of which may come in five months. As far as is humanly possible, we have no answers.
Our only hope is to look to God. We console ourselves with the knowledge that our loved one is in heaven with the Lord. She is a citizen of a better country. She no longer has to worry about COVID, gun violence, and the myriad of things that bombard the human existence here on this earth. She has no distractions to come between her and her Savior. She can worship at His feet without interruption or inhibition.
One thing I’ve learned so far is that pain is guaranteed. It is a part of life, just as death is a part of life. Tyla is alive still, in another dimension, and while we on this planet are still searching for answers, we think of what we can do to preserve her memory. We have photos and other mementos, but we want to do more to embed her footprints on these sands of time. And so we discuss plans, and they give us a sense of hope and a feeling that she is still with us. But the greatest hope we have is that we will one day see Tyla again, face-to-face as the Bible promises.
“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4: 13 – 14).
If you are grieving the loss of a loved one, know that it is okay to grieve; it is okay to cry, it is even okay to question God. “Jesus wept” (John 11: 35) is the shortest verse in the Bible, but it shows the extent of his love for us. It shows that He is with us in our sorrow and our pain, and He will one day turn that pain into a platform and your trial into a testimony. Most of all, death, medical death, is not final. Your loved one lives, and if you are both Christians, you will meet again.
I pray that this post comforts you. If you need to share your pain with someone, why not drop me a line in the comment box below and sign up for my mailing list where you can receive other important posts and offers.
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