“Dad, where are you?” 

Every morning for years these were the first words out of my older son’s mouth.

“Dad, scratch my back and sing,” was my younger son’s oft-repeated goodnight ritual. 

By this time we’d moved out of the beautiful baby days. 

With all the tween years involved, it was easy to forget the baby years, the work, the mountains of laundry. 

It is easy to forget the sleepless nights.

But, tucked into the mundane and the repetitive, are things so miraculous that a middle of the night baby moments can transform into holy encounters. 

Our lives together were, and are, lessons of love, moments of kindness, volumes of vulnerability, sometimes encountered so powerfully and painfully they could only have come from the heart and mind of the Divine.

“I’m exactly where I was when you said goodnight. I have hardly moved.”

“No, I did not sing only two verses. I sang all three. But you were asleep by then.” 

When the washing machine dies and the dog jumps the snowy fence to explore the greater neighborhood and one son has a splinter in his finger and the other is hungry and needs his nappy (diaper) changed and the bills are mounting in a stack of unopened mail, it’s easy to lose sight of the trail of miracles that come with every baby.

I have gotten my fair share of letters asking about parenting only to discover the “baby” to whom the letter refers is a 40-something year-old man! 

I know this is an unpopular thought but I repeat, parenting ends. 

Somewhere around 17 to 20 it’s done. 

Parents have two decades to train children for great lives, to face challenges, love others, and to serve their communities. 

This is sufficient time to complete such training if it begins in the parents’ hearts and heads long before the child is born and is implemented immediately after the child is born. I do not mean that you are no longer his or her parent – that you will always be – but the function of parenting on your part, ends. Of course you can guide and assist and encourage and support but if it is not complete in 20 years it’s unlikely it will ever end.

He will “always be my baby” if you allow it and treat him like one.

Actively teach your children from as young as possible to be independent of you.

“The day will come when you can do all this (cooking, cleaning, laundry, finances, deciding, planning, loving others) on your own,” and, “you don’t need me nearly as much as you think you do,” and “look at how capable you are,” are wonderful things to tell your children.

TheAfterSermon – week 10:

Grief is a crazy companion, sometimes comforting, even refreshing.

Then, it will rip you apart.

When preoccupied, it can go away briefly, go into hiding and you can live, ever so briefly, as if you have never lost anyone or anything.

Then, out of nowhere, it will hit like a ton of bricks, playing its twisted game of hide-and-seek.

Believe it or not, grief has your best interests at heart.

It will do its work to revive yours, as battered and broken as your heart may be.

Let grief do its work as best you are able: its painful, beautiful, inner work. Allow it free-range. Full access. As it does its slow, deliberate, detailed work, you will continue to become even more beautiful than you already are.

That’s what it does: it turns hurting people into human agents of incredible understanding and grace – if you let it.

Your heart may be broken.

Your life may feel hopeless, but grief will ultimately deliver you to a hopeful destination and hope and courage will be yours again.

If you let it.

Try to get out of grief’s way. Allow silence. Allow yourself stop-and-think time. Allow yourself to remember. Play the music that may be painful to hear. Go to the places you are avoiding. Look at pictures, play the saved voicemails.

Watch the home movies.

Do these things when you are ready to do them.

You will know better than anyone when you are ready.

You may fall apart at first when you venture into the things you have been avoiding, but it is all part of getting ready to fall together.

Allow yourself speak-to-a-trusted-friend time.

Cry, write, read. Be angry if necessary.

Grief labors long over its ever-incomplete healing work.

Accommodation is possible. A full life is possible. But, keep in mind, the vacuum left by some loss is never filled, some losses are beyond healing.

It is natural to want to rush grief and to want all pain to be gone.

Who cannot want pain to be gone?

But, it is a crazy and unruly companion.

Grief breaks out at the most unexpected times.

Rushing grief, hurrying its work, will lodge pain even deeper into the soul only to later manifest as some unwanted reaction or unfamiliar emotion.

No matter how recent or distant your loss, welcome the tears.

Let grief’s first agents, first responders, flow.

“Time heals,” clangs the cliche.

Time doesn’t heal, not usually, not by itself. Time is time.

Time passed is not grief diminished.

There are some losses that are never “healed.”

Some never find “closure.”

This does not mean survivors cannot live full, productive, beautiful lives.

Warmth, two listening ears, and hot cups of tea accompanied by face-to-face-no-phones hours may be the most powerful gifts a person can offer one who has suffered.

It is ridiculous to approach a grieving person with a step-by-step generic packaged get-over-your-grief formula.

“What shall I do with this grief?” she asked, having lost so much, one thing on top of another, more than enough loss for many in a lifetime.

You shall sit with it.

Embrace it.

“What shall I do with the pain, the gaping hole in my chest, a wound in my soul, my very being?” he asks after losing his life-partner.

As difficult as that may sound, you will let it do its work.

You will go into survival-mode. Operate on automatic.

Auto-pilot.

Then, you will arrange your life around it, at least for a while.

“But, I do not want this, the anguish, this disorientation.”

Nobody does.

It is always an uninvited guest.

Crazy, unruly grief will do its work and you will emerge as gold.

You will know remarkable intuition and offer presence to others in ways now unimagined despite it being a path that you’d never have chosen.

The power of grief should never be downplayed or underestimated.

Grief is a private journey.

Don’t mess with it, not in yourself or in others.

It’s a crazy, unruly, companion.