It was a warm, sunny winter day with bright blue skies. A beautiful day for traveling. A beautiful day for gathering with family and friends. A beautiful day for saying goodbye ~ or rather, “Until I see you again.”
Welcome to Caring with Marsha, one of the results of a passion born as I stood in a church foyer greeting family and friends. My husband’s memorial service had just concluded. He had died four days earlier after a brief and harrowing illness.
Many people were there in the aftermath of my husband’s death. First were my parents followed closely by the hospice nurse. Family, friends, and co-workers would stop by in the hours and days to come to support us as we entered life without our husband and father.
. . . Entered life without our husband and father.
Birth pains are never easy. Growing pains are never easy. Every death of someone we care about is hard. I had lost grandparents, great grandparents, friends, and others I loved dearly across my life. I had grieved, sometimes much more deeply than others.
Not one of those deaths, or even all of those deaths together, prepared me for the extraordinary loss of my husband.
The reality of his illness and what was likely coming began to set in as I talked with his doctor and as I watched him lying there in a hospital bed following surgery. I determined then and there to stay in the moment, only looking as far ahead as I had to. To look forward very far at all, although we didn’t know anything for sure at that point, threatened to take my breath away. My husband, and our children, needed me to steer our ship through these troubled waters, whatever they were bringing.
With one last breath, there we were . . . entering life without the man who created our family.
Then the words began, but first with me.
“He’s in a better place.”
I knew this immediately. Not because he was a saint. None of us are. I knew this because he had given his life to God. I could see it on his face and in his body as it relaxed from the absence of pain. He was free.
I could see first hand he was in a better place!
Then the flow of people began. Along with them came their words. More often than not they included those five little words I had said in the immediate aftermath of his passing, “He’s in a better place.”
I remember the moment my growing purpose and passion went from unsettling “labor pains” to its full on birth ~ to change the world, our society, and the things we say to anyone who is grieving.
I remember who I had just hugged and was talking with. This gentleman didn’t say anything wrong. Not even close. But, he said those five words. Those words we grow up hearing adults say to those who are grieving. Those words we repeat when we become adults. Those words I had heard countless times in four days since first saying them myself at my husband’s bedside upon his passing. Those word I vowed in that moment to never say again to someone grieving.
“He’s in a better place.”
Just because these are words everyone says doesn’t mean they are the best words to say to a grieving person. As a widow I can attest to how hollow they begin to sound when you’ve heard them said over and over and over again no matter how much love and care is behind them.
We can do better. We should do better. We WILL do better!
Are you with me?
Marsha
