We Place Our Hope Not in this Life - by Carly Mainland

Sunday night it was said that this is likely going to be one of the saddest weeks in American history. Our Pearl Harbor, our 9-11 moment.

I can’t fully explain what yesterday was like, the weight I felt, the emotion of it all.

The only thing I can equate it to is a grief that has been a part of our family for a few years. Because the thing about Pearl Harbor and 9-11 is that no one was prepared, each event came by surprise for most people, and death is like that sometimes. Suddenly in a moment it is in your lap and there was absolutely no time to prepare for it’s arrival. Like a car accident or a heart attack. But sometimes we receive a warning… sometimes it comes after days, weeks, months or years of anticipation.

You see, several years ago we found out that my mother-in-law has Alzheimers.

We knew for years that something was wrong, but when the diagnosis came there was a cold hard reality to face. There was finally a name, a label for the issue itself, the things we’d been noticing for years were now symptoms and, in a way, we were given permission to really start grieving… because so much has been lost already… there have been many losses already… and yet so much still remains… and now we’ve been in waiting for years.

Waiting for what? We don’t even know: will it be fast, will it be slow? All we know is that death is coming, yes just as it is for every single one of us, but for her in a specific tragic way… slowly, but too fast already, and much too soon. It’s been strange to process this reality. To begin grieving while being thankful for what remains… trying not to live too much in the ‘what if’s’ of the future, while accepting and beginning to prepare for the inevitable.

The truth is that any one of us could drop dead at any moment. Really, none of us know the exact moment death will come to us, or how. So we can’t live in a constant crippling awareness of it’s coming, or we will miss whatever life we have left. But something about these reminders that it is, in fact, one day coming can help us to stop and enjoy the beauty of this life, of all the goodness there is.

But somedays that grief is weighty. Somedays the sadness can consume.

And it feels a lot like yesterday did for me. I felt like I was anticipating all the grief to come, and feeling it way too soon.

And in a lot of ways, for me personally it felt like anticipation not so much of my own pain, but the pain of those I love the most. This has been significantly harder for my husband than it has been for me. And yesterday I wasn’t anticipating that this virus would likely be taking my nearest and dearest, but of the collective grief, knowing how much others will be hurting, the loss they will face, and so many are already facing.

I can’t imagine life without my mother, and yet my husband has been thrust into accepting a reality that his mother will be gone someday sooner than we’d all like. In some ways she already is.

I think about my daughters and how much they love Gigi, how she delights in their play, such a child at heart herself… and sometimes I think about who she was, and how they will never know her… and I’m sad. I’m sad for them. For my father and sister in laws, who, just like my husband are slowly losing one of the most significant people and roles in their lives. They are losing her little bit by little bit. And it sucks.

And here we are in America, as we’ve slowly been losing grip on what was our reality just a month ago, and anticipating even more loss, possibly the greatest of this generation… according to predictions.

And how do live in this time of waiting?

What do we do with our collective grief? What do we do as we wait for the worst of the hurricane to hit, even as some of us have already lost so much?

Right now. I’m crying.
I’m crying for the losses already, for whats to come…
I’m finding that saying this out loud and feeling it is helping me to process and move through it. Even now I know that I can’t sit here anticipating the tidal wave for too long. Yes in many ways this is a time to ‘batten down the hatches’… but in other ways we have to take the time we have as a gift and use it wisely. With an awareness of what’s coming, but with something else at the forefront.

It feels strangely relevant this week. In some ways I dread the coming of Good Friday, and yet we know Easter is just on the other side. It is not fun or easy or light or joyful to celebrate the death of Jesus… and yet look at what He has made of death. We don’t celebrate His death in isolation from all the rest of what He did. The reality of the whole picture gives us hope in our grief. In the face of death.

And here we are again, clinging to the hope that can only be found in Jesus. As we anticipate His death, the death that is coming this week and in the distant and not so distant future for so many of us, we place our hope not in this life, but in the one to come.

Picture Credit: Chris Mainland