The Color Comes Back

Okay, I can specifically remember a day in our life after tragedy, after your sister died, when I was in the kitchen and you were in the garage. Do you know what I'm going to say?

Yeah. She was my best friend. It was really hard to watch her go because when she passed, she was only 44.

She had four boys that were young. And I think you're going to say you remember hearing me laugh. Yeah, I remember. You are a joy-filled, laughing woman. You bring laughter into the Wilson house.

It's one of the greatest things I love about you. But you hadn't laughed in two years. I was in the kitchen, you were doing something in the garage, and the door was shut.

And the laughter was so loud, it came through the door into the kitchen. What did you feel? And I remember thinking, oh, it's going to be okay. There is life after death.

There's hope. And we knew that intellectually. We knew that scripturally. We knew that theologically.

I had taught it as a pastor. But when you lived it. But we hadn't felt it. And again, it wasn't like, oh, it's all over and now we're going to be joyful the rest of our life.

But it was like a glimpse like, OK, we're going to make it. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. We're talking a little bit about grieving today and the hope that comes after grieving.

And Jesus is our hope. But it's not a topic that we always like to go to because when our friends have experienced it, we feel awkward. We don't want to say the wrong thing.

And so many times we say nothing, which then that feels weird. But I'm glad that we're going to have this discussion today. So we've got the deals and the Sullivan's back with us. And we've already talked a little bit with Ron and Nan. Many of you know Ron from Blended, director of Blended Family Ministry here at Family Life and amazing ministry.

We don't need to puff him up anymore. Nan's shaking her head no more. Yeah, Nan's like, yeah, I agree. And then the Sullivan's, Brad and Jill came in and great friends of the deals. But both of you lost a child the same year, 2009. And we've walked through that journey they both went through the same year and then the journey after and what God's even done and is still doing. In fact, the best is yet to come in terms of your ministry. And so today we sort of want to talk about, OK, is there life after death? Is there joy? Is there hope that comes? And I'm looking at you and I can see the smiles again. It's real, but we need to help people get through that.

So how do you get there? I think one of the frames of reference I would give people is the pain and intensity of your sorrow after losing a child changes over time. It doesn't go away. There's moments where it instantly comes back.

We call them landmines. It's a song on the radio or on your podcast or it's a word or you walk in, you find a picture on your phone and boom, you are back in the middle of the throes of your sadness. But the space between those moments of intensity gets wider over time. In the beginning, it is all consuming and overwhelming. But over time, we're 12 years out.

All of us are in our cases and the space gets wider. So you're able to experience again more of the ups of life, the happiness in life, the joy of life. I think on some level you can always have joy even in the beginning in your head. You know Jesus wins the day.

We know we get to see Connor again. I knew that. I said that at his funeral. That doesn't mean I didn't fall apart immediately after the funeral and then begin to try to figure out how do you walk through life when you have no motivation for life.

Like the reality of the sorrow is very, very heavy in the beginning. But there is joy that comes. This year our oldest son got married. And I'm so thankful we were 12 years out. The first two, four, six, I couldn't have danced like I danced at Braden's wedding.

I was full on celebrating for them. But there was Connor's picture on Brennan's lapel. I was carrying him all day long. I was missing him like crazy. He was mentioned at the rehearsal dinner. He was mentioned at the wedding. But he wasn't there the way I wanted him. And yet we celebrated. And I know it's what he would want, but I was in a space where I really could. And I tell you, those first four, six years, I don't think I could have like that. And it does come.

Yeah, here's the question, how? You know, because I know it's true. I mentioned Anne a little bit. I know that after my little brother died and I grew up, I got to a place of hope. I'm thinking of a good friend of mine, John, and his wife, Sonja, lost their teenage son to suicide. And we were at the funeral, and John got up and gave one of the greatest sermons I'd ever heard and sang with his arms raised to Jesus in that funeral worship moment. And I know a week later he collapsed. And now, years later, I know he and Sonja, they found joy. I mean, not fake joy, a deep well of joy, but it's a process. You know this process as well as anybody.

So help us walk there. I know, Ron, you talked, I don't know what they're talking about, but they talk about you say the color's going to come back. What's that mean? Yeah, so in 1998, Nan and I lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Jonesboro had a school shooting. It was one of the first ones. The year before Columbine was the Jonesboro school shooting. I was at the school that night, along with lots of other volunteers, trying to provide comfort to families that had lost their children.

The counseling center in our church, within six months, there were five people killed, four students and a teacher. Three of those five families were in our care. I walked personally through the tragedy with a number of families, but especially those who had lost children.

This is all years before we lose Connor. I remember sitting with one of the mothers and had a conversation one day in which she said to me, the color has gone out of my life. My life is gray. I went home that day and shared that with Nan and said that was a moment as a counselor I knew I was incredibly inadequate.

I had nothing for her. And I also know that that was profound and a holy moment, and I just don't even know what to do with it. Now, fast forward, years later, we lose our son Connor. And there she was. And this mother reaches out to us and she starts mentoring me. She starts helping me make sense of my world. And she never knew the conversations Nan and I had about the story, life is gray and I've lost the color.

She never knew we dialogued about that or that I had shared that with colleagues and people and had talked about it. And out of the blue one day, she sends me this message and she says, Ron, I told you once that my world was gray. And I just want you to know the color comes back.

So here's this woman who out of her tragedy is now turning around and giving to me. And I held onto that. The color comes back. And I just said that to myself over and over and over.

And it's as a believer, I know the color is wrapped up in the cross and Christ defeating death. And I have hope because of that. But my pain is really strong right now.

You know, someday I'll see Connor again. But that's not today. So at the same time I have joy, I also have sorrow. And those two things do not cancel one another out. Christians need to know this and hear me say this because when you say to somebody, well, aren't you glad that they whatever, you'll see them again as if that means their pain goes away now.

It doesn't. So we comfort people with what will be. But we have to help people be sad and cry over what is. And we have to do both of those at the same time, which is what I think while we're waiting does. It gives people a space to, in their faith, deal with their pain. You know, we've said this before on this program. My faith informs my pain, but it doesn't get rid of it. And while we're waiting gives people a space to do that in the midst of their Christian beliefs. I mean, I'm just thinking it's interesting that if somebody else who really hadn't gone through something like that had said the same words to you, you might have just winked and said thanks. Yeah.

But somebody has been there. I mean, we mentioned this earlier, but it really is 2 Corinthians 1 where Paul wrote, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that there's the purpose. Why does he comfort us? Just for us? Well, partly, but really so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. And she did that for you. And now you, all of us, are doing that for others. Let me ask you, as you've done that, as you've grieved, you're also having grieving siblings, grieving children that are still in your home. How do you do that when you're suffering so much?

That's a really hard thing. You know, I actually recently recorded a podcast with my daughter about that topic. She is now 25. She was 14 when her sister went to heaven. And, you know, we acknowledge the fact that when she lost her sister, we just had the two girls. Hannah was her best friend. Hannah was her confidant.

Hannah was the one that she went to with everything that a girl is going through. And when Hannah went to heaven, she lost her sister, but she also lost her parents, the parents that she had known all of her life. And so it was a profound loss for her. And she became an only child.

She became an instant only child with parents who were no longer the same. At the time, we really weren't, like you said, we're so caught up in our own grief, and we tried to help her and be there for her, but it's a very hard thing to do. And we've learned now, of course, in retrospect, that we should have probably included her in our grief more. We tried to protect her from our grief, and she tried to protect us from her grief. And so we ended up grieving a lot behind closed doors and grieving separately. We should have been grieving together. And I think that would have helped both of us. And of course, we did that some, but we could have done that better.

You know, all of these things you can look back at now and say, okay, these are the things we could have done better. Do you remember laughing together as a family after Hannah's death? That's the thing that I want to encourage people, too, the laughter and the joy comes. And at a retreat, if you would walk up inside the refuge and hear the laughter going on, you would think, well, I want to join this party. But then you find out what we're all there for.

You know, we have mentioned on this episode, why are you there? We're talking about this while we're waiting retreat for parents that have lost a child. So you're all there because you've lost a child, but you're laughing. We're laughing, and we probably laugh more than we cry.

We absolutely do. And that's good, but that also is that safe place for parents to do that. But the thing that we've got to experience over the last ten years of doing retreats and being around parents that have lost children is to see that process of their joy coming back, to see what God is doing in their lives. And that has been very rewarding for us just to be a spectator to see. And you see ministries that are born. You see people using their story to give God glory and just being obedient. That's so powerful to us to get to see God work. Our Father is the Redeemer, and He's starting to redeem this story.

We know it's going to be redeemed. And we focus on that hope and to have our eyes fixed toward eternity. And it's powerful to experience that, but just to see joy start returning in others' lives, in our lives, and then to see God work. And we kind of changed as parents, too. We kind of jokingly, with our other two boys at this point, talk about the lost two years when they kind of lost us as parents. Like, we just weren't functioning very well.

Is there anything you can do about that? For us, God's grace was my sister who repeatedly flew to where we lived and spent time with us. And we would say, hey, Aunt Cherilyn's going to come back. And my youngest son, Brennan, would go, oh, good, we'll get to eat again. That's sort of the joke, we forgot to feed him. But my sister came, she cooked.

And like, I'm not kidding. We really stopped being proactive parents. All the things we here at Faming Life teach parents to do, we went numb. It could barely function.

It could barely function getting through life. So you need that community of people around you. I would say, too, it just takes time.

And I think we need to be gentle with bereaved parents, but it's not a year and then it's over. It takes time. And some people take a little bit longer to find their way than others.

And I would say I was one of those people. I was really angry with God. I was frustrated with him. I really dug in my heels for a long time.

I'm on the other side of that now, but it just takes time and the joy can come back. I think the one thing that we did really well was we extended each other a tremendous amount of grace. That's what I wanted to ask. Yes. I wanted to ask about the difference. Yes. You know, maybe one spouse is mad at God and the others move beyond that. That was us. Difference in grieving.

Yes. The timetable is different, so how do you... You know, I'd be really curious for Brad and Jill to talk about their journey. So when Nan and I started grieving, we like to say we grieve together. We clung to each other. We walked with each other. The intensity of our pain was the same.

The frequency was the same. We were both in the pit together. And then I would say four or five years into it... You read the book of Job. And it kind of, you know, it helped me. That helped?

It helped me turn some corners theologically in my head and make sense of some things. She didn't want anything to do with that. I was stuck. You were still mad at God.

I was so stuck. Were you resentful of Ron? I wasn't resentful. I just wasn't going there. So I let him go.

I did. I let you go. And the big journey for us at that point is we began to diverge a little bit. Yes, we did. Mostly from where we were and how we would function in life is we had to have, as she said, grace for each other, which meant I needed to be really super patient when she needed to rehash stuff over and over and over again that I no longer needed to do.

And I needed to sit and listen and be with her. I think we extended our boys' grace, too, because we wanted to be at the cemetery more, do things like that. They didn't want to. And so we never really pushed that. We never really pushed counseling unless we really saw a red flag with them. But we extended each other a tremendous amount of grace.

If they still wanted to do the pizza and movie night and I wasn't ready, I kind of let them go and I'd kind of do my own thing. Yeah. And so it's delicate.

Like, there's no prescription for this. For every couple and family, it would be different. For us, it was all four of us individually were grieving. We had our own journeys. But then we tried to do the family grieving thing. Like Jill said, we tried to talk and share and be open with each other and connect into our children's grief.

But that's only when I could be mindful enough to get outside of my own head to enter into their space. It's a hard, hard, hard journey. And you don't know if you're doing it right or wrong. Or we had one child who would talk to us and tell us everything he was feeling, and our other son went silent for years, cried twice in a decade.

But then when he finally crashed, he crashed hard when he was in college. And then it came out and we had to pay attention to him and help him in that space. Like, you just never know if you're, are we doing okay?

We're not doing okay? And so it's touch and go, which again, reinforces this idea that when you have somebody to bounce it off of, somebody else who's ahead of you, another person is grieving beside you, you kind of get a sense of where you're at and what you can do different and what you can't control. I'm curious about your grief journey as a couple.

What was that like? I think ours was a little bit different in that ours started before Hannah actually went to heaven. You know, from the time she was diagnosed, we knew we were dealing with a potentially terminal illness. We prayed for healing, we trusted for healing, but we knew that God might not choose to heal her. So we began grieving her before she went to heaven.

And we had to walk that journey of the cancer journey with our child, making decisions about treatments and hospitals and things like that. And we had to process some of those things together before she died. So I think that maybe bonded us together a little bit in that so that when we grieved, I think we grieved together. And one thing we definitely noticed, and I've heard many, many bereaved parents say this, when he would have a really, really bad day, I was usually doing okay. And then vice versa, when I was having a really, really bad day or week or whatever, he was doing okay.

We rarely were both way down here at the same time. And I think that's a grace that God gives us. I agree. And I'm guessing maybe you've heard that as you do your retreats. Is that something that you hear couples say? We hear that a lot. Because the truth is, and I don't know the statistic, maybe Ron, you know it, the number of marriages that don't make it after a tragedy like this, they don't make it. I'm glad you brought that up. I've looked into it.

There's really not any good science. You'll hear things like 85% of couples divorce after losing a child. That's not true.

It's not true. It's not nearly that bad. But it's hard. It takes a toll on your relationship.

And again, if you have other children, they can be so forgotten in the process. People ask you, other adults ask you how you're doing because they're adults, you're an adult. Very few people go up to your 14-year-old and say, dude, how you doing? Like, really? No. I want to know. I want to know.

They will ask, how's your mom doing? Yes. Yes. You guys, is that something we should be doing?

Oh, yes. In the church? Like to go up to the kids, the siblings, and ask them? Because the parents are having a hard time doing it. If you'll step in and be a parent for those kids or help them, I would long for just somebody to take them out of the house where the grieving mom was just, the cloud was over. And take them to get a shake or take them to a movie. Do something normal because they're not grieving on the same level as the parents are.

Just help. Yes. And there's actually a term, the forgotten mourners. That's what siblings are called in the research literature around this because everybody gets paid attention to, the adults do, but not so much the kids.

And think about a teenager, our son was 14, going into high school. It's hard enough. Yeah. And now you're the kid whose brother just died?

Yes. I didn't know how to talk to you anyway. You're trying to make it in this high school sea of uncomfortableness.

And now you've got that on you, that tattooed to your forehead. That's hard. So if, and you've already said it, so I don't know if I'm asking for something you've already said, but if you could look at a parent right now listening, who's feeling like, I don't know if I'll laugh again.

I don't know if I'll ever feel the joy I once had before my son or daughter died. What would you say to them, any one of you or all of you? How could you help them? What would you remind them of?

I would say two things. The color comes back and just take the next step. That's about as far as you can see right now. And you don't, you worry about what's beyond that. And there's so many questions in your head you don't know how to answer. You're right.

Try to focus on just taking the next step. Brad and Jill, I'm curious. We have some friends whose two sons overdosed and they died. And we've watched these grieving parents. They're just so heartbroken.

And I'm thinking of parents of kids that have committed suicide. So now they tag on, on top of all this grieving, they're also carrying this sense of guilt and shame or maybe even blaming each other. Do you address that?

Is there somehow that I feel like that's big too, and it's a little bit different from what you've been talking about? It is different and our retreats, we do have mixed groups typically. You know, whoever registers is who we have. So we have retreats that have parents who have lost from stillborn children to kids that die of cancer or car accidents or suicide or murder, all these different things.

And we've done that that way for years now and it's been fine. But even in that, we know there is a difference when your child dies by their own hand. And so something that we have just recently started are retreats that are specifically for parents that have lost children to suicide.

And they are led by or facilitated by parents that have lost children to suicide. We've just done a few of them so far. We've got some more on the calendar. And those have just been amazing. We sat in on one just because it was the first one and we just kind of sat in on some of the discussion time. The discussion those parents have is rich.

It's just amazing. And when you come at it from a foundation of faith, it makes all the difference. People who have lost children to suicide, you know, you think people say crazy things to us who lost a child from cancer, from an illness or something like that. People really say inappropriate things to people that have lost children to suicide. For them to just be able to get together and be in a very safe place where they can say anything without a filter and they can laugh and they can cry and it's just a beautiful thing. So we do offer something that is specific for them. And I just want to say, I'm guessing somebody stumbled on this program today.

And they're like, I don't, I can't believe I tuned into this podcast, radio broadcast. This is hope. God put this program in your ears right now because you need what we're talking about. I think about Jesus saying, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Thanks for being with us. You guys appreciate you so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. It may be that you're the person or the couple Dave Wilson was talking about just a minute ago, someone who stumbled on this program and who needs what Dave and Ann have been talking with Ron and Ann Deal and Brad and Jill Sullivan about today. You need comfort.

You need God to draw near to you in the midst of your own grief. Let me encourage you to go to our website at familylifetoday.com. There's a link there to Brad and Jill Sullivan's website.

More about their ministry is available. Again, go to familylifetoday.com and then we recommend podcasts and books, resources that can help you as you walk through a season of grief or maybe you know somebody who's walking through a season of grief and you want to look for resources for them. Levi Lusko and his wife Jenny were here recently. They shared about the loss of their five-year-old daughter. Levi has written a book about their journey through grief called Through the Eyes of a Lion Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power. You can order that book from us online at familylifetoday.com.

Maybe you know somebody you want to pass it on to. Again, the website familylifetoday.com or call to order the book 1-800-FL-TODAY is our number. That's 800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Well here we are at the end of July, the beginning of August. For some of us, summer is already starting to wind down. We're looking ahead to the new school year starting and fall is almost here and it's going to be a sprint before long. David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here with us. I think that's how a lot of our listeners are feeling right now, right?

Well that is certainly what's happening in the Robbins household, Bob. I mean, summer is feeling basically over, school is right around the corner for us. I mean, we are shopping and school supplying and getting in the last bits of summer. And one of the things Meg and I did recently was peek into the fall and realize how quickly it was coming. You know, you look at the next 90 days and you go, okay, it's here.

And it's already so full with a lot of things like kid sports and school activities. And we just kind of had a pause moment to go, how are we going to invest in our marriage? And we are so excited at Family Life to be able to share that most of our Weekend to Remember locations are opening up and coming to a city near you. And we want to invite you to take a pause yourself and go ahead and carve out time. Think proactively now. It's going to be a sprint in August and September for many of you as families.

We know that reality. And so how do you plan ahead to carve out time, just you and your spouse to get away? And that's what Weekend to Remember is all about. Well, and what we're suggesting is that you now put it on your calendar. Go to our website, familylifetoday.com. Find out when a Weekend to Remember getaway is happening near you and make this a priority for the fall.

Don't let it get crowded out by other things by putting it off. Decide today that you're going to join us this fall at a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. You can get more information online at familylifetoday.com. And with that, we've got to wrap things up for this week. Thanks for joining us. Hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. And then join us on Monday when we're going to talk about how important it is for us to be thinking rightly about our identity, about who we are, who God made us to be. Trevin Wax joins us for that conversation. And I hope you can join us as well. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen. Have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.