In 1993, Smyth & Helwys Publishing was gracious enough to publish a book I wrote, Learning to Dream Again. I tried to tell something of the story of our son David. In February 1983, David was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. That diagnosis sent not only David, but also our whole family, down a road we would never have chosen to travel.

It was a road filled with the smells of hospitals and the sounds of medical terms that frightened me with their complexity. We saw our son endure the pain of tests, surgeries, and radiation treatments. As a minister, I struggled with the issue of what seemed to me to be inexplicable suffering.

The good news is that David is very much alive. As I write this, I hear the sound of the television in our family room and know that my son is watching. While David will never have what we term a “normal life,” he reminds our family of important qualities like courage, sensitivity to others, and a quiet, authentic faith in God.

Fourteen years have passed since I wrote Learning to Dream Again. I wanted to write about David once more. Why do I write again about David? I suppose it’s because he’s never far from my mind. Or maybe it’s because David reminds me that life is both precious and fragile. Or maybe I need the catharsis that comes when we try to put on paper moments in the movement of life that are really too deep for words.

However, this time I want to write about more than just our family’s experience. As I have traveled to different places to preach and to speak, I have found that my telling of David’s story has evoked moving responses from people. Some people have promised to pray for David and my family. I haven’t tracked all of these people to see if they have kept their promises, but even the expressions of care have meant so much.

The responses, though, that have profoundly moved me are the stories that people have shared with me because David’s story is much like theirs. For certain, the details of the stories are different. Yet, there is a striking similarity. A young engineer tells me about an older brother who is a paraplegic. One day the older brother, while playing with his children, dived headfirst into a pile of leaves. What he didn’t see was a rock buried in the leaves. His head hit the rock, and now a once physically vibrant young man is irreparably changed.

A couple gives birth to a child. They want what every mother and father desire: “As long as the child is healthy . . . .” But she’s not. “Down’s Syndrome,” the physician says, and now the parents and their child face a multiplicity of unexpected demands. A husband notices that his wife is beginning to forget some things. Maybe it’s just a “senior moment.” One day, however, he gets a call from the manager of the grocery store that his wife seems confused and can’t remember where she parked the car. The physician examines her and writes the word “dementia” on her chart. Just one word, but we know what it means. After a while, she no longer recognizes her husband, her children, or her grandchildren. How painful to watch intimacy become such distance.

These are just a few of the responses that my sharing of David’s story have sparked in the lives of others. The common thread is grief. Nobody has physically died, but when we think about it, so much has died. Dreams we had died. Relationships changed. Whole families suddenly shifted in a psychological earthquake.

The grief continues. Certainly, time and perspective bring healing, but we see a person whom we deeply love and wonder what may have been. We don’t have a funeral that at least brings some finality or gives us a point in time from which we can begin to reconstruct our lives. A child who is autistic stands in front of us. While we go on with life, the fact is that our lives and our child’s life are different. If it’s a husband who suffers from “Alzheimer’s Disease,” his wife sees the shell of what used to be. She can’t help remembering the time he touched her hand, held her close, or told her, “I love you more than life itself.”

I’ve chosen to call this experience “lingering grief.” It’s grief that lives with us every day and every night. It can be overwhelming. This kind of grief can make us jaded and cynical. Or it can deepen us and make us treasure life even more and fear death even less. However we respond, the grief makes a big difference in what we may have expected our lives to be, and in one way or another, we adjust to what will not adjust to us.

If you are reading this and have experienced the death of a “beloved,” I hope you understand that I’m not saying the type of grief I’ve known with David is more severe than yours. I have been a minister long enough that in some sense, grief lingers for all of us who have experienced losses. A woman told me about her husband who had died. “Each night,” she said, “I reach across the bed expecting to touch his hand. All I feel is emptiness.” In the local newspaper, a child’s picture is at the bottom of the obituary page. The child died two years ago, but his family pledges to remember the day of his birthday. The loss of something or someone evokes many of the same feelings regardless of whether it’s a physical death, a death of a relationship, or having to let expectations that we had for someone or for ourselves die while a new reality is born.

Grief is grief, but one of my concerns is that caregiving for those who are experiencing lingering grief is often more difficult than for those who have experienced a death. For example, I have met people who have been through the experience of divorce. They remember when they stood as a couple in front of a minister and pledged, “. . . till death do us part.” They parted, but it wasn’t at death. It was another man, another woman, or an instance in which somebody became bored with his or her partner. For at least one person in that relationship, it wasn’t death, but it sure felt that way.

“I am going through a divorce,” she said. “I need to find a new church.” I listened as she shared. “It’s not that the people in my former church don’t care for me. Many of them have called, and some have invited me for dinner,” the woman continued. “But the longer this goes on, I don’t think even my friends know what to do with me, and frankly I don’t really know what to do with myself.” She spoke about needing God but feeling distant from God and the church. “I feel angry, desperate, ashamed. My self-esteem is so low. I feel rejected, unloved. I don’t even know what I want people to do for me. Most of all I know I can’t put my marriage back together.”

Not every story of lingering grief is the same, but she captured much of what I experienced. I felt out of control. Things were happening to David that I didn’t understand. The only prognosis the neurosurgeon could give our family was “Take one day at a time.” I felt isolated. I was too tired to interact with people. I was tired of explaining to people what I didn’t understand myself. Each time somebody asked, “How’s David doing?” I wanted to scream.

When people asked me what they could do for my family and me, all I could say was “pray.” Even that sounded empty because I was having trouble praying myself. As well intentioned as some people were, I didn’t know what to tell them to do. When people said, “Let me know what we can do,” I was frustrated. I was trying to put one foot in front of another, and these people were asking for directions and instructions. What meant the most to my family and me were the notes, the small gifts, and the cards through which people let us know they cared.

Most painful for me was my struggle to find anything of God in David’s illness. Embedded in me was the notion that you and I get what we deserve. While at some level in my mind I knew that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, I operated with a strong sense of justice. As a minister, I tried to explain the inexplicable. Without symmetry, how could we ever make any sense of anything? The doctrine of creation meant that chaos had been tamed, and we could find the hand of God at work if we simply thought long and hard enough about it.

David’s diagnosis confronted me with the utter irrationality of much of life. My son had done nothing to deserve what happened to him. If God were trying to communicate some message to me, then it seemed that God had picked on the wrong person. If I needed to understand something, then why hadn’t God let me be the one to have the tumor?

Like the woman going through her divorce, I felt distant from God. My vocation was to preach in the church and to the community of faith. My home Baptist church had commended me to the ministry and blessed me with ordination before I left for seminary. Wasn’t seminary the place where I was supposed to learn about God and to try to give some sense to the work of God in people’s lives? I remembered my course in theology. The seminary catalogue labeled it “Systematic Theology.”

Perhaps I expected too much, but the word “systematic” implied order, or at least a theological frame in which the disparate pieces of life could be placed, labeled, and interpreted. Since the currency of my ministry was primarily words, I expected that I would be able to put a frame around the painful parts of people’s lives to let them know God was good even when life was bad.

I was at a loss for words to explain my own journey, much less those of others. Our family was living a reality that I didn’t understand. I had questions of God, for God, and about God for which I had no answers either for myself or for David or for anybody else.

I still have questions. However, while watching David each day has brought sadness, it has also reminded me of the courage it takes to accept life as it is and to continue to live with both our certainties and our uncertainties. For me, David is a model of courage. Courage is not merely taking action. Often, it is taking life as it comes, accepting what we cannot change, and not giving up on ourselves and not giving up on God.

So I write this book to myself and for myself. But I also write it for those who have told me stories of their own lingering grief. I write because I have seen courage, and I believe I have seen the goodness of God in the faces of folks who refuse to surrender even when the suffering seems overwhelming.

When I was a little boy, my parents would read me grand stories that always ended, “And they lived happily ever after.” I dreamed about castles in the sky. I wanted to live someday in the place where good news was the only news. I’m much older now. Both my parents are dead. I haven’t found the land of “happily ever after,” but I have found people who made wherever I have been a much richer and caring place.

One of those people is Selvia Brown, administrative assistant at the M. Christopher White School of Divinity at Gardner-Webb University. When I came to be dean and to teach at the divinity school, I told Selvia that I was “technologically challenged.” Selvia has taken words that I’ve written on legal pads and put them into a form that fits the demands of the publisher. I’m grateful for her friendship and for her gracious spirit in providing me the help I needed.

I want to dedicate this book to Mary Jean Poston and to Nelson Poston. Nelson died a few years ago, and for that reason, I wish I had written these words earlier. They are my wife’s parents, my in-laws. When David was diagnosed, I thought often about my immediate family. I confess I thought little about the devastating impact that this news had on Diane’s parents or my parents. All of them must have suffered enormously. Yet, what I remember is the gifts of presence and prayers that the Postons gave to our family. They grieved, but they never stopped giving of themselves. I call that love! I call that courage! It’s long overdue, but I want to thank them for what they have meant to me.

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