For those who are grieving
Yesterday was a tough day.
One year ago my step-dad, Mike, died unexpectedly. But I couldn’t bring myself to post anything on social media. It just didn’t feel adequate. So I decided to do something different. Below is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “Finding Rest: A Survivor’s Guide to Navigating the Valleys of Anxiety, Faith, and Life,” where I talk about my stepdad, Mike, his death, and what I learned. I thought that would be the best way to memorialize him because it could also help anyone else going through grief. Remember, your struggles are being used by God for something greater. That may be hard to see now, but it’s true.
I hope this encourages you.
***
April 2020. Many will remember it as the height of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. But our family will remember it for something even darker.
I had recently started using my digital media background to help my church with tech and video projects, so when the pandemic hit I quickly became an integral part of our weekly video services once they went completely online. I was editing the Good Friday service, staring at a computer in our church sound booth with all the lights off for some reason, when I got the text.
“Did Jer call you?”
It was from my sister, Jess, and she was talking about my oldest brother, Jeremy.
“No, why?” Instantly a pit formed in my stomach, and my anxiety kicked in. My mom’s health was still not great, and Jess had been struggling with deep depression since Jenny’s death. I was concerned for both of them. Almost instantly my phone started ringing. It was Jess. What she said is the last thing I expected.
“Mike was taken to the ER this afternoon. He came home from work sick, woke up vomiting all over the floor, and called someone to take him to the hospital. When he got there, he lost consciousness and hasn’t woken up since.”
If a men’s magazine did a story of the sixty fittest men over sixty, my stepdad Mike would be in it. He’s not overweight, he eats healthy, clean, and organic, he still goes for runs on the beach, and he drinks enough water to make a fish jealous. Besides kidney disease at a young age that required a kidney transplant from his sister twenty-five years earlier, his health is perfect. Impeccable. He even completely weaned himself off his antirejection medication after his surgery, so his immune system isn’t compromised like many other transplant patients.
In other words, he’s the last person I expected to hear was in the hospital and unresponsive.
Jess proceeded to tell me that they were running tests as fast as they could. They had done a CT scan that was inconclusive, and they were stumped. Immediately I thought about COVID-19. She said they hadn’t ruled it out and were actively testing him for it. The test would take days to get back. So until then we were supposed to wait.
The worst part? We couldn’t see him.
What many people overlook, or forget, about the coronavirus pandemic is the havoc it wreaked on the families of those in the hospital. The measures being taken at care facilities were so comprehensive that those with family members in the hospital were not able to visit—especially if the patient was in the ICU, which Mike was.
But my mom was persistent. She begged and pleaded, and eventually the hospital made a concession to allow her and some select people in to see him as long as they geared up head to toe in personal protective equipment: mask, gown, and gloves. They stayed by his side as long as the nurses would allow, but he still didn’t respond.
That night I got another text: “They put him on a ventilator.” He could no longer breathe on his own. Later they tried to take him off of it, and his body made no attempt to take a breath. I didn’t need the doctors to tell me what the prognosis was, but they told us anyway. An MRI revealed Mike had a massive stroke in his brain stem, the nerve center of the body. It was the worst type of stroke. His chance of survival without life support was nonexistent. While he was still physically with us, he was gone.
I hopped on the first flight to Wisconsin. Because of the virus, there was only one. I’d say that I got one of the last seats on the plane, but the truth is there were sixteen people on a flight with about twenty rows and six seats per row. When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, the administrator met us in the lobby and explained that some of the exceptions they made earlier were no longer being offered to us. They were going to let my mom and me in because I had yet to say goodbye. That was it, and only for ten minutes. The hospital was running out of the personal protective equipment required to visit a patient in the ICU, and they had to make some tough decisions regarding future visits until Mike’s coronavirus test officially came back. I understood, but that didn’t make it any easier.
I tell you all that to set the stage for what happened next. Because as a person with anxiety and OCD who has since battled depression, it stunned me. It foreshadowed more of what was to come.
After gearing up in the gloves, gown, and mask, the nurse ushered me and my mom into the room. As I turned the corner I saw Mike, tubes and wires seemingly coming out of everywhere, his head cocked to the side and slightly bent upward, and his mouth gaping open to accommodate the ventilator. There was a steady, yet eerie, hissing sound of the machine taking his breaths for him. But as I took it all in, I didn’t immediately start crying. No disbelief. No tears. No weakness in the knees. Instead, as I stared at the man in front of me, a deep truth I had heard in church all my life surfaced: our bodies are only a part of us, and they are definitely not all of us. Mike’s body was just that, his body. What was in front of me was just the shell he inhabited here on earth. And that shell had broken down. Sure, it was a part of Mike, but it wasn’t all of Mike. There was so much more to him. And I didn’t feel like all of him was there.
To say my mom had a different reaction would be an understatement. She wept the moment we went in. But the weeping quickly gave way to something I will never forget. See, my mom was praying for a miracle. As a nurse, she knew what the medical prognosis was. She knew there was no earthly way Mike was coming back. But she wasn’t placing her hope in earthly reports. So after crying for a bit, she leaned over the rail of the hospital bed and started commanding Mike to wake up. Louder and louder, until she was almost shouting. It went on for nearly the entire time we were in there.
That’s when I lost it. That’s when it started setting in how tough this was going to be. I wasn’t crying as much for Mike as I was crying for my mom and what her life was going to be like without Mike in it.
After our ten-minute time limit stretched to about twenty, we were ushered out. Later that day I found myself alone with my mom at my brother’s kitchen table. She looked at me, cocked her head to the side, and then asked a pointed question.
“Jonny, are you believing for a miracle with me?”
Before I tell you my answer, I need to tell you this. When I talk about God using our tragedies, our disorders, and our circumstances for our good and His glory, the biggest reason I know that to be true is because of what came out of my mouth next. Because if not for decades of my own internal struggles, if not for the three deaths before this, I would not have been able to answer the way I did:
“Mom, I want so badly for Mike to have a physical miracle. And I am begging God for that. But I am not putting my hope in it. My ultimate view of God, my faith in him and what I know He can do, is not determined by Mike waking up or not. I want him to, for sure. But I’m more comforted by the fact that God has already done a miracle for Mike. If Mike doesn’t wake up, and his physical body dies, we know that’s not the end. The ultimate, best miracle has already happened. It’s already secured. Better yet, I actually know Mike is going to be healed. What I don’t know is if that healing is going to take place on this side of heaven. But the fact is, he is going to wake up. It’s just a matter of if he’s going to wake up and see us or wake up and see Jesus. I can also tell you that God’s at work whether Mike opens his eyes for us or not. I can tell you that God is using and will use Mike for His glory, whether he has a miraculous recovery or not. I just know it. And I have so much confidence in it.”
She looked at me with tears in her eyes, then looked to the side and nodded her head as she pursed her lips and took it all in. “Yeah.”
I can’t tell you where those words came from. But I can tell you they would not have been possible had I never struggled to make sense of not only what has gone on inside of me but also what has gone on around me. Because of my struggles, because of the years of hurt, pain, and wrestling with why I am the way I am and the truths that God helped me see, I was able to convey an understanding of the gospel in a way I have never articulated before and never imagined being able to articulate.
If this book were published any earlier, this chapter would have been only about my sister and one important lesson I learned. Now, through another tragedy and God’s faithfulness to use it, it may be the most important thing I’ve ever written.
As for Mike, less than forty-eight hours after I said those words to my mom, on Easter Sunday, his heart stopped beating, his lungs stopped breathing, and his blood stopped flowing. Yet with his physical eyes closed he woke up to see Jesus.
What a miracle.
This post is taken from the upcoming book, “Finding Rest: A Survivor’s Guide to Navigating the Valleys of Anxiety, Faith, and Life,” due to be published September 2021.