Pat and Eric chat with guest Dave Marttunen about the experience of losing a child and learning to live with grief.

You will hear about:

  • Losing a child
  • The role of church support during a tragic loss
  • Walking through grief as a family
  • The layers and stages of grief: linear vs. mosaic
  • The impact of grief on a marriage
  • Addressing: Is there a right or wrong way to grieve?
  • The choice to live in the reality of risk in light of grief
  • Boundaries on grief in light of Scriptural truth
  • Inviting others into your grief journey
  • Asking permission in supporting others in their grief

Resources mentioned during this episode:

Eric: Before we get started you might think you hear a faint sound of a train throughout a portion of this episode. That’s because there’s a faint sound of a train running throughout a portion of this episode. We couldn’t edit it out.

Pat: So just do what we do and pretend it’s not there. Alright, enjoy the episode.

Dave: God is leading you in the dark in this experience. He’s taking you into a dark place and he is going to give you satisfaction. And he will meet you in that place. He won’t leave you there. But, he will enrich your life through the experience in ways he couldn’t in any other way. Trust God in the Dark.

–Intro–

Pat: Welcome to Undiscussed, the show where we talk about things that Christians should talk about but often don’t. My name is Patrick.

Eric: And I’m Eric and we’re your co-hosts here today to talk about the subject of grief and loss.

Pat: Yeah, grief and loss is something that I’m not actually too familiar with. So this is an interesting topic for me to dive into. I haven’t actually lost anybody in my life that’s very close to me and I actually often have pre-anxiety about that. Like, what’s it gonna be like? How am I going to function? How am I going to survive? And it’s been helpful to actually know people who have experienced that loss and to journey with them and to gain wisdom. And sometimes to ask questions. But, I’ll be honest there are times I actually don’t know the right questions to ask or how to approach the conversation.

Eric: Well, and that’s the thing, right? That’s the show. The reason we called it Undiscussed is because often in the church and amongst Christians these subjects go untalked about and undiscussed. And there’s pain and even grief in the silence of not dealing with these subjects. And so, you know Pat, we’re not experts on these as you just implied. You know, I have experienced loss in my life but I wouldn’t call myself an expert at all. And that’s not really the point of the show. The point of the show is to open conversation and dialogue so that we can be having healthy and helpful conversations in the church.

Pat: Yeah, so, hopefully this conversation will give some of us insight into how to better understand those who are going through loss and grief. How to better understand ourselves as we respond to those that are going through loss and grief and just hopefully create a better culture of open conversation.

Eric: And I’m very excited because we have a special guest today. We have Dave Marttunen with us. Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi, it’s great for me to be with you guys. And I just want to set the record straight too. I’m not coming in as an expert. I am coming in as someone who has experienced loss in their life. and really grateful for the opportunity to talk with you about that experience and do what you guys have said and talk about things that are either awkward or shut down or undiscussed because of our lack of familiarity with them or our uncertainty with them.

Eric: Yeah, and Dave, I know that in your past you have been a church leader and a leader of leaders but I think the title that you’re most excited about these days is Grandpa.

Dave: Yeah, I’m so glad you gave that entrance way because I’ll slip into that with ease. My wife and I are grandparents to five grandchildren now: twins who are just recently adopted and they live in South Asia, three biological children to our eldest daughter and her husband who live in Sweden. So in my role as a director of Fellowship International, I travel and I’m in leading the mission but I also travel to be able to be with my grandchildren who, I’ve got to tell you, someone once quipped that when you have grandchildren it’s like falling in love all over again. And that’s my experience. And some other wag once quipped that grandchildren are the benefit of not killing your own children. That we face those challenges as parents and we wonder what we’re in for. But grandchildren are a reward.

Eric: Well I noticed that you said that you travel to see your grandchildren. I imagine you also travel to see your children and your in-laws as well.

Dave: Our children actually say to us, “Don’t forget we’re in the mix.” This whole experience at being a grandparent where you’re able to influence but you’re not responsible for all of the routine things within their life, really is a treasured experienced. One I highly value.

Pat: Do you have any favourite moments or experiences as a grandparent that you didn’t expect to have?

Dave: Oh my questions, that’s a great…I think that expression if I go back to what I’ve already said, falling in love all over again. How these children just land in your heart in a way that you want it to be but you don’t really know you haven’t been there before. It’s absolutely fantastic. They call you grandpa and everything else stops with just being in the life of that child. Answering their questions, engaging in their life, it’s just so rewarding.

Eric: Great

Pat: Wow, You’re making me look forward to that day many, many years from now.

Eric: Grandpups. You and your dog.

Pat: Yeah, I fall in love again every day and every time she eats another one of my books.

Eric: I feel like Zoe, your dog, is an ongoing guest on the show because she ends up being a part of every conversation.

Pat: Oh, yeah she’s an ongoing guest in all of our hearts really. But, Dave, actually we first met a couple of years ago. Was it two years ago maybe when we were doing an interview with you and you were actually able to share your story? It was themed “Dear First Year Me” and you talked about your experience actually with loss and grief then and that’s what inspired us to invite you on to this show because we know you were close to the issue and you had some interesting things to say and there were some things we could learn from you just based on what you’ve been through. So, why don’t we hear a little bit about your story for the audience and how you’re connected to the topic of loss.

Dave: Sure, you’re talking about, I think, one of the big events that shape your life. And that was the loss of our son Jonathan when he was nine years of age. He was delivering newspapers and was struck by a vehicle and died 18 hours later in a children’s hospital in Vancouver. We were living on Vancouver island at the time, and that is a life altering event, if I could use that phrase, a life altering experience. Because you don’t really want to survive it. You would rather have your life end with that loss just because it is so traumatic and you didn’t have the… I guess I’d use the word tools. You’re not prepared. When I say this, I’m not suggesting that we could ever adequately prepare for that kind of experience and I think to attempt to do so would border on being morbid. However, I would say to you if I come back to my own experience that navigating that, I think a popular term is a journey, you’re going through a walk, you’re going towards an outcome. You just don’t really know what that’s going to be and how that’s going to work out in the early initial stages of the loss. Coming to terms with that, there’s a fear factor of forgetting what the person who has died looks like, what their voice sounds like, what they smell like when you embrace them. The fact that they won’t ever hug you back. The fact that you can’t talk to them. This permanent cut, loss is the term often used, and it seems so inadequate. The language of grief in my experience was so inadequate to describe what my emotions, what my spiritual mind said was all of those facets.

Pat: So can you describe for us a little bit about that period in your life. What else was going on? What was your career back then? What was your family like? What did it look like?

Dave: Yeah, that’s an insightful question too because context is important for any experience. And Donna and I were involved in church life at that point. I was the lead pastor of a congregation on the Island. And we had been in that role just 6 months. So we had transitioned from a church that we had planted and lead for just about 10 years and had moved down to a new area and so we were somewhat, what could I say, out of a familiar context and didn’t have strong friendships in that context. We had a really strong, supportive church. I would say that in that experience that support grew in strength and in some very significant ways.

Eric: Jonathan was your oldest but what were the ages of the other kids and your wife? You were in church ministry but what was happening in their lives during that time?

Dave: Jonathan was our eldest, 9 years of age as I think I’ve already said and Sarah and Ruth were 6 and 5 at the time. They were all involved in school. Ruth in Kindergarten, Sarah in Grade 1, and Jonathan in Grade 4. And my wife was a stay at home mother at that point. She’s since gone back and has become an advanced practice nurse. I would say that the context was one that anyone would imagine in ministry. We were active and engaged in a church of about 250 people at that time.I was working with one other staff person and that was basically the context in which we were working. It was a small community, about 10000 people and it was just a nice, family church if I could describe it that way in summary.

Pat: Yeah, there are two things that I’m particularly curious about. One, how a loss like that can affect your family. I mean not only are you and your wife suffering, this insanely traumatic event, you also have two kids that you are helping shepherd through this. What did that event do to your family life?

Dave: It’s interesting because we talk about this as a family. I would suggest to you that grief is a little bit like an onion. It’s got layers and layers and layers. There are processes you go through in the initial stages of grief but the impact of loss stretches out through the rest of your life. So I’ll come back to the effect of the kids, but to say right now what we’re talking about is our eldest daughter’s eldest child. Our first grandchild is turning 9 on her next birthday. And already we’re talking about what it was like for us as parents to lose a 9 year old child as our eldest daughter, who is a psychotherapist, is talking about what her experiences having that child and having lost her brother at that age. And all that’s attending. And the children as they’ve continued to grow through major life events have always included or discussed Jonathan, their older brother, at all of those. Whether it’s a wedding, whether it’s moving out of the country, whether it’s a major holiday or their building their own family culture and how they want to establish it. I would say that grief or loss or their brother iterations of all of those things are presented as part of that whole process. So with the children, it’s our son died on the 10th of January 1990 and a week later was our now eldest daughter’s birthday. And we were saying to ourselves, we want to normalize our family as much as possible. So we had a funeral a few days after Jonathan’s death. And a few days after that we were celebrating Sarah’s birthday and we just decided that we needed to make that as normal as possible. So where I am taking Sarah and 10 of her friends bowling, and we’re bowling a ball and I’m turning around and I’m weeping like a baby, and I’m composing myself and going back and leading this party. And it was awful and important and all wrapped into those same kinds of events and we were determined that while our grief wouldn’t be hidden from our children, they wouldn’t suffer our grief either. They were children, they couldn’t be expected to manage our emotions and feelings and worldview. And that puts you in such an odd position as a parent. That you need care yourself but you realize you can’t make the child the person who cares for you. You need to be caring for them. And, I think those are things that occur to parents naturally, but I would say the context of this is that we were constantly vigilant to watch how our children were processing that. Now one of the things you didn’t ask, but I’ll just say is when you have a loss you feel out of control. You feel like things happened to you without warning and without your ability to respond to and so you go into a protective mode. You want to be sure everyone’s safe. So the local school, the elementary school, was a great school and people were supportive of our children and us. But they offered counselling to our children without telling us that they were doing that. And, while it’s a wonderful thing they engaged the kids, the fact that we were left out of the process made us feel vulnerable again. That we weren’t part of the equation. That we were contributing to the outcome. That we were knowledgeable of the goals that they were setting for the children in that therapy. I’m just raising that point because you’re asking how it affected everyone. And it affects you in predictable and unexpected ways. There are ways that you could prepare for loss and a sense of that cut, but there are other things that you can’t expect that do come up and surface. In the same way, I could say of other major life changing events. Like marriage, people will tell you what it’s like and then you get into it and you go, “Well no one told me about this!”.

Eric: Yeah, you talk about the onion and different things. I wonder if you could comment on stages of grief? And did you…I imagine you and your wife went through grief differently. Did you follow a predictable sequence? Maybe you could just comment on that?

Dave: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there are, without question, as I look back, stage of grief that you go through if you use an author and a contributor to the field like Kublor Ross did some seminal work on the stages of grief yet I would say to you that the stage is not linear and I think subsequent writing on the field would tell you that you go through stages or experiences but you move back and forth within those experiences both depending on what’s going on and what’s happening and how you’re thinking and processing. What else is impacting you? Because life doesn’t stop for you when you have grief. That’s one of the things my wife and I would say to each other is “The world is crazy. I want it to stop. I want to be able to process this independently of everything else,” and you can’t of course. You need to move forward, case and point as we tried to normalize Sarah’s birthday. And, then in that first year as you’re going through your own process of recovery, you’ll also building new memories with your families. And that’s essential and awful because every memory you make to normalize with your family, you’re excluding the person that you’ve lost from that experience. And so the first year, is all of the firsts. It’s the first Christmas. It’s the first school holiday. It’s the first big family vacation. It’s things that are focused on kids like Halloween and Christmas in terms of traditions that you have as a family. You’re making up those traditions. What do you do on the birthday of the child you’ve lost? It’s such a… So there are those things that you work through as so there are both stages of how you’re mentally and spiritually going through what you’re experiencing. Where you deny it, where you’re in shock, where you come to terms with it. You process it. All of that. So, I would say that my experience in grief taught me that while you can look back and see faces and stages, when you’re going through it that’s not nearly as helpful as people would want it to be for you.

Pat: Yeah, I picture, I mean even myself I would assume grief is a linear progression. Oh, where are you at..1, 2, 3, 4, 5…now obviously you’re going the same direction, but there’s this expectation vs reality graph that I always see. There’s one that’s just linear progression and there’s one that’s just a giant mess of scribbles and you’re going all over the place. That’s more what grief is like where you kind of bounce around from stage to stage.

Dave: Yeah, I think we like to think of things as linear but they’re really messier than that in life. It’s more of a mosaic. You know, it’s more of a puzzle where pieces fit into a context overall they build. There’s certainly progression. And I think with grief the issue becomes that you both want to move forward and yet you’re terrified of moving forward because moving forward means you aren’t gripped by the loss in the same way. Does that mean that you don’t love the person that you’re grieving? Are you gonna love them less? Right, there’s all of that sort of head space that goes on. And even if it’s not head space, there’s the confusion and frustration that I should figure this out. So I think all of that is, and you asked and I didn’t answer your question, but you said “Did you grieve differently?”. Absolutely, Donna and I grieved differently and what I subsequently learned or since learned about grief is, grief is a learned process. If you go back to your first.. I went to a grief and loss seminar with Dr. Nancy Reeves in Victoria, a brilliant clinician in this whole area. And she was teaching us on leaders and how to walk with people who are grieving so as a Pastor, I wished I’d taken years before my own experience but I gained a tremendous amount of information from that. And she said because it’s a learned process or a learned behaviour, go back and think about the first loss that you’ve had as a person. Was it the loss of a pet? What did your family do around that? Was it, oh well, frisky’s gone, and let’s bury him in the garden and off we go? Was there any ceremony attached to it? Did anybody talk about memories? Did you process your emotions? Were there any tears that were shed? Were you shut down for showing tears, “don’t worry about them”. Were you distracted from grief? Because families do different things in the face of sadness and loss and personalities can also do this. So I remember Donna and I sitting down and talking about this and she said with a degree of fierceness… Donna’s not here to correct either my impressions or my description of her, but just she’s just a wonderful person and partner and I’m better in every way because we’re in journey together…but she looked at me with a degree with fierceness and said, “This is my grief and noone is going to tell me how to do this. I’m going to do it my way.” And she did. Unquestionably. And she is more the introverted person as you would anticipate and as you’re listening to me today you would probably discern I’m somewhat more extroverted. And I used language and I process verbally. Donna is introspective and she’s the gal that sits and looks out the window and thinks and then as she’s come to some conclusion she’ll let you in on that or she’ll ask you questions or she’ll invite you in but you don’t invade. You wait for that invitation to come in as a rule. So I would say that we grieve very differently and we came across a frightening statistic which was at about the time about 80% of the marriages that suffer the loss of child end in divorce. And we were simply determined when we read that statistic, when we heard that, not to be a statistic. That our marriage would not end and that we would intentionally turn towards each other rather than away from each other. But when you’re both in grief and the marriage is not strong or stable or has some fractures, etc, you understand what I mean by these generalized terms or pictures, loss then is this incredible weight on something that is already in trouble or already having difficulty. And our marriage was very strong and stable. And I would say at that point we were able to say to each other things that perhaps people who were in a less stable situation or had a lesser degree of comfort with each other wouldn’t maybe process the same way. So that’s why grief is so intensely personal because it has to take all of that context into consideration as you move through it.

Pat: I’ve already detected a misstep that I know that I would make even. I know that when I experience something I have this belief that everybody needs to experience it my way. And I almost have this insistence of “this is how I feel it, so if you’re doing it a different way you must be wrong” and telling someone “Oh no, grieve differently. I grieve this way, so why aren’t you hopping on board my grief train and experiencing it the way that I do”. Is there a wrong way to grieve? Or is there just a wrong way to approach those who are grieving.

Dave: That’s a huge question. You’ve asked, I think, two very separate tracks.

Pat: Yeah

Dave: So let me comment on the first one because I think in a Christian and in North American evangelical context particularly, we tend to produce paradigms of thought and therefore behaviours that come out of that thought. You should think this and you shouldn’t do that. And we’re used to, sort of, and apologetic, relative to truth, and discovery. This is what is says. This is what I do and it tends to be very black and white.And if you have a performance based personality or culture, you add to that. Then right and wrong thinking can often be part of how we approach life. And I just suggest that grief, while it’s personalized, does have some things that are helpful and some things that are unhelpful. So if we go into processing of grief and emotion, a less helpful response is denial. “I’m not feeling this. I’m just going to stuff it down.” And I would say to you that I fell into that because that’s my nature as well. I would examine something, I would make a decision, and I would seek to move forward. So for myself, 3 weeks after Jonathan’s death, I was back working full time in my pastoral role. Was that a good thing? Well for me, it was the only way I knew how to go forward. And understand that this occurance in my life was about 30 years ago. At that point, grief wasn’t really discussed and therapy was somewhat suspicious. Models were still coming out and the evangelical community was still adapting to them. So there wasn’t anyone I would say that walked alongside of me either in the denomination of which I was a part or even within the church that I was a part. And so, I was really feeling alone to navigate. And for me, work was therapy. And in the same way, I would say to people who know me ‘cause I like to garden, gardening is therapy because you weed things that don’t belong and you feel that satisfaction and you see at the end of the day what you’ve actually achieved. Whereas in the role of ministry, it’s kind of like housework (if I can make that comparison). The dishes are never finished. The house always needs to be swept. All these things need to be set back in order because a family is constantly creating this disruption. So I feel there is a lot of parallel between those things. In grief, when you ask the question, “Am I doing it right?”, we had that same concern. So at one point, I remember phoning up a chaplain in another city, a major city, and saying to him, “I know we don’t know each other but I’m looking for a referral to someone who could give me short term therapy and to experience the grief of the loss of a child.” And he paused for a moment and he said to me, I’ll never forget his words, he said, “Dave, there are as many models of therapy as you’ve got fingers and toes. And there are so many practitioners in each of those therapies. And in my opinion, many of them aren’t worthy to pack your garbage to the curb let alone unpack your heart. So let me tell you if I was in your situation, here are the two people I would go to.” And so we made an appointment and Donna and I were ready to go and then life got in the way. There were some huge challenges that just maybe we couldn’t keep it. But I’ll tell you what happened to me at that point, Pat, was I decided we knew that if we needed to talk to somebody, someone was there. It was a lifeline for us. Whether or not we actually engaged it, knowing it was there, was a tremendous comfort for us. And what we were looking for at that point was validation. That we weren’t missing key elements of what grief was and that it was going to show up in ways that would harm us or do harm through us to others. So we wanted to try to figure out the pathway. But Donna and I were both reading extensively at that point. Others who had gone through similar experiences. And we found some very helpful processes that other people were doing that we implemented.

Eric: The little bit that I know about you, Dave, one of the things is that you’ve worn many different hats of leadership in various churches and even now as you lead the Fellowship Internationally. I’m wondering about how that, ‘cause you say grief carries on forward, how does it change, in your experience, how you experience and demonstrate and process grief in the different areas – church leader, husband, father, friend, so-on.

Dave: Yeah, that’s an insightful question. I appreciate you raising it. It’s not always…you understand when you’re talking about grief and the experience of that, those layers are not always surfaced in a conversation. People don’t always give you the opportunity. And if I could just pause there and say that was one of the less helpful things that we experienced…Is that people didn’t know how to respond to our grief. And in Canadian culture, when you don’t know what to do, the default is to do nothing. For fear of creating discomfort or awkwardness or pain or making people cry and not being sure if they’ll be able to turn the tears off. You don’t want to be that person who does that so the tendency is to withdraw and as a result of that you’re left alone. You’re isolated. And then, that creates another sort of experience or layer within the grief process. So you’re correct if I come back and say what were the different roles or hats that you wore. And I mentioned already that in my grief, I was leading a church. And I didn’t feel it would be helpful for me to step away from it at that time. That being back in ministry and doing things I was familiar with, were part of my healing process or healing might not be the right word, but dealing with my grief or going through my grief. So I, for example, began teaching out of my grief and I did a series of messages on the book of Job. Because for me, that was cathartic. I could examine someone else’s grief and make some comparisons. I could ask myself who was God to Job in all of this? He was being led blindly through his experience. Noone consulted him. God didn’t show up and say, “Dave, this is what’s gonna happen to you.” We had no forewarning. We’ve looked back and saw how God had prepared us but in the experience you feel somewhat distanced from God in terms of the role that he could show up and put you in pain and never ask your permission. Which is certainly what he did in Job’s life because as we know God felt Job’s..that God’s glory was safe in Job. That he could be put through this test and he would come forth and prove himself to be who he was as God’s agent and his ambassador. So going through the book of Job for me at that level, as a pastor, was incredibly cathartic and healing and helpful for me. And I can tell you that people came to hear that because I was a wounded teacher. And they really wanted to see if the truth of God’s word was showing up in the context of my own life. It was an important part, an important piece of that.

As do the other circles, as a parent I’ve described a little bit of that and the hypervigilance we felt. For example, we were terrified to ever let our kids out of our site. Or to do anything that we weren’t part of because we felt we needed to protect them and somehow we hadn’t been able to do that for Jonathan. And we talked openly about what we would have done differently and in that process could we have done anything. Because what we were desperate to do was to prevent loss. You don’t want another loss. You don’t want anything that would be attributed so here’s a little story that comes from that. Part of our process in making new memories is we were invited by a friend in the congregation to join them on an outward bound experience. So we all got in our canoes and we went to the broken islands, which is on the west coast of Vancouver Island and the next stop is Japan. So there were a group of islands, a constellation that breaks the ocean up but doesn’t completely prevent the wind and the waves and all of that from completely affecting you. So we launched, went from a place called Togart Bay, we’re in our canoes, we stop on one of the island appropriately called the stoppers were fueling stations for whalers in the old days. Land there and then the three fold channel that we had to cross was full of waves and wind. So much so that when the canoe was in the drop off the wave, the peak meant that no one saw us, we were bobbing up and down. And I could see the editorial newspaper that said, “Stupid Man in Perils Family”. I mean that’s what I was feeling. What was I thinking? Because you’ve been through loss, then, it shapes everything else you feel. Every other experience is seen through the lens where you know you might not come back from this at the end of the day. And risk is part of life, it’s part of what you need to do, it’s part of what you need to push boundaries and probably the bigger risk that we took, because one of the good things that came out of this, I would say to you, is that we realized that life was uncertain, that God had given you dreams and you should with intention pursue them So where that led us to in grief, and I’m coming to this issue of family and leader, was that we needed to pursue our dream. And we had said to each other, one day we’ll be in missions. And we realized one day never comes, you only have today. So long story short, we ended up being in an assignment of being caregivers to our field in Pakistan. 45 adults. And they asked if we would come and live in residence for 3 months and then go back every two years up to five weeks. And provide Pastoral care support so that would be 4 trips over that 6 year assignment starting with the three year residency. And we flew with our kids to Pakistan to a muslim country that at that point was under martial law and I remember my father phoning me and saying, “Dave, what are you doing?” And I can replay the conversation in my head, my dad’s now in heaven but I remember saying to him, “Dad, my mother, your wife died of cancer in this country. And my son, your grandson, died in a car accident in this country. We can’t keep people safe anywhere. That’s in God’s hands not ours.” There was silence on the other end of the phone and my dad said, “You’re gonna go then.” I said, “Yeah, I’m gonna go.” He said, “Ok, I’m gonna support you.” which was great news and all of that worked out well but what I’m saying is the choice to live is almost paralyzing in the face of grief. And you hold that in your heart as a dad. That’s part of the way it shapes you. And as a husband, I think it was to support my wife and she to support me and to give each other the distance we needed to process things our way but then with intention to come back and talk about them. Where are we? What are we feeling? What are we thinking? All of that.

–AD BREAK–

Pat: Earlier you mentioned that there’s this moment when you took your family to go bowling for your daughter’s birthday and you tried to go about the motions. You were bowling but you had to turn away in cry, almost in private, and then come back and face your family but put yourself together and present this image of someone who is doing ok, at least in that moment. And being a leader in a church as well, I imagine that there was a similar desire to maybe do that there where you felt like you had to portray a certain image or version of yourself. Did you feel the freedom to be yourself in grief? Or did you feel that you had to be a certain way for the sake of other people?

Dave: That’s a great question and I think it’s nuanced with two things. One is it’s got a historical nuance about what the culture expects from leaders and how it shapes leaders’ behaviours for example. I think also a church culture is a facet of that as well that has to do with what their expectations of leaders are and how you fulfill them. Because you can push some of those boundaries past some ways but you also have to live inside some of those kind of constraints. And I would say now, that typically leaders within church groups have a freedom to express vulnerability and development in being in process with a greater degree of freedom than they could have even 30 years ago. I think there’s been a movement in that. Both in doing that well and in doing that poorly. I think we still need leaders in whom we have confidence and trust and that’s built on integrity, that’s built on maturity, that’s built on a few things that shouldn’t be sacrificed, in my opinion, for that sake of connecting in a place where we’re all vulnerable. So answering your question directly is, yes, I think there were times but that’s also personality, how it affects you, how comfortable I am with things. So I do think at times I said to myself with a degree of calculation, I don’t want the church to have to go through my grief because I’m grieving. I don’t want them to ignore my grief and I don’t want to hide it completely. So for example I might be leading and there might be a song and I’m just blubbering like a baby. At that point, I used to sit in front of the congregation, up on the dias .That was part of the tradition of that church, it’s since changed, but that was part of it. Well, suddenly here I am, every eye is on me, they’re all going, “Oh is cracking up?” You know, that’s how I’m perceiving it. So not only is there that I’m leading the congregation, but it’s how they’re perceiving me and how I’m perceiving them. And I wouldn’t necessarily have a little check in talk about that it’s just perception. So, yeah, I would say I’m sure if you were to interview people who watched and observed or journeyed with me in that process they might have some very interesting answers about that. But they would probably have some interesting answers about other aspects of my leadership too. It’s all sort of bound up together.

Eric: Yeah, one of the reasons I was really excited about this episode in particular is I think there is a culture, especially in North America, I’ll speak for Canada, of the Canadian church that there’s an expectation that Christians have it all together. That there’s this myth, well I call it a myth, that there’s nothing hard that we experience because, you know, we’re living the joyous, victorious Christian life, and there is a joy and a victory that comes with following Christ but Jesus also promises that we will have trouble and so I wonder if you can comment. ‘Cause you’ve seen the church, the Christian culture over a longer period than me. I hate to out you, but you did call yourself a Grandparent. How would you describe how that, I’ll even say it this way – that insidious myth – that there’s nothing hard has been in the church.

Dave: Yeah that’s a great question and it’s perceptive. You guys are doing a great job at interviewing me in this context. I’d say to you that I think we’re guilty of reductionism. To make things easier to understand, we sometimes make them simplistic. And as result of that, we create platitudes or paradigms of understanding. If this, then that. And life isn’t a formula. It’s not about a formula and I agree with you that I think one of the things that’s often missing from a rigorous theology in the evangelical movement is a doctrine of suffering. We sometimes thing naively that if I love God and I do all the things that I’m supposed to do, then A + B = C. And I’ll feel comfortable. Because the highest value is of Canadian culture is comfort. And if we’re not comfortable, then somebody’s failed. And we look for how to root it out, and define it, and exclude it. And, I just know that life isn’t neat like that and so do you and I think a rigorous teaching, a more mature theology, that we would develop of life is going to have to include suffering and loss. And I think if I quote, you know one of the contributors to the whole evangelical ethos and theology, Tim Keller, he would say, “There is no forgiveness without suffering.” And that’s on a very personal level. Now death and forgiveness meet in Christ…they didn’t meet in my experience. I’m not suggesting that was part of the paradigm in the loss of Jonathan but I want to say to you for sure that if we don’t have a mature concept of how God works and understand what loss and grief are all about when we experience that it’s shattering.

Eric: Mmmhmm. Now, we do call this show Undiscussed and so I’m wondering if we can, you, shift to the conversation around grief. You can speak to your experience as a leader, you can speak to your experience. What do you think are the unhelpful notions or ways that people talk about grief and suffering and loss and either in the silence or in just accomplishing it poorly.

Dave: Wow, that’s a great question to. I think it goes back to what I previously said that we victimize ourselves by not having a robust view of who God is and how the gospel works. And we fail to understand that we’re going to experience what Jesus did. We somehow get to the triumphal part, the resurrection but we forget how he was treated and viewed within life and misunderstood. So if I come back to that whole process and what was less helpful for me in grief is the well meaning platitudes and the quotes of scripture that were intended to comfort me but often had the opposite effect because I felt I needed to defend my experience when it didn’t match what someone else was trying to help me with. For example, people would say, “Oh, Jonathan’s in heaven now.” It’s true. I believe that. But I want you to understand that heaven for me, as real as it was, was still a separation from Jonathan & I. And knowing where he was, didn’t deal with my loss of where I was. This was really hard. And I’m not given to dreams and visions and those kinds of out of the body experiences but I remember a particularly low moment when I was sitting on the steps of my house inside the home. And I was just weeping before God and I cried out in my anguish and I said, “I hope you have a plan for this because it’s killing me. “ And suddenly at the moment, in answer to that cry, I had a sense of – I didn’t see him, I’m not saying there was a form, but I had a sense that someone was standing right behind me. Tall and strong and vigorous and incredibly happy and content. And in my head I said to myself, “Oh, that’s Jonathan”. And then I said to the Lord, “I get it.” I am missing him but he is not missing me. In the presence is the fullness of joy, at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. If that is true, then Jonathan’s loss of his family and earth is eclipsed by the joyous satisfaction of being absent from the body and being present with the Lord. And that actually put boundaries on my grief. And I began to see it and own it for myself and not put it on anybody else. Certainly not on Jonathan. And that was a way forward. If I come back to what other people did, there was those platitudes…there was those, you know, weeping endures for the night but joy comes in the morning. I think are you kidding me? You know, what am I supposed to do with that? Or other people would come along and we found ourselves as leaders within a church that we actually had to take the weight of coaching other people how to help us. And I know that’s not unique to a leader, other people have said this same thing. One of the paralyzing parts of grief is people don’t know what to say, so you have to coach them… how to help them be your friend in loss. So we would say to people, “If you’re comfortable, I’d like to talk to you about Jonathan. Because one of the fears are we were forgetting him. One of the permissions we needed was to talk about him and not have people be afraid we would cry or that we would grieve openly with them or that they were somehow contributing to our pain when actually they were allowing us to express our pain and allow it to come out. So we would do that and we established as a family, I don’t know if you like to call it a ritual…I suppose when you do things over and over again, you ritualize them. And for us, one of the things that Donna and I have maintained as a family is on Jonathan’s birthday, we eat one of the things he really enjoyed that we would cook for him. And we tell Jonathan stories between us. We might even get out an album, a picture book, that we have and we’ll talk about Jonathan stories because as a 9 year old, there were hilarious things that he did and there were stupid things that he did and we will recount those things. Not in any way to harm his memory, but to keep his memory robust and to say he was a real person and he was nine. And he was perfect for nine, but he was nine and so here are some of the Jonathan stories that we’ll tell. And those things for us are wonderful. Like, we find that and if we cry over those things, that’s fine. That’s also a recognition of what we’ve gone through but it’s also very much part of the celebration. And we do it on his birthday with intent because we want to celebrate his name. His name means gift of God and we want to celebrate that Jonathan was and remains a gift to us even though he was only with us for nine years. So I want to say that people did wonderful things for us because, you know, one of my good friends, came to me at that point and he said, “You, know I have a son.” And I said, “Yeah”. And the upshot of the conversation was if you ever want to borrow him for an afternoon, if you just want to hang out with a kid, you can come and do that anytime. Now that was a huge gift that he was simply saying if you’re missing just hanging out with a kid, I can make that happen for you and I will share my family with you. I mean I feel quite emotional even describing that to you because I realize that was an incredible gift. He wasn’t giving his boy away, don’t get me wrong. He may have well chosen, knowing who he is, to engage with me and his son and we did those kinds of things together. But that was a really positive thing that someone did for me…Is they recognized where my pain was. And figured out a way of entering into it with me in a way that was really caring.

Patrick: This is just illuminating how out of touch I am. Like I am so…I feel like my natural inclination is to do the exact opposite of everything that was unhelpful and helpful in those examples. I somehow believe in my head that if I bring up someone who’s passed away, oh no I’m reminding the person of them and that they’re gone. And my inclination is to distract people from pain and suffering and try and make them forget. And it’s making me realize that’s probably just not helpful to ignore the fact that somebody has passed away and even the example…I would have never thought to let someone borrow my kid or just hang out with my kid ‘cause I would fear that that would come across wrong but it hit such a good nerve with you and touched you so deeply.

Eric: Based on what you were saying earlier, Dave, I’m now curious about Pat’s family of origin and their grief stories.

Pat: Yeah.

Dave: Sure, it’s a really helpful thing to examine that and to say how do I process this? If I could add one other thing, it’s that we learn from the experience of loss that it’s always right to go to someone who is in grief even if they can’t receive you. For them to invite you into their grief is paralyzing. How do they begin to let you in? They don’t know the tools or the process. So when Jonathan was still in the children’s hospital and we had flown over there, there had been a network of phone calls, as you can imagine, people caring about us, calling their friends, calling their family…and we had a number of people who came to the hospital immediately just interrupted their lives and arrived. I’ll never forget that. We couldn’t always spend time with them because we didn’t want to tear ourselves away from Jonathan’s bedside. The conclusion of his life at that point hadn’t been pronounced by the physicians and we needed to be with him. And so I’m saying to you that when you go, if someone can’t receive you, it doesn’t mean it was wrong and you did a bad thing. It just means it wasn’t the right time. And they might not be able to express that to you at the time. So that’s why other people like myself who have gone through it can help interpret that for a few others. I’d also say that one of the very helpful things that people did was they asked permission. They would say, “Could I do this?”. “Would this be helpful?” or to ask a question… “What can I do for you to support you?” “What would you value me doing?” And we had people who showed up and brought meals, which of course is a Canadian thing to do. They cleaned our house, they washed our car, they went for walks with us, they invited us out. And we would say, oh that’s a great idea, and we would come and then we would phone and say, “We just can’t”. But, you know, please can you accept that we would love to come but right now our experience is that if we go we’re just gonna be wasted to ourselves and to you so we’re just going to cocoon.

Eric: Something that a friend from church in my life has shared with me is that there’s a difference between stated support and felt support. So…

Dave: Good line.

Eric: Yeah, and it stuck with me cause he, I’m gonna quote him poorly so I’ll just paraphrase, he would say that saying I love you or saying I’m here for you or maybe what the person feels, they receive it that way. But if they don’t receive it that way, then it’s as though it didn’t happen. And so he has encouraged me in those situations to look for the ways that the people feel supported. And so it sounds like you had a community of people that was engaging in both saying, stating support, but also expressing it in a way that you were able to receive it.

Dave: That’s so true, you know, for example, one of the wise, elderly women in the church we were leading at the time of Jonathan’s death…and we had people from our former church that we had 6 months ago left, they came in significant numbers to the funeral and sat with us. And one of them, the two ladies were talking, one of them said to the other, oh I’m sorry we’re not giving you a chance to have contact with Dave & Donna. And she looked at them and said, “We’ve got them after you leave.” And just gave them permission to soak up that time with us and to invest in us which was wonderful. And I would say to you that I’m rephrasing what I think what your friend said to you wisely was, language of love is important to pay attention to. Is it acts of service? Is it presents or gifts? Is it just time? What are those things that have been articulated? Because they impact grief and how people are dealing with it too. So, now what you’re saying to me is processing grief and assisting people in grief means different things to different people because we have those experiences, personalities, and you’re right, it’s all…it all needs to be factored it.

Pat: Yes, almost impossible to find a formula to do it the right way and we’re obsessed with that. The more we talk about these things, the more I realize that our culture is just, what’s the right way to do it? How do we check all the boxes and how do we do things properly? And it’s just that, I don’t know, trial and error seems to be a decent way to do it.

Dave: You know, Pat, that’s true particularly if you ask permission. And I would say that pretty much every other discipline, if I want to use that term, has an outcome they want to get to which is, if I want to use the term in grief, is caring for the person who’s grieving and that’s really where I think we’re landing right now. But if you look at the delivery of that service like a physician, he knows he wants your health, but currently it’s not the physician telling you what to do, it’s entering into a consultative process and say here are some options, “What do you think would work for you and how might we get to a better condition of health with you?” If you go to the counsellor, it’s the same, a counsellor isn’t going to say, “I know how to make you better.” The counsellor will say, “Well, let’s talk about this because, talk is one of the processes that we’re going to… I’m gonna give you some homework and gonna do some other things, but right now let’s talk about what you want, expectations.” So, I would say grief is a similar process.

Eric: Ah, one of the things we like to do on the show is to give our guests the last word on the subject and I mean, I’ve liked everyone one of our guests, but I’ve especially (I say this every time but) especially enjoyed our conversation with you and I know you’re so humble you want want to take my compliment but you are a very wise person and I have very enjoyed all of the interactions I had from you and so I’m… I could sit and listen to you for another couple hours but maybe, could you give us your last word on the topic of grief and suffering and those sorts of things…and you know you can take a minute to collect your thoughts or…

Dave: What leaps to my mind and something that we haven’t talked about are what are the good things that God brings to those who suffer or go through grief like this and I want to end on that note if I might. Because there were a couple of things that God brought into sharp focus…again that were gifts that people gave me…One person came to me and gave me Isaiah 45:3 which is really a prophecy to a man who didn’t know to his own satisfaction God was about Cyrus and the prophet said to Cyrus, “I will give you the treasures of darkness.” And it’s a puzzling context or it’s a puzzling phrase. What the person intended for me to receive and what I took from it was that God is leading you in the dark in this experience. He’s taking me into a dark place and he is going to give you satisfaction and he will meet you in that place, he won’t leave you there but he will enrich your life through the experience in ways he couldn’t any other way. Trust God in the dark. And it’s repeated in Isaiah 50 where the prophet is saying to the individual who is in the dark, “Do not light for yourself a torch but wait for me.” And then he actually has a strong word condemnation of judgment to the person who fashions his own light, to make his own way. And he says this is what you’ll receive from me…”You’ll lie down in torment”. And he’s really saying that you need to go through these experiences with me and if you trust me and learn to trust me even though you’re terrified of me, even though you’re confused by my action, if you trust me I’m going to give you what you cannot gain any other way. And I’m here to tell you God did that. That’s our involvement in missions, how God has enriched our lives. Now one other story as I conclude and I know this is going on longer than the last word but… since you’ve given me the mic I’m gonna take it…And it is where grief shows up in your feature and you might have to battle some of the pieces that come out of it. So, I moved to Guelph four years ago, that’s where we’re currently living in Ontario, and I remember saying to my wife, “You know what, I kind of think I’m holding my heart against God right now.” She looked puzzled and she said, “You’ve gotta kinda say more, what do you mean?”. And I said, “Well God didn’t ask my permission when I was plunged into grief with Jonathan’s death and you know what, I think I’m guarding my heart, trying to prepare myself that if God does something else that’s unsettling, I’m ready for it. And I don’t want to live like that.” And you’ve got to know my wife and our humour. She stood up and she came over and she slapped me. I mean not on the face, and not a wild, but it was unexpected. I said, “Don, what was that for?” And she said, “All this time, I thought I was the wretch that was dealing with these things and I told you this stuff and now I find out…” And I said, “Donna, I’m confessing this. You know, get this right because I want to get this better.” So what am I saying to this? Is that our experience has ways of showing up in our life with repetition. And if we can fall prey to the weakness of our flesh or the enemy that we have in the world, he will conspire against us. So, we do have to very determinedly, I’m going to say, trust God in the dark places and anticipate in ways that we can’t really know what that’s going to look like. That he’s going to lead us into a green pasture. With still waters and he will restore our soul. And so I’m telling you on the outside of recovery, that God has done a work of restoration in my life. And I can talk about grief this way with you and what’s undiscussed because I really do believe he is the answer and he will journey with us in the experience, even if we feel…”You know hear my cry, O Lord, attend unto my prayer. From the ends of the earth will I cry unto thee. When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” That’s Psalm 61:1-2. And when you feel that, there’s nothing under your feet. Your bobbing like a little piece of wood in a wild ocean and you do not know where stability will come from. That was my grief experience but I can tell you I feel rock under my feet. And I do know who has supported and led me and I think that’s my final word as we just sort of bring it together but that’s a long process. And I do hope that what will come out of this is that more people will talk about grief and will talk with others and will engage them with permission in their grief experience.

Pat: Yeah, that’s our hope too and I think this has been insightful for me and ended on a hopeful note too. So I’m really thankful for the time you gave us and just the vulnerability with which you shared your experience.

Eric: Yeah, thanks so much Dave.

–Outro–

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