That Letter to My Grieving Self

My wife’s dad died on Saturday. 

She told me it was okay to share, and I probably wouldn’t have asked if not for the paragraph I found Sunday night, at home, while setting up her old iMac for the kids’ online schooling to begin this week. And setting it up on Sunday night, at home, because we weren’t on a plane to North Carolina for the funeral, because, of course, all this is happening in the midst of a global pandemic. And also because, regardless of the pandemic, Melissa is 37-weeks pregnant and advised not to travel 1,237 miles.

I got Melissa a MacBook for Christmas around six years ago, which was the time we decided to put the old iMac away, securely stored in a closet and awaiting its repurpose as the main feature of a computer lab we were going to build later, when the kids got older and needed computers and all. But by the time I rebooted the machine on Sunday, it occurred to me that I was staring into an accidental time capsule, a digital record of our lives from 2010–2014, full of the things that never made it on Facebook and the like. And among these forgotten files of pictures and half-written blog posts, there was a doc titled “Letters to My Grieving Self,” written not by me, but by Melissa, from way back when she had the time to write things.

As it turned out, everybody was in bed Sunday night when Melissa and I ran across the doc. “What is this?”, I voiced half-heartedly, assuming she wouldn’t remember. Except that she did. 

It was an idea from those iMac days, when we were twentysomethings and I must have been in seminary. On one hand, that wasn’t that long ago, not compared to a hoard of silver coins archaeologists recently discovered in southwest England; but on the other hand, those iMac days feel like ages ago because life looked so different for us back then. How much time does it take for big things to happen that you didn’t expect? A moment, of course. Just a moment. And the least expected it was before the moment, the more distant all previous times before the moment will seem.

And that was many moments ago, that idea to write notes to her future self about grief she had been wise enough to anticipate. 

And so there we were on Sunday night, alone in our living room, in the wake of her father’s death, looking at that old idea which had become this note right in front of us. 

Letters to My Grieving Self — you mean like, for now? Are you serious? You wrote this thing years ago and forgot all about it, and now, in this moment, in this moment of all moments, we have just stumbled across it. Here, you wrote this for you. For now.

I tried to grab a handle on the preciousness of that scene much like a kid might hold his first fish, excited and proud, but also trepidatious. I opened the doc right away, planning to read it slowly, but it was so incomplete Melissa laughed out loud. It was hardly a paragraph, interrupted by who knows what, and never revisited for probably the same reason. But I still read what was there. 

I’ve copied and pasted it below, just as we found it:

Letters to My Grieving Self

Melissa, 

You knew this day would come. You knew it was never a matter of if youʼd grieve, but when. And in the days before grief was all-consuming, here is what was at the core of your fear for these days. Would he keep you? Vulnerable and exposed.

As I read the paragraph softly, my first thought was that it needed a colon in the third sentence, after “these days.” But my second thought, and the more important one, was that she has asked the perfect question. God knows the letter could have been relevant in times before this, and it may be more relevant at some time ahead, by which I mean the loss of her father isn’t her introduction to grief, and the harshest grief could be yet to come. But her question still is the question. Isn’t that what we all really want to know?

Will he keep me?

Whatever comes, however dark, will he really never let me go? 

Which is another way to ask: How much does God love me?

How about more than tribulation is a trial or distress is stressful. More than famine and persecution are painful. More than danger and sword impose their threats. More than anything death or life can bring. More than any power from today or tomorrow. More than any dimension of creation, the seen and unseen universes we don’t even know, much less can explore. He loves us more than anything that cannot separate from his love, which is everything outside himself (see Romans 8:31–39).

Would he keep you?

He is.