Joining the Mess
Essays, Featured — By Courtney Albon on August 25, 2010 at 8:00 amAbout six months ago, a little girl died. She was playing in the snow.
I’m a newspaper reporter and my editor told me to ask her parents if they’d like to talk. I didn’t want to interrupt. I didn’t want to invite myself — and all of our readers — into their grief. I wanted to protect them from the voyeurs. I called the funeral home. The director said he’d check with Keith and Lisa. Lisa called and told me to come to the house at 4.
The drifts were so high, I had to park about four blocks from their home. The walk was longer than I expected. I was late and my glasses were foggy and somehow I’d dropped my pen in the snow.
I said hello. They said hi and Lisa asked if I’d like a drink.
“No thank you. But could I borrow a pen?”
I told them I was there to learn about their daughter, Emily; to let people know who she was. I asked them about her favorite foods and colors and her quirks. I asked them to remember.
Emily was an eight-year-old explorer, they told me. She was curious and smart and feisty and a leader among her peers. She played soccer and was a math whiz. Her grandpa was one of her best friends. Through tears, they flipped through stacks of pictures. Emily climbing a rock wall at the county fair. Emily in the treehouse her grandpa built for her. Emily dressed as an old woman for Halloween — silver hair and walker included. Emily wearing her beloved goalie gloves at a game last fall. I cried a little. Lisa kept talking. I stumbled over my questions. She answered openly, through hazy, glazed eyes.
“Love your children while you have them, ’cause you don’t know when you won’t. You just don’t,” Lisa said. “Those of you who have children, just give them a big hug and kiss. Hold them tight.” I thanked them and wished them well.
I expected the messiness to overwhelm them. I expected to be pushed away and so I prepared myself for it. I thought and thought and thought about myself and how I could best tiptoe around their grief. Instead of fencing me out, they asked me to enter in.
I wonder if this tendency to anticipate rejection is actually a way of protecting myself from the messier parts of others’ stories. It’s a lot easier to choose not to engage someone who is in pain. To send a card instead of picking up the phone. To offer a cliche instead of an ear. To stay out of the way. And while it feels like I’m doing all of this out of respect for their experience, it’s likely that all they want is for me to join them.
I saw Keith and Lisa a few months after Emily’s death. Emily’s classmates were planting a tree in front of their school in her memory. As I watched Lisa cry and Emily’s friends turn the soil, I remember thinking how brave she was to attend, knowing she’d fall apart. But I’m not sure it was bravery that pulled her out of bed that day. I think she couldn’t pass on an invitation to remember her daughter with others who missed her, too.
Maybe sympathy is less about simply caring from a distance and more about a willingness to join others in their mess. Maybe their mess is meant to be my mess, too.
8 Comments
Wow! This is so well written and perfectly expressed. I have often wondered how reporters can interview a family that is grieving. And, personally, I have often felt uncomfortable talking with friends or aquaintances when I knew had just lost a loved one. Your story is a great illustration of how to be like Jesus in the midst of grief. He meets us where we are, joins us in the middle of whatever mess- regardless of how messy as soon as we invite Him. And that is exactly what your story proposes we all do, whenever possible. I will be sharing this with some friends! Thanks!
I see this with the cancer patients I work with Kristen, quite a lot; sickness, death, suffering – anomalies, almost a disease in themselves, and people are afraid. Our perfection oriented society avoids these travesties, as if tragedy were in itself a form of contagion.
I fear that contemporary Christian faith has become nothing much more than a twisted form of inoculation against reality – and we are become immunised against the fragility of humanness in ourselves, and worse, in others. We are at risk of losing our empathy and compassion. The Perfect Life is a myth anyway. Everyone is actually walking around with their hearts hanging out.
Great writing Kristen, loved it.
Thanks very much for this. It’s right, and doing exactly what you hope: making me think.
Dear Courtney,
This is very good and made me think about my friend that had a stroke and cannot use her left side so she will never walk again.
I will think alot differently when I talk to her.
Wow, this is definitely very well written. it’s easy to enter those situations almost selfishly hoping to just get through it as soon as possible in order for you to get your “godly deed” out of the way. it’s funny how we think that loving people is really love when it’s forced and only to make ourselves feel better instead of the person whom we’re supposed to be comforting.
Courtney…thanks so much for the post. I work with your dad at LCBC. thanks for the reminder and challenge today to be with people, to enter the mess. in just a few moments i have to make a call to someone who lost a loved one this weekend. i appreciate the reminder. hope you have a good day. thanks for writing!
Hey Courtney~Loved reading your work in a very difficult situation! Good job and thanks to your Dad for sharing it with us. I especially loved your last line, “Maybe their mess is meant to be my mess too!” I think we so often write things off as “what THEY are going through”, when we need to be walking right alongside of them. Thanks for “letting your little light shine” in what your are doing and allowing God to work through you! Love you girl!