What hurts the most

(Readers, I warn you. This post will likely be sad. Read at your own risk. In a place where crying is OK if you are the crying type.)

There are dates that stick with you.

For me, some of the big ones are October 1, 1978, the day I was born. There’s July 29, 1977, the day my parents got married. October 24, 1991, the day my grandpa passed away. October 25, 1941, was the day he married my grandmother. December 18, 1998, the day I was baptized. May 1, 2003, the day I began working in Student Ministry Publishing at LifeWay. May 5, 2003, the day I graduated from Vanderbilt. August 11, 2007 is the day my brother married Amber, followed closely by August 23, 2008, the day Grandma Polly passed away.

As I write this, one of my dearest friends is waiting for the call that her grandfather has passed away. And I sit here understanding what she’s going through, longing to make it easier, yet knowing I can’t take the pain away. And I remember the friend she was to me as I waited for word that fateful weekend, one week after my brother’s wedding, when we knew my grandmother had had the stroke that would take her from us. There was nothing left to do but wait. And wait we did. Me in Nashville, then my parents’ house in Missouri; my parents at my grandmother’s bedside in the hospital at Cape Girardeau; my brother on the farm, working in my dad’s stead.

There’s a memory I have of that weekend before I headed for Missouri against my parents’ wishes: it was Saturday, August 18, and Mindy took me to our favorite 24-hour coffee shop. We sat on the patio, sipping coffee and eating, talking about nothing and sometimes not talking at all. Because she knew what I needed wasn’t advice or platitudes. I just needed support. I just needed a friend.

What I knew then and even more now is that saying good-bye hurts. I wrote this in the days following my grandma’s death, when everything was fresh. I still cry when I read that.

No matter how expected it is or how prepared we think we are, it’s hard to let go of the ones you’ve loved with your whole heart. It doesn’t matter that you know they’re ready for the end, that they long for a place where tears, pain, suffering, and sadness are wiped away by the hands of God Himself. It still hurts. And the pain comes back at the most unexpected moments—when something happens that you just want to tell them, when you find your loved one’s phone number tucked away in your cell phone contact list, when you find a snippet of your loved one’s handwriting.

But this isn’t my time to talk. It’s my time to sit in quiet rooms and simply be there. It’s my time to remind my friend of the words that brought me so much comfort on the hot August Sunday we buried my grandmother: “we do not grieve like the world does, without hope” (1 Thess. 4:13).

I know you know those words well, Mindy. I pray they become real to you. Because they are true—in the moments we believe them and when we don’t, because He is faithful when we are faithless (2 Tim. 2:13).

These days of waiting and the hard days to come will be days that you remember. But they won’t always hurt this badly. As Andrew Peterson once wrote, “the aching may remain, but the breaking will not.”

Above all, know that your little family of friends in Nashville is here for you. And we love you.