Death Belongs To Us All

A year or so ago, Matthew Warren the son of Rick and Kay Warren died. Last week Kay Warren put up a post on Facebook in which she wrote about how well-meaning but seemingly insensitive people expected her to let go of her grief at the loss of her son and move on with her life (You can see the post here http://t.co/yqlYGC7nRY). According to her, people felt she should stop mourning and get back to doing what she used to do before the tragedy happened. They believe she is taking too long to recover from the loss.

Last week Sunday, someone I knew died. (Is that knew or know?). He was coming back from his mother-in-law’s burial when the tire of the vehicle he was in burst and the driver pressed the brake in a reflex action, trying to stop the car. The car somersaulted, my friend, his wife, their baby and the driver all died. Only one of his two children survived. In a moment, in an instant, she has been left all alone in the world, an orphan.

When I heard about my friend’s death on Monday, I was extremely disturbed. I was disturbed and saddened for the whole week. It wasn’t the first time that someone I knew has died but like all the other times it left me disturbed at the coldness of the world. Like always, the world did not stop at their death, it didn’t even slow down. The world went on. Even when I lost a nephew, after all the grieving, we all went on with our lives. For those not affected by the grief, there was even no mourning to slow them down. There is no acknowledgment from the world that someone of importance has left the earth. In the same way people are dying in war zones like Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Venezuela, Nigeria and other parts of the world daily and the world has not stopped to consider. As I write, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is still missing. While the world wonders what could have happened, it is the families and friends that are in mourning, whose lives have stopped. It is their lives that will never be the same again.

Grief at the loss of a lost one is person to each of us and that grief is expressed in a different way by different people depending on how close they were to that person. I still can’t believe my friend is gone. We were in the same department in church and we used to meet regularly during meetings. Yet my grief and sense of loss cannot compare to that felt by his family, especially his parents. There are very few things that can compare with a parent losing a child. The normal order of things tells us that parents are supposed to die before their children. It’s a terrible aberration for a parent to bury their child.

Every person will deal with grief in their own way and I believe they should be allowed to deal with it the way they deem fit unless it is affecting their health, physical, emotional or psychological. A parent can never forget a child and the loss of a child is always hard. The loss is especially hard when the child has grown to their teens and their whole life is before them or just beginning. Until we have experienced it, it is not something we should make light of. It is also something we should pray not to experience. We might not be able to understand it but we should let those experiencing grief get on and deal with it in their own way. We should not think less of them or grow impatient with them but encourage them to deal with it hoping they will receive comfort.

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers, http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.