“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.”
Outside its storming. The trees are unsettled by the wind, the lake is shifting, the sky is groaning and rolling. And there is a change in the light; the colors seem washed out somehow, like the rain has actually caused the vibrancy to seep into the soil below.
Inside its storming. My mother-in-law is bedridden. She is unsettled, constantly shifting in the twisted up sheets, she groans as she tries to roll over. There is a noticeable change in her inner light, like someone has stepped inside and dimmed her. Her vibrancy has slipped away a little bit each day.
And as I read out loud to her in the middle of a storm grey room, that quote from Lewis kept rattling around in my head: grief like fear.
I am no stranger to grief but each time he visits he's different. In the past he has come to the door of my heart quite suddenly, quite traumatically. In these visits I have felt the fear that inevitably accompanies shock. The fear that comes with losing something in a terrible instant and knowing that you could lose everything else you hold dear just as abruptly.
But this time grief has shown a different face. He crept up to the door, snuck in, and then he began to settle down for a lengthy initial visit. This time, I felt the fear that accompanies waiting for the inevitable. The fear that comes with knowing someone you love is slipping away and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
And in that most detestable, inevitable waiting that accompanies a terminal cancer diagnosis is the restlessness, the open wide yawning of the soul as it prepares for the transition from this world to the next.
The book I was reading out loud was "Heaven: your real home" by Joni Eareckson Tada. Joni compares heaven and earth to a child in the womb. If you were to tell a fetus that just inches away is an enormous world filled with rivers, and oceans, and stars, and the moon, and mountains, a world they were being created for... the fetus would laugh and tell you that the only world is the dark womb they are in.
Friends, we are in the womb. This earth is a just a small dark pocket that is preparing us for somewhere that is so much bigger and better than anything we can possibly imagine. We are being created for the heavens, and the heavens are only inches away. As we pass out of this current world, we are birthed into the spiritual world.
And all the restlessness, the stirring, the groaning and shifting are the beginning of the birth pains.
My mother-in-law is experiencing the contractions of heaven. She is being delivered straight into the arms of Jesus... straight into the world that she has been fashioned for, a world so far beyond our comprehension.
Even though I found myself crying as I held her clutched hand, I choked out these words of truth, these promises of paradise just inches away.
“And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.””