Tribulation is Treasure
The whole head is sick,
Isaiah 1:5-6, New American Standard Bible
And the whole heart is faint.
From the sole of the foot even to the head
There is nothing sound in it,
Only bruises, welts, and raw wounds,
Not pressed out or bandaged,
Nor softened with oil.
putative summer
Our summer began with tragedy: the death of a my son-in-law’s father. Just a week later, he received an email from his stepmother’s attorney, disputing his rightful claim to half the estate. Although he was his father’s only child and his claim was valid, his stepmother was intent on keeping everything for herself.
Because of that email—and everything else that followed—we began calling it The Putative Summer. School was out, the sun was shining, but we experienced none of the usual joys of the season. Instead, it was a summer of funerals and grief that stirred unsettling questions.
Culturally, there’s a prevailing belief that people absorb their greatest losses, integrate their grief, and then return to life as it was. Those who don’t are said to suffer from unresolved grief, delayed grief, chronic grief, distorted grief, and somatic grief. There’s always a diagnosis for those who grieve improperly.
Even parents mourning the loss of a child are expected to show improvement within a year—and by the end of the second year, to have accepted their loss and become quiet about it. This cultural insistence on tidy, time-limited mourning isolates the bereaved.
Often, parents who lose a child rush to conceive or adopt another, hoping to fill the void. But the weight of a broken heart settles on the next child—a burden too heavy for anyone to carry. Other parents create shrines to the dead, preserving rooms and belongings as if time itself had stopped. I knew a couple who hadn’t changed a thing in their daughter’s bedroom, even after 22 years.
Some of the bereaved become bitter and angry. Marriages end. For certain losses, there is no healing—no return, and no clear path forward to and place untouched by that terrible loss.
putative friends
People often ask how I healed after the death of my 12-year-old daughter, Olivia. But I don’t think in terms of healing—I think about how I changed.
What preoccupies me isn’t recovery, but transformation. The loss altered me so profoundly that I left behind parts of my former life, including certain relationships. Many who grieve come to wonder why we ever tolerated fair-weather friends at all.
One of my closest friends hurt me deeply while Olivia was dying. Her words and absence felt like betrayal. Though we eventually made peace, I eventually chose to let the friendship go. Earlier in life, I might have clung to it, excusing the relationship’s imbalance or my friend’s lack of reciprocity. But grief clarifies.
Later, when a family member embraced this former friend as her mentor, I wished them well—but I knew I could not trust either of them again. Grief made me certain. The ache of my loss, ever-present, reshaped not just how I lived, but who I could walk with.
Author Stephanie Ericsson observes that the dark-hearted reveal themselves when the bereaved are at their most vulnerable:
They emerge at fortuitous times, usually when we are at our weakest, because evil will never seek an equal opponent. It is the hyena who waits until the prey falters before it moves in for the kill. [. . .]
Stephanie Ericsson, A Companion Through the Darkness
It is inevitable that evil will rear its head when death visits. In-laws never speak to us again after the funeral. No explanation. No reason. Just silent blame and cruel desertion. [. . .] Many of us who expected our families and friends to stand by us at our darkest hour found ourselves attacked instead. [. . .]
I found that everything I thought I could count on, I couldn’t. People I thought cared for me, I discovered hated me. People I never knew cared for me came through as beacons of light.
The most grievous losses have a way of separating silver from dross, often through betrayal. I resolved to clear away the dross, and gather only what is rare, enduring, and true.
putative values
Like many who have lost a child, I changed most in my understanding of what matters. In her book about healing after child loss, Barbara Rosof notes that most bereaved parents report a dramatic shift in their values:
“The conventional markers of success—promotions, a nicer house, more money and things—all mattered much less to them after their child died. Their commitments changed as well.” 1
Before Olivia died, I was more devoted to nurturing others than to cultivating myself. I had even built a career around it. But after her death, I grew more fully into my true self.
During that time, I had also somehow managed to hold onto my faith and hope, even in the face of the brutality and meaninglessness of Olivia’s illness, suffering, and death. In that besieged city of sorrow, I still found great lovingkindness. 2
But I also became sick to death of hypocritical Christians. I stopped going to church for a year, choosing instead to worship God alone. Some Sundays, while my husband took our children to church, I remained at home—face down on the bedroom floor for an hour and a half, my heart torn in two.
After Olivia died, my true self sprang forth like Athena from the head of the woman I had been. Even in death, my daughter was my teacher. It has taken me eight full years to begin to make sense of what happened. Some place in me that had never been hard before became solid and immovable—shaped by deep sorrow and the demands ofmidlife.
I no longer have time for foolishness.
I hear the clock ticking.
tribulation is treasure
. . . any man’s death diminishes me,
John Donne, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions 3
because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery,
or a borrowing of misery,
as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves,
but must fetch in more from the next house,
in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did,
for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it,
and made fit for God by that affliction.
If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold,
and have none coined into current money,
his treasure will not defray him as he travels.
Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it,
but it is not current money in the use of it,
except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.
endnotes
- Rosof, Barbara D. The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child. Holt Paperbacks, 1995, p. 258. ↩︎
- Psalm 31:21, New American Standard Bible. “Blessed be the LORD, for he has shown his marvelous faithfulness to me in a besieged city.” ↩︎
- Donne, John, 1572-1631. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Cambridge [Eng.]: The University Press, 1923, xvii. ↩︎
reflections on losing my child
- Part 1: Of Love and Terror
- Part 2: Trauma
- Part 3: Waiting in Fear
- Part 4: Night Song
- Part 5: Walking Her Home
- Part 6: The First Year
- Part 7: Resolved to Heal
- Part 8: Tribulation is Treasure
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