Ryan, Grief, & Love Batting Last

There is something about the capacity to love 
that is as connected to sorrow as it is to joy. 

Jane Herring

On Saturday, in the middle of her grief and mine, a friend and I talked about the strangeness of grief, and how gifts and losses live co-mingled in it. It is hard to wrap your heart around this when you are in it. She spoke of the strange, beautiful, comfort in a funeral where steel drums and weeping shared the space. It struck me that it was the perfect way of expressing the juxtaposition of grief and hope that somehow wrap around one another in mourning. The sounds of sorrow and hope, the weeping and the drumming, were more than enough to hold space for both the enormous heartache of the mourners as well as their seeds of hope. 

Time passed after his death. Her heart had softened, and she has grown strong. She will always be lonely here without him, but she loves her life again. That’s proof enough for me that love is sovereign, that most of the time, love bats last. And this is what we have to offer from our grief: a promise that we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.  

Taken from Stitches by Anne Lamott

My brother died 12 years ago today. I miss him. Always. I miss his space in our world.
But I have also grown strong and gentle at the same time because of it. I have no doubt now that Love always bats last.

Over the past couple of years, as this disease has slowly stripped me of many things I thought I needed or I thought defined me, there has been a lot of grieving. Yet, alongside my losses are so many gifts. Gifts I would not have sought out but bring much beauty and depth to life.

My deterioration has been like going down a staircase. Often it has been slow, one stair at a time with a pause on each step. But a few times I have tumbled down several. In the slow steps or the tumbles, I have never been able to physically get back to where I started. If I fell four steps, I might be able to climb back up two but I never returned to where I was before.  So I have certainly had to consider where the staircase might lead me. During the hardest parts, I had to consider if this was a journey without recovery; that I would never recover and eventually, but way too soon, I would die.

And though I cannot begin to articulate the excruciating pain as a mother holding that possibility, there began a growing comfort in my deepest heart knowing that my own grief journey has been healing - full of sorrow, anger, questions and heartache but co-mingled with love and hope and steel drums. I know that Love bats last. I don’t believe that love bats last only in this life. Sometimes the end of a life looks like a strike out. But Love is on deck. My belief in the redemptive work of God does not diminish it to time and space, right here and right now with only what I can see and know. That’s not faith. My faith has widened to realize that Love will always bat last. It did for Ryan, it will for you and it will for me. If something were to happen to me,* I know Love would bat last for my kids too. I know that something surprising and beautiful - even if a little misshapen - grows out of sorrow being redeemed in the Light of Love.

Last night, as I tucked Evan into bed, I told him that today might be a hard day for me because it’s the day my brother died; I said I would think about Ryan a lot, watch his memorial video, cry or be grumpy but that we could also listen to rap music (gasp!) and make and eat chocolate chip cookies because my brother loved rap and cookies. I said maybe we would practice our dribbling because Uncle Ryan would love that too. I want to teach him already that loss holds both deep sadness and beauty and hope; drums and weeping. Evan held my hands and said, “If you ever die, I would want to die too.” My heart stopped for a minute but I smiled at him, pushed his wild hair back from his innocent face and said that if I died I would not want him to die. I told him of my dreams that his life will be beautiful and full of compassion and love and fun and lots of hunting. He really liked the hunting part.

The future is never certain or controllable. But if I have learned anything from grieving Ryan, it is that the future is always full of hope even when we can’t see it and that it is sometimes our deepest sorrows which make Hope shine truer.

Their lives had come apart into pieces in a way they’d never agreed to. But out of the pieces, we sew something together. 

Anne Lamott (Stitches)

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**To be clear, the prognosis for Lyme though complicated does not appear to be life-threatening. By all accounts, if the treatments are not successful, it will be a chronic illness that we continue adjusting to. I am more referring to the unknowns and the questions I had to consider in the past couple of years as I continued to deteriorate and wonder where it was leading.