My Daughter Died

proverbs of grief

Though I’ve now planned and held a funeral for my daughter, typing the words “my daughter died” as the subject line gives me a felt response in my body. My stomach begins fluttering with a feeling of anxiety, it moves up through my chest, and my hands tingle; my heart races a bit more than before. Death is unnatural.

My beloved daughter of 20 years died by suicide on January 8. I wrote some Words of Remembrance for her service that you can read here.¹ When I press send, Annie will never open this email. I will never feel her against me again. A tragedy.

The loss is devastating, and there are no words to describe it. My brain spends hours upon hours trying to make sense of what has happened, and in some ways, we’ll never be able to. My body holds many words about this loss, and I initially shared some reflections on FB that I may share here sometime.

Time is different now. I worked as a hospital chaplain and bought a smartwatch for the occasion, but some days I now forget to put it on. When I do wear it, it tells me I've gotten about 4 hours of sleep a night since her death. That’s a generous accounting of some nights. Almost a month has passed, and yet, it feels like only yesterday that she died. Some days drag on endlessly. I scroll my phone or read, but even reading is hard. I read pages of material, only to go, what did I read? I flip back and reread the same pages over and over until my mind is truly able to make sense of the story and be present to the words on the page. My thoughts so often slip to her.

Because I was a hospital chaplain in the CPE program, I haven’t gone back to work. CPE is probably one of the hardest things on the planet to do, as you are daily being critiqued by a group of peers and put into impossible situations only found in Level 1 trauma center hospitals, and it’s debatable whether I have the capacity to return. That’s frustrating because I wish I had a regular rhythm - a job or a place to go or something to do that I love doing while I navigate grief. Chaplaincy gave me a way to pastor, and shepherding is something I love to do.²

I’m realizing, as I head into the second month, that soon people will forget about the pain I am carrying. I won’t be active in their minds. I am moved when people tell me how long they plan to pray for me. One person wrote she would pray for at least a year. How much she is teaching me! Having lost a daughter herself, she knows.

I know I won’t carry this alone, but the reality of it is setting in. I say this not at all wanting to minimize the tender care and affection the Lord has shown my family and me through his people. I’ve never experienced such tenderness and kindness as I have with this loss. I know that I am deeply loved. We have people bringing meals until March, and I have friends who plan to sit with me.

People have said I am different, or that I will be different, and I hate that saying. I do not want to wrestle with the loss of myself, too, but the reality is this is already true. People don’t quite know what to say or to do. I don’t talk to my coworkers daily anymore; they were a source of joy.

I could stay in bed all day, but I get up to be with God. He gets me out of bed. I told myself yesterday that, in addition to rising to be with God, I would set the goal of doing one productive thing a day. Yesterday, I managed to do several things and was quite proud. This week, I aim to leave the house a little more than last week, which was barely any. No one should put goals on grief except the griever, and even then, it’s not worth it if it becomes shaming. Grief determines the rhythm of its arrival; I let it do its work in me.

My friends text me as to what I would like to do, and I think I would like to do nothing. I know they’ve been given the task of upholding me during this time, but I've only got today, and tomorrow will come when it comes. Time, remember, is different. Planning to do something is truly weird.

People give me gifts, send flowers and plants, make meals, and send cards. They want to show that they care. I wonder if they want to fill the void. Annie’s things always exploded and took up space in my house, and this has not changed, though one day, it will. For now, there is even more.

It’s so rare for someone to know how to sit with others in pain. That’s what I did as a chaplain. Sometimes I just sat and said nothing. My presence said, “I am here. You are not alone.” My grief is very generous when people don’t know what to do with me. Sometimes, I cover for them. It’s like I know a secret they don’t. I wonder if that’s a type of numbness. I don’t know.

People ask me how I am, and I dissociate. How does one answer? I am here. I am still living and breathing, but sometimes, the pain is suffocating. However, I know what it is to hold joy and sorrow together. I laugh and smile sometimes. I am working to be present, and so usually, I am distracted enough by others’ questions to be dull to the ache for a minute.

Grief has shown me what is important and what is not. If I am lucky, I will live long enough to take the lesson for granted again.³ One of my worst fears became a reality. In my mind, while I know God can, will, and is probably already using this for his glory, that is so far from comforting. It’s disturbing and unfathomable to know that God allows this type of pain, but I cannot deny his presence with me here. I am in a holy place.

People frequently tell me that Annie’s funeral was powerful. I was too numb to experience it quite the same way as everyone else did. Many give me credit for what my pastor said in his message as if his words are mine, from my words of remembrance. But I recognize that people see something powerful in my story.

Last week I zoomed into CPE class, and at the end of the week, I had a one-on-one with my educator. I naturally talked about Annie and where I was with grief that day. (Grief is a minute-to-minute type of thing.) She said that the way I talk about Annie is powerful. I don’t know what she truly meant by it; I never really do when people say that, but she asked me, or said rather, “I don’t know if you were always this way, or if it was something you learned.”

Learned. I learned to love as God loves because of Annie, and I have no idea why I couldn’t have kept learning by suffering while she was here, why healing couldn’t have come in life rather than in death. I’ll never know those things. I don’t understand why Annie suffered so much. But I’ve been invited⁴ to keep learning about the depth of God’s love through the fellowship of suffering with God. The power that is in me is Christ.⁵ Chaplains hold space for all kinds of religious traditions, but what tradition can teach about the joy of suffering? None but Christ.

I am sure that I am different, maybe I will be different. As I wrote in a text to some friends, “I am sure I will change and be different, but the things that God taught me through Annie before she died mean that I have a depth of love, and who I am will be relatively the same. My roots are too deep in God’s love. I can’t say how I will change, but I see it as going deeper into God’s love. I can’t control other ways in which I change, but it’s comforting to know that at least I will keep going deeper in His love in ways I can’t understand, didn’t even know I could.”

I bear the scar of Annie. She’s the only one of my babies born by C-section. In my body, I’ve held hers - knit together in my womb. After she died, I saw that she’d liked an Instagram reel about the poet Andrea Gibson’s death. In it, her wife, Megan Falley, tells Anderson Cooper that Andrea has allegedly died. I’d like to say that Annie has allegedly died. She has died, and it is but a mystery, but in Christ, if I truly believe him, she lives. Her little baby cells, leftover from when she grew in me, actually still live in me here. And maybe here, I can see her still alive in a different way, in me and in the lives she touched. And there, just beyond the veil between this world and God’s heavenly kingdom, though it’s hard to imagine, she lives in Christ. It doesn’t lessen the pain right now, but it gives me hope.

Until then, I’ll keep learning what you are teaching me, my sweet, beloved Annie.

1. Note to my email subscribers: I wasn’t ready to hit send or email this out yet, so my apologies if you are just finding out. Read my words of Remembrance here:

For Those Affected by Suicide

2. Coming out of a Baptist setting, you can take that as full on or as loosely as you like. I mean no harm by it. I only mean that I am a shepherd - it’s a gift God’s always given me, whether I hold a fancy title or not.

3. I’ve lost people and things before.

4. I recognize it doesn’t seem very invitational.

5. There are three posts I’ve written that come to mind:

Jesus Died

Let Nothing Disturb You

Shaped by Motherhood