The deepest wounds may be the least visible, so offer mercy to everyone
As the late John Prine sang, “if heartaches were commercials we’d all be on TV.” Prine said nearly everything worth saying first, and what he didn’t say first, he said best.
I’ve been thinking lately about heartaches.
A beloved member of my congregation died a few days ago at 57, of cancer. I’m watching her husband, probably still in shock, reel under the wrenching grief that only those of us who’ve experienced that variety of loss can comprehend. And for him, I know, this is just the beginning, bereavement’s opening salvo of a long siege.
Simultaneously, I’m transcribing my mom’s handwritten memoir, which I wrote a column about a few weeks back. I’ve reached the part where she talks about the loss of my tiny brother, Timothy. He died in childbirth as the result of a botched delivery.
That was in 1960, when I was four. We lived in Berea. I can still can see my dad heaving with sobs. I remember in the funeral home touching the baby’s mysteriously cold cheek.
My mom is writing in the mid-to-late 1990s, but her grief remains visceral. This isn’t an old wound that has scarred over. It’s an open wound that still aches.
“Having babies never came easy for us,” she remembers.
When it was time for Mom to deliver that second child, her young doctor put her in the hospital, intending to induce labor.
“It didn’t work. The day I was to be sent back home to wait, I went to turn over in the bed and my afterbirth came (out) all over everything. Instead of rushing me to surgery and doing a Caesarian section on me, they let me lie there, thinking I would go into hard labor. I didn’t do anything.”
By the time her physician finally performed surgery the next day, Timothy had died. He was an otherwise healthy, perfectly formed infant. And after the operation, my mom was left unable to have more children.
“I could have died—at least for a while,” she says, “but my 4 ½ yr. little boy needed me and missed me and that gave me the strength to keep on going.”
Still, she struggled. Struggled mightily.
“I sewed for people, did alterations, made doll clothes, mainly in an attempt to keep myself busy, busy, busy,” she says. “I would pray a lot after I went to bed at night. I would beg God to ‘take care’ of our baby boy, as though He wouldn’t if I didn’t beg Him.”
By 1962, my parents adopted my sister, Cathi. That helped, but it didn’t end Mom’s heartaches:
“One day I was going somewhere and I got (Cathi) dressed and wrapped her in her blanket and (picked her up) in my arms, I had little Paul David dressed and I looked around for the third one! I was so shocked and it was at that moment I realized what condition I was in emotionally and I knew I had to get control of myself.”
She surely did get control of herself. I never heard anybody suggest she’d ever lost control to begin with. I never sensed that myself, ever. I always saw her as the stablest, calmest person I knew. She continues:
“Sometime around 1980”—20 years after the baby’s death—“I went to Somerset by myself to spend a few days with mom. I went to the Berea Cemetery and to Timothy’s grave. I sat down on the ground and cleaned the grass away from his tombstone, and cried and talked and talked and cried and said things like, ‘You never got a chance to live, did you Timothy? I believe you would have grown up to be a fine young man like your brother but we never got to see.’ That time served as a catharsis for my mind and emotions after all those years. I believe Timothy is in Heaven and we’ll all get to see him one day.”
She was a master at masking her emotions, I suppose. She always seemed unflappable. But clearly she was grieving Timothy decades after that nightmarish delivery, turning the events over in her mind, trying to make sense of her loss.
Here’s my point. In my observation, nearly everybody you meet, no matter how confident she acts or how handsome he looks or how evolved she appears, is suffering.
As somebody put it, we’re all the walking wounded. And those who haven’t been wounded yet will be before it’s all over. Whether it’s from the death of a loved one, a bitter divorce, a chronic illness, a childhood abandonment, a rape, a bankruptcy, an addiction or kids gone to the dogs—everybody gets crushed.
It’s easy to forget that. Those scowling people careening around you in the grocery store, the hypersensitive manager in your office, even the smiley pilgrims on your church’s worship team, they’re mainly just trying to cope. That’s why it’s a holy act to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This week, perform an act of mercy for the distracted, the cranky, the brittle—even for the apparently serene. The deepest wounds frequently are invisible. That person in front of you may be doing well just to be standing there.
Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.