Lessons I've Learned from Grief -- Part One

While I've ranted and raved about my own emotional train wreck in the wake of losing my son, I've learned a lot about not only myself but the people around me. I'm not sure which lessons have been the most unexpected.

I've learned the world is full of more heartache than I ever imagined, and that my particular brand of pain -- the loss of a child to drug addiction -- is far too common.

I've discovered other people can understand my pain in many different ways.

By reaching out, I've met people who have experienced very similar losses to addiction. Included in this group of struggling parents are those who are so close to this pain every day, that they can almost feel it. Like I was for years, they're already grieving the loss of the child they thought they knew while loving the one they have. They're fearing that phone call that will destroy their final hope. Others, like myself, are dealing with that final loss. On either side of goodbye, there is a bond that means we can talk to one another in ways we cannot talk to anyone else. In addition to our pain, we deal with so many questions about how things might have been different. We deal with people judging us for not doing enough or maybe too much. We deal with our own inaccurate sense of failure in somehow not producing a child who could face the world unaided by the crutch of an addiction.

There are other people whose childloss is different -- different circumstances, different degrees of preparation, small children as well as those who've walked through childhood, even adult children -- who also share my pain. At it's heart the loss of a child and all the potential we saw in that child from birth is the same. We have lost a piece of ourselves and will never feel whole again.

Still others grieve for something else. Any loss is the loss of dreams, whether it is a beloved pet, a job, health, a parent, or a child, pain is pain. There are degrees of hurt and the duration may vary, but virtually everyone knows about loss. Our grief is a shared bond and I've been humbled by the outpouring of love and kindness from friends, virtual strangers, and people I only met because of my loss.

I've discovered that my friends who are blessed to have no real idea at this time in their lives also care. They've sent cards and messages, they've telephoned and showed up on my doorstep. They've been a good reminder that the world isn't completely filled with pain or uncaring strangers either. Even my friends who seem to have disappeared during this time in my life are a reminder that not everyone is strong enough to share this burden for someone else, and I'm working on releasing the nugget of resentment that I sometimes feel at their absence.

Beyond that are the random people who humble me the most. They are the people who I don't really know, and who, as far as I know have no reason to fear or understand my pain, but who still keep reaching out to me with gestures from the heart. They leave me staggered at their love and generosity and realizing even through the tears, that they are showing me God's love in ways I never expected.

While everyone who reaches out is doing their part to help everyone they touch heal and live, those people who don't feel my pain, who didn't even have names before Ethan died, can bring me to unexpected tears. Out of those tears, sometimes, I find an equally unexpected blessing, not only in what they have done, but what it may take me a little while to see.

Although I rant and rave to the heavens about my feelings, about how God was supposed to take care of Ethan and by gosh this wasn't what I meant and I'm so hurt and alone, I'm not forgotten. The cards unexpectedly delivered and the angel that brought me to tears weren't just the thoughtfulness of people who want me to know they care. They were the works of His hands and feet on this earth.

I've Been Broken, Willing or Not

I came to a shocking realization Saturday on my way home from Zumba.

I'm a better person than I would have been if I had not lost my son.

Even writing that and refreshing my realization of that hard truth brings a tear to my eye,

From the first time I heard the song "Keep Making Me" by the Sidewalk Prophets, it sent chills through me. It was not a song -- in fact a prayer -- that I could pray. I shied from it. By the time I really listened to the words I was already as broken as I felt I could be.

Make me broken
So I can be healed
‘Cause I'm so calloused
And now I can't feel
I want to run to You
With heart wide open
Make me broken

Make me empty
So I can be filled
‘Cause I'm still holding
Onto my will
And I'm completed
When You are with me
Make me empty

During Zumba I hugged sweaty women that I previously didn't know, and may still only know as the person who dances in a certain spot each week. If I'm lucky, I know their first names. After class I spent 30 minutes standing in the warm January sun in the parking lot talking to someone I would never have met.

Nowadays I pray for, encourage, and cry over people I've never met, and people I've come to know in the last two months. Sometimes, I've met them face to face and sometimes they are just voices on the telephone and perhaps pictures on Facebook. Some exist for me only on Facebook or Google+. They are people who I know because we share a fear or a pain that often cripples us. It has drawn us together like children together while a storm rages. There is nothing we can do for one another but share our stories, hold one another, and pray that we and, sometimes, those we love, survive.

Before losing Ethan, although I had more empathy for the families struggling with addiction and the young people who had lost their way, I didn't feel this.

I was so damn independent and self-sufficient. I didn't worry about anyone else. Zumba class was just a place where I showed up and burned some calories and left. I didn't really care about the other people there, not in the way I should, because I didn't know them and didn't take time to know them. I didn't need to know them. They didn't need to know me.

I could handle life and whatever it threw at me because I always had -- even Ethan's addiction. Sure, I realized I needed to pray, because that was how I had coped with a lot of things, but I had never been broken. I could still separate myself from the rest of the world because my pain and their's didn't overlap.

Then Dec. 15 came and my world changed.

I was not only broken, I was shattered.

No, I didn't crawl in bed with a bottle of wine, photo albums and Ethan's old sweat shirt (although some days that's still an option), but the tough shell that kept the world out was gone.

When I broke, I did it in the most public way that I knew how. Isolated in my little corner of the world with my little circle of friends, I posted it on Facebook and then, struggling to wrap my head around what had happened, I wrote about it in my seldom read blog. I invited my little world into my pain because I just didn't know how to cope any more.

What I found out was that my little world suddenly expanded and the shell that held me together had also held everyone out. I hadn't just been taking care of myself, I had been making sure I didn't have to take care of anyone else.

My world now is a far different place and not just because Ethan is not in it. I'm a different person. Grief, this particular kind of grief tied to so many things that no one wants to talk about in drug addiction and death of a child, has changed me in ways I would never have expected that go far beyond loss.

Instead of feeling like a diamond, something intact on its own, beautiful and hard, I'm a sponge. I'm soft and open to the world and I soak up the hurt, the hopes, and the worries of so many people who share any part of what I've gone through. I think of them. I wonder about their days. I pray for them. Many of them do the same for me.

I struggle with writing, with saying what needs to be said instead of the right thing. I'm prayerfully trying to understand if this is what God wants me to do and if I'm doing it correctly. I'm stumbling through my days looking for light, waiting for the touch of angel wings or the sense of my son's nearness, looking for understanding not just of what happened, but of life and death and what comes next and why.

I wish there had been an easier way to become this person, this woman who really, genuinely cares and reaches out and who may have something to offer. I wish there had been an easier way to realize down to my bones that this life, as all consuming as it feels, is just a small part of who we are and what we do. I wish there had been an easier way to let God really touch me and know what He needed me to know for the moments in time that it has happened.

But I had to be broken. And I've come to understand that healing doesn't mean going back to what I was before, it means being better. Even if it's only because I take the time to care.

My Faith is Strong, But I'm Struggling With Worship

I realized Sunday, in the midst of what turned out to be one of the best weekends in ages, that one of the hardest places for me to be lately is church.

It's not so much that I'm mad at God, although I am and He's letting me work through that, but that to worship freely I need to let down the barriers that help hold me together the other six days of the week.

Don't get me wrong, I've not dodged church as a result. In fact, my church family -- especially my Sunday school "siblings" and a few close church friends -- have been people I can turn to when I have an earthly need. Although I struggled with going to church that first Sunday afterwards knowing that the sincere hugs and condolences would be hard, I've gone every week.

Sunday school class goes fine. I probably don't share as much of what I'm going through on a day to day basis as I once did -- if anyone is familiar with the pain of loving Ethan, it's them -- but I can still contribute to the lesson. Being with a group that supported me for so long is good, even if we don't talk about it.

It's the worship, the music and song that gets me. Sometimes it's the sermon as well, where I just can't wrap my mind around how all this earthly pain ever stacks up to anything good.

When it comes to the music, it's probably the same root cause that has me switching from listening to KLOVE on my radio in the car, to playing CDs. At first I blamed it on the few commercials (especially those for Teen Challenge, an addiction treatment program that Ethan refused to attend), but I've realized it's because I cannot control what they are playing or even skip a song that strikes too many chords in my heart.

At the same time, I'm finding it easier to deal with in the car because it doesn't matter if I cry as long as I can still see the road. I've come to terms with the lyrics of a lot of songs that cause me pain and reached the point that I can generally sing along even if I simultaneously cry. If I find I cannot handle it, I can push the skip button or stop singing, which allows some of my defenses to come back up.

In fact, the first week that I started getting out, I spent most of my time in the car crying, no matter what my destination. While I was eager to get out, I found those alone times with Christian music, which frankly is all I've listened to in years other than my old stuff, were tough. Even if I had the girls in the back, I would cry between point A and point B, then put myself together enough to go on.

I've found that same problem carries over into the worship part of church service. I'm not sure if that means that playing the music in the car is a worship, which at times it does feel like, or not, but it does leave me struggling to get through the start of our church service Sunday mornings.

I cannot hit the skip button if the song the choir or congregation is singing causes me pain. I cannot change the station. I cannot turn it off.

When the pastor encourages us to celebrate our Lord in our worship, I stand there with my jaw locked trying not to cry, or perhaps losing the battle and just hoping I don't break down completely. Depending on the structure of the service, it may be all I can do to get through to the end having exhausted my emotional reserves early in the process. Although I do listen to the sermon, sometimes the lesson has a hard time taking root.

Because to be quite honest right now, I'm struggling with my relationship with God. It's hard to be close to someone you're angry at and I don't understand why any of this had to happen. Reminding myself that I'm not supposed to and that the world is an evil place where bad things happen only gets me so far.

Through some terrible paradox, while I'm angry at God, I have to depend utterly on my faith in Him to be able to make it on a day to day basis. I have to have faith that there is a reason for pain -- mine and Ethan's and all the other pain that I've become much more intimate with in the last five weeks -- or else I would sink into utter despair.

That this life is just a short part of our existence and the things that happen here are passing is hard to accept when mortality is all I know. Even accepting that, the need for pain and suffering and what impact it can have on our souls still baffles me. The Biblical lessons about how we endure trials here converting to treasures in heaven just don't satisfy my need to understand what's happening now.

I don't think church can help me deal with these things so I guess church may just be tough for a while.

I know these are issues God and I have to work out on our own in long, mostly one-sided conversations with me doing the talking. My answers some in brief flashes of insight, visions that might be dismissed as daydreams, the words of people I don't really know that without this pain I would never have touched, the ability to make someone else feel less alone during the hardest times of our lives.

My answers come in faith and hope in things I have not seen and won't see at church, but that I nonetheless believe in and which keep me going seven days a week.

Walking in The Valley of the Shadow of Death

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalm 23

When I was a preschooler, I learned the 23rd Psalm with my grandfather's encouragement.

I don't know why he picked those verses, but I know as a reward I got to go into the nicest department store in town and pick out a dress. They told me I chose the most expensive one in my size and it still hangs in my closet, waiting to be worn by another generation of little girls.

Whatever his reasons for choosing it, that is certainly the only chapter of the Bible I could quote from memory; some of the few verses I could easily identify.

In the last three weeks, those verses have taken a different memory from what I always assumed they meant. Although they haven't changed in that David spoke of God as the one who protected and cared for him in all situations, my view of one of those situations has changed. In verse 4, I'm not sure if David was writing about his mortality which I had always assumed, or his own journey into grief because, like me, he lost a beloved son. I don't know about the history and how it lines up with his songs, but I know that I now read those verses differently than I did a few weeks ago.

To me, the valley of the shadow of death isn't where I go when I die or when my life is endangered, it's where I've been for weeks now.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

This verse has repeated in my head countless times since the call informing me that Ethan was dead.

My walk has been on a dark path because of the shadow of death. It isn't my death. It isn't sickness and the threat of my own mortality. The shadow of death is grief and it has changed the light through which I view the world. It's a shadow that adds a bittersweet edge to everything I do, a fear that some other next time won't come, that all my tomorrows will feel like today.

And yet, the Psalm reminds me to fear no evil, for God is with me and I will have comfort.

I've never considered myself a "good Christian," for lack of a better way to put it. God is as real to me as the sun that shines on my face on the hottest day of July, but I have lived a far from perfect life even when I knew better. I never thought I was favored by God, even when I managed to come through some of my dumber stunts unscathed. I never felt I had an inside track, because my prayers seemed to fall on unlistening ears as often as anyone else.

But as I've walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I've found out that God really is listening, it has been I who wasn't hearing. Time after time, when I've needed help just to keep going, the phone has rang, a song has played on the radio, or I've seen in my mind the answer to my prayer or felt just how wrong I was to let my feelings of despair consume me. I do not need to be afraid that everything is not under His control or that there won't be something to ease this grief.

I'm certain that skeptics would say I'm delusional and that the God I believe is caring for me doesn't exist or at the very least doesn't care. But coincidence is a term that I don't place a lot of faith in, and my life since losing Ethan has been too full of sudden answers and gifts of understanding. No, not the total understanding of why that I would wish to have, but an understanding that lets me accept the way my life has suddenly changed and keep on living.

I no longer see myself alone in this valley through which so many of us are walking. I see myself with new friends who travel the path of life under the same dark shadow. I see us all reaching out to one another and guided by the shepherding hand of God.

My Non New Year's Resolutions

I didn't plan to make any New Year's resolutions this year, not beyond trying to stay physically and mentally afloat for what I anticipate will be the continuation of the most painful year of my life.

After all, how could I look ahead with any big plans to a year that will be so filled with heart-breaking firsts? Certainly I couldn't think about the items people tend to put on a New Year's resolution list, because most of those things are meaningless to me right now.

Yet, I've found in reading some friends' resolutions, that there are things I expect from the coming year beyond survival. Things that, following God's lead and with His help, I should resolve to do in 2014 and all the years to follow.

1. Exercise my faith and grow my relationship with God.

As hard as it is for me to accept, Ethan's life and death had a purpose that I don't understand. I do not believe that it was coincidence that I had been blogging just long enough to have made it a part of my routine before Ethan's death. Some mornings I do not want to write, but I feel that is part of our purpose and the earthly journey Ethan and I made together. There are a lot of people hurting and if knowing they are not alone brings them the same relief that it does me when someone sends a message back, then I have to keep doing this. Many days it is my faith that God has a plan and this has to have a purpose that keeps me going.

But I don't want anyone to think that just because I seem to work through my emotions in black and white it's easy. It's not. I cry a lot. Sometimes it is just the sadness and sometimes it is anger. Instead of just crying, I have to remind myself to talk to God at these times and ask Him for help and guidance. The answer may be scripture or song or a vision, or it may be the sudden ringing of the telephone when someone has felt that was just the time to call. God answered my prayers and finally gave my little boy peace and healing. It wasn't the way I wanted my prayers answered, but sometimes the answers are unexpected. The answer won't always be so black and white and if I don't take time to listen and wait on God, I may miss the messages and healing He wants me to have.

2. Keep moving and living my life.

It's easy to get stuck in grief. I want to say especially the grief over losing a child, but while it may be more difficult to accept for a parent, there are many kinds of loss that we grieve. Whether it is a pet, a spouse, a parent or a sibling, or even a really close friend, it is easy to allow ourselves to give in to selfish grief. Our lives can become all about our pain and our inability to cope with it. We can shut out the people who still need us, the people who would help us, the people who are grieving with us. We can allow our grief and pain to suck the joy out of our lives and simply stumble through the motions of living. I know there may days when I feel I need to stop and let it consume me for a while, but anyone who God has chose to leave living has a purpose and it is not to sit around and feel sorry for themselves because of someone else's death. Those who are gone are free from pain and suffering and it's our place to live on.

The other side of that coin is to deny our grief. I know there are people who don't allow themselves to grieve because someone has to be the strong one in a family torn apart. Or perhaps grief can be avoided by refusing to accept reality -- especially for people like me who had a sometimes stormy and strained relationship with the one who is gone. While either of these choices may seem outwardly strong and at the very least as far removed from self-pity as possible, they still cut us off from human emotions and a human process that we have to embrace as part of living. They keep us from being emotionally available to loved ones grieving with us and they stop us from helping one another by learning to grieve and live on together.

For me living my life means picking up the threads of old routines that were dropped three weeks ago. It means digging out my knitting needles and starting a new project, stepping on the scale again, going back to my exercise classes, taking the girls back to Awana and gymnastics, planning activities for the future. Some of these things aren't as important as they were, and some have taken on new meaning, but they're all steps in moving forward and living again.

3. Help others.

This used to be simple, like stuffing a few dollars in the Salvation Army kettle, taking groceries to the food pantry in town, or helping to stuff food boxes for the holidays. It's not simple for me any more.

I feel there are too many people grieving the little losses of addiction or the earthly loss of a child and that too often we all feel alone. I promise to be honest and keep reaching out, even when it hurts. I want to help build a network of support where we can bear one another's burdens, love one another, encourage one another to feel not only the pain but the joy of living, and count on God for the final answers and help we need to get through the hard times.

4. Make good memories.

There have been times when I've thought that I wouldn't mind dying, but I want to live long enough to be a memory for my granddaughters. As they say, dying is easy, living is hard.

But the kind of memories I leave, the kind of memories I make every day are important. Although it's tough some days, I want to go to bed each night without a regret in the way I've lived the day God gave me, in the way I've treated the people close to me, or in the way I've reached out to make sure that family and friends who I don't see every day know what they mean to me.

---

So there it is, a simple list. It doesn't involve numbers on a scale or in a bank account; it doesn't involve kicking a bad habit or taking up a good one; it doesn't involve getting organized or a better job, or many of the things we typically put on our list of resolutions.

Even more importantly, it's not a list that will ever be checked off as accomplished. These are resolutions not just for 2014, but for the rest of the life God has given me live. It's not the life I expected or wanted a few short weeks ago, but it's the one I've been given. While it may pass as a vapor, it's my reality now and I intend to make the most of it.

I Cry Every Day

I cry every day.

People ask me how I'm doing, careful about the question as if I were fatally ill, not someone still struggling with death. They know an honest answer won't be good, but they ask because they care although they may mentally cringe at what I may say, or at even asking the question. It's not just me who doesn't know how I'm supposed to act, it's all the world around me that doesn't know how to treat me.

I know at some level that it would be easier in so many ways to just quit. To wear the same clothes day after day, to sleep on the sofa with the TV muttering its distractions, to totally forgo life and just allow the grief to consume me. But while the grief occasionally swallows me whole for long minutes of time, I can't do that. Even though the addiction often wouldn't let Ethan think of anything except himself and getting high, I know the boy/man that I loved and who loved me would not want me to do that.

So I try to go on, not as though nothing had changed, but as though I were OK, because most of the time I am.

But I cry every day. Not just once, but repeatedly in moments when I find myself with nothing else that needs to be done, or when I sit quietly for too long and my mind begins to pull up fragments of memories, like a squirrel digging for acorns in the leaves.

There's a big hole in my heart, but you cannot see it and a doctor would probably never miss it unless he asked the right question. Then my heart would stutter along as it seems to do periodically throughout the day, a pulse that has nothing to do with the pace of my body, but with the faltering of the breath in my chest, the sudden streaming of tears down my face.

My clothes still seem to fit, although I think I've eaten three good meals in the last week and a half. I eat when I need to fix a food for someone else, or when someone else prepares food, because although I'm hungry, there is nothing that I want. Food is a wonderful idea, but one I only manage to embrace about once a day. My diet is mostly coffee. I need lots of coffee to wake me up in the morning, when daylight is a long way off but my eyes are open and so I must begin my day. Then more coffee after lunch to keep me awake with the girls, to be sure that I don't nap and sacrifice sleeping at night to the exhaustion that sometimes threatens me at 2 p.m. I usually manage to eat a little dinner, when my husband is home and the girls are ready to eat as well -- their appetites unimpacted by the grief that fills me. After the girls leave, I begin chasing sleep with the same zeal that I use all day to avoid it. Alcohol helps. A glass or two of wine and my eyelids are heavy and I can turn off the television and escape my reality for a few hours.

I try to convince myself that I need to exercise, to drink the quarts of water that I used to consume every day, and that to get moving and embrace old routines will make me feel better. But those things just don't seem important right now. I'm not going to feel good, so why bother? The disrupted schedule of the back to back holidays means I have to be self motivated, and right now I'm just not.

But aside from the liquid diet and my general apathy toward a lot of things, I think I'm doing OK. I'm feeding dogs and chickens and the cat and rabbit and gathering eggs. When the girls are here and going strong, I'm pulled from the brink of whatever pit of gloom may be threatening me and carried by their energy. When the sun is warm and the wind doesn't blow too hard, I want to be outdoors and moving with the dogs(it just isn't the season for much of that).

Most of the time I can keep my grief simmering in a pot on the back burner, but there are moments when I'm alone that the pot boils over and for just a little while it's really messy. I'll be coasting along doing OK and some random thought of Ethan will pop into my head, quickly followed by the bone-shriveling reality that he's gone -- not just mad and not speaking, not just out of minutes on his cell phone, not just high and not in the mood to talk -- gone from my life for whatever remains of it.

When I sorted his video games one last time before donating them to the local homeless shelter, I touched his treasures and my heart broke. Then I felt something in the side pocket of the gym bag where they were stored and pulled out a toothbrush and half a tube of toothpaste and that pushed me over the edge. The little losses and reminders, the bits of him that will always be part of me are sometimes just too much.

In those moments, I understand the despair that sends mothers to emergency rooms or drives them to lock themselves away from the world. In those seconds, I grasp how people lose the will to go on and are beaten down by grief. In those minutes, I'm often huddled with dogs who are not always my own and who lick the tears from my face and press against me with warm bodies, sensing some pain they do not understand but seek to ease. In those times, once I'm able to breathe again and trying to pull my head above water, I turn to prayer or the words of the songs that echo in my head to comfort me.

My prayer is often an angry one filled with questions and pain. On Christmas morning, however, I managed to thank God not only for the gift of his Son but for the 23-year gift of my own. Because despite all the pain and the fact that I do not like how the story of Ethan's earthly life ended, he was a gift that I might not have been given and I have to remind myself of that sometimes. I'm struggling to find acceptance and it comes in brief moments of clarity that I cling to when the tears come back again.

Perhaps, with the passage of more time, this wound will be less tender and the tears won't come quite so often. I won't start my day with this self-imposed therapy session where I often rip the scab from whatever healing I've managed and poke at the weeping pain beneath. Or perhaps, the scab will gradually be replaced with tender flesh and a scar that I'll touch gently forever. But right now I know I'm going to cry and working my way through it in words seems to help me wade out of the pit when I fall in. It gives me something to cling to, to remember. It's a free therapy session where the prompt isn't a psychologist's questions, but a blank screen.

If you ask, "How are you?" The answer is that I think I'm doing as well as I could be. The fact that I hold it together doesn't mean it's not even more awful than I imagined, it just means I don't see any other option.

And although you will probably never see me do it, I cry every day.

Watching the Grim Reaper

Have you ever seen anyone die?

Unless you're a medical professional, emergency responder or hospice volunteer, the answer may well be no.

That's what most "normal" people get to say. My past profession as a journalist, however, puts me in a different category. Although I wasn't necessarily up close and personal with the people I saw die, I was standing nearby when I saw that the fight was over, when emergency responders stopped their frantic efforts. Sometimes they walked away. Sometimes here was another soul still trapped in the mangled wreckage of what used to be a car, and the efforts continued around a sheet draped body.

I can remember the majority of those deaths, even if I cannot tell you the names of the people who died. I remember where they were at and what happened. Depending on my overall mood, sometimes the roads I travel are virtually haunted by those memories.

Lately, however, I've been grappling with the memory of a different death. A song by Brandon Heath, "Dyin' Day," which is on the CD that has taken up residence in my SUV's stereo system, has me thinking about execution. It's about a man facing his execution, witnessing to the guard who has treated him decently. He explains that Jesus has come to visit him every day since he invited him in three years earler. That Jesus made him an innocent man.

Nearly a decade ago I was one of the official witnesses to an execution by the State of North Carolina. Steven McHone(Wikipedia helped me to recall the name) had shot and killed his mother and stepfather in a rage. Shortly before his execution, his siblings had begged the state to commute his sentence. His step siblings, however, were not as forgiving and neither was the state.

The morning of the execution, after driving the long route to Raleigh and passing by protestors in the chilly night air outside the prison gate, I was seated with other witnesses in a small room. The man, who looked far different than the man in the mug shots I'd seen, was on a hospital style bed on the other side of a large window. When the set hour arrived, the witnesses watched the life drain from his face and the pallor set in.

At the time, it seemed his death was, if anything, just too easy. His jailhouse conversion was too pat. I had seen too many people die when there were people fighting for their lives, when they had done nothing wrong other than circumstance. I'd watched a firefighter carry a dead toddler in his arms when her car was run over by a truck loaded with steel pipes and her car seat wasn't properly secured. I'd seen them weep when the CPR they'd administered to a 5-year-old boy wasn't enough to save him from the head injury he suffered after his drunken uncle slammed head on into another vehicle on Christmas Eve. I'd seen them put down IV bags and walk away from the remains of automobiles as others draped the vehicle in a tarp to protect it from prying eyes.

His mother died knowing her son had shot her and asking them not to blame him. His death was just too easy. The judgment was what he had earned. My biggest problem with it at the time was that it really served no purpose and cost so much. It was so isolated from society that it couldn't possibly be a deterrent because no one who had not witnessed it would believe in it -- and even then they would likely never envision themselves in his place.

Now, I'm not so sure. Judgment isn't mine to make and it would seem living with the knowledge of what he had done would be the more difficult of the two sentences. I'm looking at him through different eyes and after using the vision I'm used to for so long, I admit I find it troubling. I'm probably becoming one of those people who would have to say I could not impose the death penalty based on "religious" views.

I know all Christians, and a lot of non-Christians as well, don't take that point of view. I've heard it from the pulpit many times. But I've also heard that sin is sin and can be forgiven, no matter how minor or major we may see it. That judgment isn't up to us because we're all sinners. I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say I would be able to forgive him if the people he had killed were my loved ones. But it's a goal I'm working toward. I know that a friend who lost two of his children to a drunk driver and was able to forgive the man has a much easier load to bear than anyone who drags around anger mixed in with his grief for the rest of his life.

And I have to believe that if he was genuine in his profession of faith, that when he was executed he was welcomed in heaven. That he was greeted by Jesus, and perhaps his mother was among those who were there with open arms. That a forgiven killer is as innocent in God's eyes as a forgiven adulterer, as a child who has never sinned. That's a hard concept to wrap my head around.

Maybe it wasn't that his death was too easy after all, but that death for the rest of us is just too hard. Many of us don't get the chance to make peace with our family, time to seek salvation and forgiveness for our souls. We die suddenly from strokes and heart attacks, from someone's mistake on the highway, from violence -- from the mortal fallout of living in this world.

So this week, I've been working within myself to find the person who would answer yes to that man on his dyin' day. The person who would pray with him and share his last meal.

Because I know that every day I touch the hands of a sinner, even if they're only my own.