When Your Stars Fall from the Sky

On December 26, 2017 I received a call from my mother.
“You need to come over right away.”
My brother and sister received the same message.  We all knew the reason for the urgency.  My father had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in June of that year.  In September he was told he had just months to live.  I can still remember sitting by his bed in the hospital that day as he told me in a tear-choked voice to take care of my mother.  Just the night before I had met him at the ER where he had gone in for what he thought was yet another bout with pneumonia.  He had been joking and laughing with the nurses when I left him for the night.  Even though he had the dire stage 4 diagnosis he had hardly seemed close to death.  Sure, he had a horrible cough and the chemo took its toll.  But his spirit was still vibrant, and he was still independent.  He had driven over an hour to the VA hospital in Indy that day.
But all that changed the following day when the doctors told him that he was going to die.  The realization that he would not get to enjoy retirement, not get to see his grandchildren grow up, and most importantly, that he would leave behind the woman he had loved and cared for all his adult life set in all at once and it was a terrible thing to behold.  Don’t get me wrong, my father was a Christian and he believed that he would go to Heaven.  But he was not ready to go yet.  And it was hard – very hard – watching him deal with that.
Two days after the dire news, he went home to hospice care and inevitable death.  A week later we had a family gathering where those who could attend said what would be their last goodbyes to him.  But he hung on.  On Thanksgiving he made his way out of bed to take the traditional family picture with us.  For a moment I fooled myself into thinking he was rebounding.  But he wasn’t.  The weekend before Christmas he took a turn for the worse.  We all gathered at my parent’s house as we have every Christmas Eve, only this time with the knowledge that it would be my father’s last.  The next day the call came.
When I arrived at my parent’s house my mother was visibly shaken.  I went in to see my father.  He was in terrible pain to the point of being almost incoherent – nothing like the day before.  It was as though he had summoned all of his strength to make it to Christmas and now he was spent.
Finally, the hospice nurse came and gave my father enough pain medicine to make him comfortable.  He was sleeping when I left him and returned home.
On December 27, I happened to be awake at 3:30 in the morning.  I received another call from my mother.  No good calls come at 3:30 in the morning.  My father had passed away in the night.
 
As Thanksgiving approached a year later, I found myself struggling with thoughts of how different the upcoming holiday season would be without my father.  Little did I know the darkness that was awaiting me.
On November 11 I took my fiancé to the ER.  We had been together for years and I was well aware of her health issues.  She had a heart transplant when she was a child and had been on a battery of daily medicine ever since.  Some of the medicines that kept her alive suppressed her immune system, which made her prone to catching viruses and infections.  Suffice to say that ER trips were not uncommon for us.  Early on the morning of November 12 she was sent home with 2 antibiotics to fight an infection she had.  The following day she seemed to be improving.  But on the morning of November 14 I awoke to find her in some of the worst pain of her life.  I took her to the ER again. She had had severe abdominal pain before, so even then I was still in the “this too shall pass” mode.  But as I sat beside her bed in the ER, out of nowhere a voice in my head said:
“You are about to go through the worst day of your life, but I will get you through this.”
I dismissed it immediately.  Sadly, I had been in similar ER situations so many times with her that I just couldn’t imagine it ending in anything more than a brief hospital stay at worse.  How wrong I was.
About an hour later the doctor came in with the results of the scan they had just done on her.  The infection had caused a perforation in her bowel.  She had to be operated on immediately.  What followed was a downward spiral so sudden and intense that quite frankly I am still trying to come to terms with it as I write this.  The end result was that about 8 hours later I was standing by her bedside holding her hand as she breathed her last breath.  The woman I had planned to spend the rest of my life with was gone.
I share these tragic stories with you to give you my credentials as one who has known pain and deep sorrow.  I have cried every day since that cold night in November.  Some days it is just a mist that comes to my eyes as I think of her.  Other days it is a soul-crushing sob as the feeling of loss overwhelms me.
Make no mistake, I know that I will see her again in Heaven.  But that does not change the fact that we are separated right now, and at times for me that separation is unbearable.  So then the question becomes, how does one deal with such loss?  How does one cope on Earth when all their hope resides in Heaven?
My hope is that I can share what I have learned to help you find the comfort and purpose God has for you during such dark times.  God’s purpose for all of us is to love him and guide others toward him.  The methods by which we achieve this purpose are different for each of us.
One of the first things I learned was the clarity that grief can bring.  When you have your own dreams and plans stripped away, suddenly God’s plan comes into focus.  Now I’m not saying that God creates tragedies to force people to bend to his will.  God uses tragedies that occur in the fallen world of humans to bring out the best in people.  In the darkness people find courage that they never knew they had.  They find talents that had fallen dormant.  They learn to take nothing for granted and to hold every moment precious.
In my case, I had pretty much stopped writing years ago.  I was never what anyone would call a successful writer, but I like to think that my writing reached at least a handful of people and made a difference.  However, over the past few years, I let other worldly concerns take over and I found myself too busy to write.
The first meaningful thing I had written in years was a letter to my father.  I wanted him to know everything I felt about him before he died – all that he taught me, how much I respected and loved him.  After he died, my mother told me that he had been so moved by the letter that he kept it by his beside in the weeks leading up to his death.
I started dabbling in writing again.  I began work on what would later become a short book “You Are Never Too Far Gone for God.” But the work was sporadic.  I fell back into my old ways and distractions pulled me away from writing.
And then my fiancé died.  The morning after her death I woke up and my mind was filled with words and phrases.  I immediately got out of bed and grabbed a notebook and a pen.  Within minutes I had written her eulogy.  To be honest with you, I had been terrified that I would not be able to find the words to properly honor her.  But the response those words received at her funeral reassured me that they had hit the mark.
They had done something else as well.  Co-workers who were at the funeral found out that I was a writer (I had never been successful enough to write for a living, so I have been working a full-time job at the same company for over twenty years).  They began to ask about my writing and requested some of my books to read.
A week after the funeral, I finished “You Are Never Too Far Gone for God” and published it on Amazon.  I have also resumed work on a long dormant fictional project.  I had started it several years ago and the main plotline involved a stoic character who had suddenly and very tragically lost his fiancé.  I will leave it to you to decide if this is just a coincidence or something more at work.
Your purpose may not be to write a book, but I assure you, you do have a purpose.  My mother found hers after my father died.  She was terribly grief stricken.  She was also forced to learn a lot of new things for the first time in her life, since she had been dependent on my father for quite a bit.  The first thing she learned was courage.  She asked God to help her deal with her grief.  She specifically asked to find other widows who would become her friends.  God answered by leading her to a luncheon for retirees.  It was a miserable, cold rainy day and it was at a place that she had never been to before, but she trusted God and went.  When she got there, she sat down beside a lady and introduced herself.  She learned that the lady was also a widow and part of a group of widows.  They quickly became friends and she was welcomed into their group.  God had answered her prayer.
She also found her purpose.  One of the widows is going blind and my mother has become a welcome helper for her.  Another has just been diagnosed with cancer.  My mother’s experience with my father’s illness is helping to guide her through this difficult time.  And my mother’s experience in dealing with the grief of losing my father is helping to guide me through my grief.
God does not just give us purpose in dark times.  He gives us comfort as well.  I have had no shortage of people praying for me and offering to spend time with me or help me in anyway that I need.  But for me, there is no greater comfort than knowing that my father and my fiancé are in Heaven and that I will one day join them there.
Whether you have lost someone you love or are in great pain or turmoil yourself, remember that this life we live is fleeting.  The tears we cry will soon be wiped away and we will be brought to a place where there is no sadness or pain.  Yes, this life can be difficult.  But life is short and eternity awaits us.  If you trust in God and believe that his son Jesus Christ died to save you from your sins, you will one day find yourself in an eternal paradise where you will be reunited with those you have lost.
So in those dark times when your stars fall from the sky, turn to the light of God.  You will find peace and comfort in that light.  And has you surround yourself in his light, let it fill you so that you become a light that shines to help bring his peace and comfort to others who find themselves in darkness.
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