The Valley of Grief

Some fragmented thoughts on my beloved late mother-in-law, the impossibility of preparing for sorrow, and the weirdness of recognizing the magnitude of love

Feb 20, 2023

Monday, February 20
Grand Rapids, Mich.

What does it mean, dear reader, to be ready to meet grief?

This question weighed on me last Wednesday as Tristan and I packed our bags to head to Houston. His mother was in hospice, and we hoped to get to Texas in time to say our goodbyes. When we rose early the next morning for our 6:30 a.m. flight, we learned that she had died a few hours before.

Our eyes bleary from the hour and the grief, we halfheartedly tried to gather our mourning clothes. Tristan pulled a couple of his suits out of the closet; the dark grey one was probably the best choice. Except the ones he’d pulled weren’t his at all; they were mine. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought to do any of this earlier, but we hadn’t. And in the haze of sadness and with our flight time approaching, we were struggling.

I told him I’d deal with it later.

We weren’t ready.

So now, after a few days with the family in Houston, I’m back in Grand Rapids. I’m refueling on Fozzie snuggles, taking some deep breaths, and retrieving all the things that we forgot. On Wednesday, I’ll fly back south.

We weren’t ready. But how can one ever really be ready? The contours of each grief are different, and you can’t help but just feel your way through it all. Sometimes you think you’re just fine—or maybe that’s the story you tell yourself. Then, in a flash, you’re surprised by its seemingly sudden sharpness.

This morning, I made fried eggs and toast for breakfast, and in an instant, I found myself thinking of Ashie. (The way Tristan and I were reared, I was never, ever going to call my mother-in-law by her first name. Sometimes I called her Mrs. Ashby and sometimes she was Ashie, which is how the grandkids addressed her.) As I slathered salted butter on my toast, I remembered how much she’d adored good butter. Sometimes she would text me just to talk about butter.

Sorrow can be so specific, summoned unexpectedly by an act as mundane as spreading butter. It stops you mid-motion—I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at my half-buttered toast—and it holds you.

Ashie had done her best to prepare us. She was a planner. So, for instance, she had already drawn up a rough draft of her obituary. All we had to do was to plug in some particulars. All I had to do was to go over the text with my copy editor’s eye. But as I added a semicolon here and corrected a typo there, I wrestled with both the impossibility of the preparations as well as the utter insufficiency of a few lines of copy to capture the fullness of a human.

An obituary is to the dead as a resume is to the living: It can capture some of what a person has done, but there is little room for the essence of who she is and was. There is no place to explain how she made her loved ones feel. There is inadequate space for stories.

I love this picture of Ashie, from our wedding in 2012

In the spring of 2012, a few months before we got married, we traveled to Ireland with Tristan’s parents. The manuscript of my book had been submitted, and the publisher had chosen the title, Does Jesus Really Love Me? (Not my choice, but that’s another tale for another time.)

In the middle of dinner one night, Ashie turned to me with a serious look on her face. “Now Jeff....” she said.

I could never be sure where the conversation would go when she began with, “Now Jeff....” Sometimes she’d want to talk about one of our shared loves—extra-crispy bacon, say, or butter. Others, it would be a question about a sermon I’d preached or a thought on a book I’d given her. Always, I had to try to get ready.

“Now Jeff.... I want to ask you about the title of your book.”

“OK,” I said.

“Does Jesus really love me?” she said. “Have you really ever asked yourself that question?”

I’d had maybe one gin and tonic at that point—nowhere near enough to steady myself for this conversation.

“Yeah, I have,” I said.

She gave me a look that I’ll never forget. It felt at once like an indictment of the circumstances and the most tender embrace. Then she said: “That just breaks my heart.”

Part of my particular grief is the admiration I had—and still have—for Ashie’s profound faith. She lived a devout Catholicism that did not shy away from complexity or contradiction. She never wavered in its commitment to the Church even as she disagreed with a priest’s posture or a doctrinal position. She saw no disconnect between her religious convictions, her allegiance to Rachel Maddow, or her steadfast support of us and our marriage.

I wonder sometimes whether the resilience of her belief was forged in part because she lost her mother when she was just a young child. Surely that shaped her faith and especially how she expressed it—above all, through loving compassion and deep empathy, whether for the victims of the latest tragedy halfway around the world or for her future son-in-law, mired as he was in spiritual doubt.

That compassion, layered with sharp wit, extended even to chickens. Obviously she was not a vegetarian (see extra-crispy bacon, above). But in a text conversation, shortly after I started helping raise chickens at the Farminary, when I told her that these were being raised for meat, not for eggs, she wanted to know what we’d named the chickens. I replied that we didn’t name them, because it’s weird to eat birds that you’ve named. She immediately wrote back: “Exactly.” A few weeks later, I received a Father’s Day card from her in the mail. Confused, I asked Tristan what that was about. “The chickens,” he said.

When I sent Ashie this picture, she replied with one word: “Name?”

The other day, because I miss Ashie and because I’m a masochist, I scrolled back through our yearslong text conversation—just the one that she and I had going, not the thread that Tristan and his sister were also on.

It should surprise nobody that we texted mostly about Fozzie, whom she loved, as well as about food. One day, she texted me a photo of a bag of Lays potato chips. She knows I hate Lays and think they’re the most boring potato chip. “Delicacy from HEB,” she wrote. “Love and miss you.”

This is the kind of thing my mother-in-law would text me

As I reviewed nearly a decade of back and forth, I began to realize how consistently she had read my work and watched livestreams of my sermons and how often she sent praise and encouragement. “You were marvelous,” she wrote one day. Nobody else has ever said I was marvelous. Or if they did, I never believed them. I believed her.

Sorrow might hit all at once in the aftermath of a loss. In a sense, though, it’s been forming all along, fed by love. When the source of that goodness steps out of the picture, then you suddenly see that love-shaped shadow that we call grief.

There’s a particular shape to that grief when it has been made through a love that is at once steady and lavish. Imagine a river that flows ever so gently. At least it seems gentle until you realize the weight of its water, a power you can’t possibly understand until you look back and see the valley that it has slowly created. Over so many years, the water has carved its way through the soil and the rock. The constancy of its presence goes almost unnoticed, except when you take stock of all the life to which it has brought flourishing.

What does it mean to be ready to meet grief and to be overwhelmed with gratitude?

I found a text that Ashie sent me after she’d read Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved), which I gave to her some years ago. “Just finished,” she wrote. “She is amazing.” The book had moved Ashie, and the list Kate offered of things absolutely never to say to people experiencing terrible times had particularly resonated. “I told Lynn [Tristan’s dad], life is like a road you go down and good things happen and bad things happen along the way. But not sure how much control we have. Just try to make the best of what happens. We’ve had a great trail.”

One of my favorite pictures of Tristan’s parents, from our trip to Ireland in 2012

A great trail indeed, and along the way, she made such a difference: I see Ashie in Tristan’s compassion. I witness her testimony through the tight-knit, beautifully loyal family she leaves behind. I observe her guidance in the fierce protectiveness of Tristan’s brother and the self-sacrificial care that Tristan’s sister consistently offers all of us. I taste her presence in the cornbread stuffing on our Thanksgiving table and the room-temperature butter on our kitchen counter.

The last text I got from her, just before the new year, was a big thumbs-up. I wish I could send that right back to her right now, along with a thousand hearts.

I wish for every person an Ashie in their life. I’m so lucky I had her in mine.

I know each person is wired differently; what can feel like profound solace to one human can be cold comfort to another. I’m curious: What has brought you steadiness and warmth in seasons of grief, and what has not?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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