Why did my wife have to die?

         

          That doesn’t seem like an unusual question, I suppose. But let me elaborate.

          I’ve lost both my parents and one of my children; more than that, I was with all three of them when they died. 

          And I don’t wonder why they died.

          Because I know why God took them early. Or at least how the Romans 8:28 promise applied to me in their deaths. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” meaning “Christians”. 

          But today is the second anniversary of my wife Melissa Smith’s death, and I’ve yet to find a single purpose that I can credit upwards for her demise at the tender age of forty-seven.

          So, forgive this indulgence, but this is the topic on my mind today.

 'Til death do us part, indeed.

          My mother died when I was twenty. She had turned fifty two weeks before her death. Her first visit from breast cancer came seven years earlier, when her children (my brother Stuart and I) were ten and thirteen, respectively. Dying then would have been very difficult on us, more than it eventually was. She survived the first battle, but the disease reoccurred five years later, and the second time it came back with a vengeance. I left CalTech my sophomore year to help care for her, and started working as her teaching assistant in her elementary school band classes. Those few months when I taught with (and for) her made me realize that teaching was something I loved, something I was good at (for a novice), and something that made me feel like I was doing something worth DOING. By the time she passed in late March, I had taken over the band job at that school, and that led to full time jobs the next year. Her illness and death had guided me into the career God wanted me in, and I taught band for twenty-nine years in California and Idaho public schools, guiding and changing literally thousands of lives – not just by teaching music but by teaching life. Without my mother’s illness and death, I wouldn’t have gone into teaching at all.

 

          My father died when I was twenty-seven. He and my mother had divorced while I was in junior high (just before she contracted cancer). They remained good friends; neither ever remarried. But Dad wasn’t living with me anymore – although I saw him regularly, I feel like I missed out on a big chunk of my relationship with him in my formative teenaged years. His kidneys failed rather dramatically when I was twenty-four, and because of his weakened condition he lived with me for the last two-and-a-half years of his life. I got those connective years I’d missed: we spent many conversations about life and love and all those topics a father and son should have. And while I was struggling with the condition of education in California, thinking it would otherwise have been the perfect time to leave the state for somewhere more education-friendly, I was caring for Dad, knowing that I wasn’t going anywhere while I was caring for him. 

          So when he died suddenly in March of 1992, I knew it was my “permission” to leave California. I spent my spring vacation visiting places in the greater Northwest where I had family or close friends, and decided on the Boise area. It’s been one of the best decisions I ever made, and it would never have happened without my father’s “timely” death. (On top of that, it was the death benefit from his retirement fund that allowed me the luxury of time in the process – if I’d chosen to wait a year before teaching, I could have. That didn’t happen, because I took a band job I loved for seven years before moving on. But it gave me the chance to be selective about my job hunt.)

          The third death in this story came eight years later – I married Wendy in 1996, and we had our first child, Hamilton, the next year. We’d planned to have two children, and from our own experiences growing up, we wanted to have them three years apart. So Emerson was conceived and the pregnancy was leading up to a February 2000 birth. I had delivered Hamilton myself (that wasn’t planned; we just didn’t know Wendy labored insanely fast!), and we were hopeful that I might be allowed to deliver Emerson as well. Unfortunately, he had some issues that drove us to the hospital at 36 weeks, and despite the rush to try and get him out quickly, he had pinned his own umbilical cord between his shoulder and Wendy’s hip bone, essentially suffocating himself faster than we could possibly have delivered him.

          In the process of laboring, Wendy had a dream about a little girl in a field of flowers telling her not to worry, because “she’s got the baby”. Wendy assumed that meant the baby was going to be a girl, and when it wasn’t, we were rather confused by her dream. Days later, I asked her to describe the little girl in as great a detail as she could – three years old, blonde, etc. I found an old photo of my mother as a three-year old.

“THAT’S the girl!”

“That’s my mother, honey.” So apparently it was my late mother telling her not to worry, because she had the baby taken care of, presumably in heaven.

But here’s the REAL gift from Emerson’s death. We were going to stop after two children. It was very hard on us psychologically to have another pregnancy, which we started before the end of the year, but we still wanted Hamilton to have a sibling close enough to his age to relate to. So Sutherland was born, at a 4 ½ year gap with his older brother…but by this time, we were starting to want a third child. This time, we had that three-year gap nailed, and they had a little brother, Rutherford. Our twin girls were unplanned, but we wouldn’t have had them OR the two other boys had Emerson survived – that was going to be the “surgery” trigger, after the birth of child two. Four children, four human beings, would not have even existed if Emerson had lived. That one’s a pretty obvious benefit.

So down the road, Wendy left me and the children on the girls’ third birthday (the reasons are immaterial at this point, except to say that neither of us are blameless), and I played the single father of five for a year and a half. While Wendy gradually re-invested herself into her children’s lives, something miraculous happened in mine.

The woman I’d always wanted to marry came back into my life. 

Melissa and I first met in high school in 1981. We spent eight, ten years trying to make long-distance relationships work through her insecurities and both of our issues. When we were together, we were absolutely together – soul mates, as they say. (I wrote a book about us with that very title, in fact.) But something always intervened, and finally in 1992 we basically broke off the chase and said, ‘This will never work – good luck.’ We each went off and married alternate choices.

But in 2010, after we’d both been divorced by our spouses, she contacted me (I hadn’t even know where she was). When we saw each other again, everything simply clicked, and we started planning our wedding. We got married in December of that year and she moved to Idaho (from Laramie, WY) so we could finally have our happily ever after.

And it was happy. She brought me (and through me, my children) to the Lord, and we had the wonderful love and married life we’d always dreamed of.

So, Lord, tell me – why did we each have to get so sick so soon?

My illness, I understand: it was yet another dark cloud where You’ve shown me the silver lining. I have a condition called “TAM” – tubular aggregate myopathy – which is basically severe pain and fatigue, with a ton of symptoms that evolve from those two. Meds control the pain, but the fatigue forced me to stop teaching band (a FAR too energetic job to have with this condition) and start supervising the alternative school (a superb job if you want to stay sedentary and still influence troubled students into positive lives). The MOST important part of the disease, however, was that it slowed me down enough to hear and listen to the Lord, and to accept Him as my Lord and Savior, which I’d never taken the time to do in my fast-paced life before. No, I understand MY illness.

I’ve never understood Melissa’s.

Soon after our marriage, she started developing full-blown symptoms of fibromyalgia. (Look it up.) She thought in retrospect she probably had signs of it in the two years prior to coming to Idaho, but it became debilitating towards the end of 2011. While she continued being a wonderful second mom to my children, she had to do it from our bed more and more. In December of 2014, I found her dead in that bed, when we came home from school.

She was only forty-seven years old.

Charlotte and Melissa - my daughters adored her even then.

What was the "Romans 8:28 benefit" for us? I’ve understood just about everything else the Lord has done for me, or allowed to be done to me. Sometimes it took a long time to understand, but I’ve got just about all of them figured out or explained to me. But it’s been two full years and I don’t understand why my bride of four years had to die so soon.

It’s completely reasonable to assume that she and I were supposed to have married in our twenties, and the two of us screwed that up. In fact, we decided that probably was the case. That still doesn’t explain why she was given less than a half-century to live, but it sure would have been nice to have had a twenty-year marriage instead of four.

What does one learn from hardship?

What are we supposed to gain from loss?

One possible gift of a difficult life, as she discovered, was the ability to empathize with others suffering through similar problems, to be able to pray with them and for them in ways that we who never knew those problems could never do. Am I supposed to be a beacon for others who have lost their spouses?

Another possibility is that it was simply an accident: she wasn’t meant to die then, but something happened that ‘shouldn’t have’ that killed her. I’ve basically discounted that after the coroner’s report said that her health and medical status basically portrayed someone who was already living on borrowed time. The cold she had that day slowed her breathing down to a perilously slow speed, and she simply never took that next breath. But if I’d been there and woken her, and saved her from that death? Apparently, it  would’ve probably happened the following week or so instead.

To test my faith? My faith has never wavered. If anything, it was strengthened in the days following her death, when my attuned daughter Charlotte AND my normally non-attuned son Rutherford both saw her (AND Emerson AND their grammie, my mother) the day after her death. The wildest thing was that Charlotte ‘heard’ Melissa tell us that there would be a present for us ‘under the left hand tree just after eleven’ the next morning. After eleven the next morning, we went out to check, and just then the high school vice-principal, one of my best friends, drove up, parked under the left-hand tree, and brought money and food and presents from the high school students and staff. We were completely freaked out. In a good way, mind you, but still…

To get my attention? Lord, You absolutely HAVE my attention. I had been writing before her death, but now I felt compelled to write more frequently, aiming to make an avocation if not a vocation out of my work. God had made it clear that writing was something I was to do to glorify His Name. And sure, I've had more time to write after she died because I'm not taking care of her any more – but if she hadn’t’ve been sick, I wouldn’t have had to take care of her in the first place!

Did it help someone else outside of our family? Well, obviously there's no way to know this is false for sure, but I can't imagine who or what this could have been. Melissa didn't have any enemies that I knew of - even her ex-husband had come around to being a co-parent with her, and in fact he and I are still friends. If this is it, I'm stumped.

Is there a specific task this was supposed to help me accomplish? Now we’re getting into the, “Lord, I pray this wasn’t the only reason my life-long love had to die…” category. It’s hard to imagine what purpose it would serve for me to trudge on alone, without my Christian guide and love of my life, that would be an improvement for God’s glory. We all learn through suffering… true, but is there a reason for this particular suffering?... At some point, the mentor must step aside for the student to blossom… that’s more a lesson from the Odyssey and “Star Wars” and other epics than it is Biblical…

In our faith, we know that we will get all of these answers in Heaven. And had I not seen so many similar questions answered on this side of the veil, perhaps I wouldn’t be asking about this one so vehemently. But there is so much that was lost when Melissa died: my own partner, the mother to her children (especially the one who still lives with me here), the stepmother to my children (especially the four who still live with me here), the anchor in prayer that she was, both for our household and her church, and the intercessor for the hurting that she glorified God through.

What were the benefits that allow this to work for good for Christians? They must exist because Scripture demands it. I met a wonderful woman this year, my dear Dana, whose love, friendship and affection I will treasure for the rest of my life. Through her contact with me, her faith in God has been brought to bear and strengthened. That wouldn’t have happened had ‘Lissa lived. For a while, I tried to make myself believe that our finances had improved when I wasn’t paying for her medical care or her real-sugar Pepsis…but the truth is that we’re no better off today than two years ago on that front. Do I have the time or motivation or life experience to do more effective writing than I did for the glory of God? Well, I’m trying to make that one come true, but I don’t know that it’s even related – I think that’s simply where God is leading me.

The end result of all of this introspection is simple. “Have patience, young paduwan – all will become clear to you in God's time."

Lord, give me patience…and give it to me NOW!!!

(Hmpfff.)