God's Teacher

Shortly after midnight on April 26, 1997, Lynette Harrison and her best friend, Toni Allen, slipped into PJs, piled onto Toni's bed and fired up the VCR to watch While You Were Sleeping. Their husbands were at the annual Lake Baptist Church men's retreat near Salem, Ore., and their children were dozing in another room. Enjoying the rare peaceful moment, Lynette thought, This is living.

About 10 minutes into the romantic comedy, the phone rang. Lynette and Toni exchanged a glance; late-night calls usually brought bad news. As Toni picked up the receiver, Lynette wondered if a terminally ill friend of theirs had died. But the bad news struck much closer to home.

"Bryan just had a heart attack," Toni said. "He's at a hospital in Salem." Lynette's 36-year-old husband had Hodgkin's disease, so any health crisis seemed all too believable. After finding a baby-sitter, the women set out on the 45-minute drive from their hometown of Tigard, Ore., to the hospital, praying and singing praise songs all the way.

Before Toni could pull the keys out of the ignition, Lynette burst into the waiting room. Seventy men from her church turned toward her. All of them looked mournful. Pastor Scott Smith walked up to her and said, "He's gone."

Lynette, Toni and scores of men wept for what seemed like hours. Finally, Lynette insisted on seeing Bryan's body. The doctor agreed. Toni and her husband, Ted, accompanied Lynette to the room where Bryan's body lay. They watched as she looked at her husband for a few moments. She walked to the bed and touched his hands and then his face. Turning back to the Allens, she said, "He's not going to wake up, is he?"

Love that keeps us strong

Over the next few hours, observers filled in the details of his final hours. Earlier that day Bryan, the CEO of a Portland association for real estate agents and father of three, had enjoyed a round of golf with friends. He called Lynette from the course to thank her for his new golf bag, an early birthday present. The short conversation was the last time they spoke.

At the retreat, Bryan and Ted Allen had enjoyed the afternoon together. Bryan began to open up to his friend, and they discussed deep issues for the first time. Later they had climbed a steep hill to get to the conference center's Foosball table. When they walked in the door, Bryan sank into a chair. Ted thought the climb might have winded his friend, but Bryan's condition suddenly grew worse. He rose out of the chair, then fell to the floor and shook violently. Despite receiving CPR from an anesthesiologist who had witnessed the attack, Bryan died.

Now Lynette had to tell her children about it. The idea brought back memories of her own childhood, when she was 15 and learned brain cancer had just killed her father. Arriving at Toni's house around 3 a.m., she decided to let her children sleep. Grief could wait until morning. She told 11-year-old Zach after he woke up. "You're lying," he said and began to cry. Toni brought in Allison, 10, and Alexis, 4, and the entire family dissolved into gasps, wails and moans.

The memorial service took place three days later. The marbled gray program read "Death Is Swallowed Up in Victory" and thanked friends for their love and support. Lynette did not speak at the hour-long service, but one song, Michael W. Smith's "Friends," voiced her feelings: "But we'll keep you close as always / It won't even seem you've gone / 'Cause our hearts in big and small ways / Will keep the love that keeps us strong."

An outpouring

Counseling rose to the top of the Harrison 's hierarchy of needs. Lynette met with a pastor from Lake Baptist, and the family enrolled en masse at The Dougy Center, a grief-counseling clinic in Portland for children and families. Featured in Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and "20/20," the center uses support groups to help children and parents deal with loss.

Dougy staffers believe each person grieves differently, and they use some unorthodox methods to reach their clients "The Bomb Shelter," for instance. This room contains no furniture, just padded walls. Children or adults use the shelter to physically vent their frustration without hurting themselves or others. Lynette borrowed a page from the Dougy handbook when Zach began hitting the walls at home. She hung a punching bag in the garage and told him to take out his anger on it. He used the bag a dozen times, but he never slugged the walls again. Lynette also credited Dougy's kid-friendly sessions for Allison and Alexis' ongoing emotional healing.

According to Lynette, God prepared her family for tragedy. Six months before the heart attack, her brother convinced her reluctant husband to take out an adequate level of life insurance. Bryan had resisted the idea for years, believing monthly premiums a waste of money. The last-minute policy allowed Lynette to stay at home with their children.

A prior calamity also helped Lynette cope with the current one. In 1990, she had become pregnant with her third child. Concerned about how her exposure to radiation as a medical assistant might affect the baby, she received an amniocentesis. The results showed the child would be born with Trisomy 13, a genetic disorder with a low survival rate. Disregarding their doctors' advice, Lynette and Bryan refused to abort, and Matthew Garrett Harrison was born on July 5, 1991. Though the baby lived just 21 days, his parents thought taking him home from the hospital and dedicating him at church were small miracles. Miracles that gave Lynette courage to face Bryan's death.

Lynette received still more support from family and friends. For three months after Bryan's funeral, members of her Sunday school class brought meals every day and set up an every-other-day meal delivery service for five months after that. For a year, they also provided free baby-sitting once a week to give her a night to herself. Men from church dropped by regularly to do yard work. Each Christmas, the family received a generous gift from an anonymous group.

"You expect people to help out for two or three or four months," Toni said. "But this still goes on three years after Bryan died. It's an outpouring of people who remember."

Cycles of grief

Still, small things upset Lynette for no apparent reason. Determined that Bryan, unlike her father, would have a large headstone, she failed to find a stone or a site that seemed right. This minor irritation infuriated the typically mild-mannered mother, and she aimed her newfound rage at the heavens.

"I was angry with God," the 40-year-old remembered. "Bryan and I were in a great place, and now it was gone. I felt cheated. I figured God hadn't understood that after losing my father, I couldn't do any more death in my life."

What Lynette could do is try to rediscover her faith, a task that required a little help from her friends and family. On her widowed mother's recommendation, she prayed through the Psalms and found in David's laments a vicarious account of her own struggles. Mourning the loss of his family and his relationship with God, David understood. Every night she called a different friend, looking for any shred of encouragement. Before sleep took her, she made an effort to push aside feelings of despair and meditate on an attribute of God.

While no turning point took place, Lynette found herself trusting God more and more. "There has to be an end to anger," she said. "It was a process for me to learn that God doesn't reject me when I'm angry with Him. He's big enough to handle anything I feel. Christ's death on the cross made sure of that. Grief, in my life, has been God's teacher."

So has Gerald L. Sittser. The Washington religion professor and sometime contributor to Single-Parent Family wrote an account of his wife's death called A Grace Disguised (Zondervan). Lynette read the book and hasn't found a better resource. Unlike other treatments on the subject, she found Sittser's realistic and sound. For instance, he writes people should embrace their grief, the opposite view from what Lynette heard when her father died. The book also gave her the most helpful observation of all: grief comes in cycles.

"Grief is not a stage," Lynette said. "That was a new concept to me. I've always thought of it as, 'Well, you're in the shock stage.' Or, 'You're in the anger stage.' The idea was once you get past that point, you'll never return again. But I learned these feelings come in cycles. They're continuous. Waves of grief will come at unexpected times and unexpected places. God can use them."

When asked for examples of such divine intervention, Lynette recited a sizable list. A friend who just lost her husband. Grief-stricken people in Oregon, California, Arizona and Germany who received A Grace Disguised postmarked from Tigard. Mothers and fathers in her support group at The Dougy Center and in her Sunday school class. Two recently widowed women who live nearby. Another friend who lost one of her twins in childbirth. The community of grief includes every tragedy and encircles the globe.

This month, Lynette will get another chance to observe the cyclicity of grief. May 9 was Bryan's birthday, a cause for celebration now tainted by the bleak milestone immediately preceding it: his death on April 26. But when feelings of anger and doubt return, Lynette Harrison will face them once again.

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