Grieving Parent

Author: Joe Mudd

  • Heaven Is For Real – Book Review

    Heaven Is For Real – Book Review

    Heaven is real.

    Can there be more important or beautiful words that any grieving parents could hear?

    Yeah, there could be better words. “Honey, wake up! You’re having a nightmare,” or “There’s been a big mistake, your son isn’t dead, he’s just been in the witness protection program. But it’s all OK now, so he can come back into your life again,” come to mind.

    But it’s pretty clear those words aren’t going to be played sweetly to our ears. Learning that heaven really exists is our greatest source of hope.

    Todd Burpo says he has proof, Heaven is real.

    Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back is his book. He shares the story of his 4 year old son Colton’s trip to heaven.

    The early parts of this book were hard for me to read. Colton was in the Intensive Care Unit. Been there, done that, and don’t want the damned t-shirt. It brought back a lot of hard memories. It was intensely stressful – I think that’s where the “Intensive” part of the name comes from.

    Like Colton, Richard recovered and came home from the hospital. Unfortunately Richard also came home with scar tissue in his brain that would cause him to have seizures and ultimately kill him.

    Colton was touch-and-go, the doctors didn’t have much hope for him.

    But Colton made a miraculous recovery. He also came home from the hospital. He came home with stories about Heaven.

    Some of the things in this book will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. For example, Colton was able to tell his parents things they were doing while he was out of it and in surgery. He couldn’t have possibly known what they were doing, each in a separate room and not with Colton. It gets your attention.

    Much of this story seems too perfect. The author, a pastor at Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, Nebraska, takes every detail of Colton’s story and matchs it perfectly with Bible scripture. It just seems too pat and lines up so well it’s hard to believe. Mr. Burpo could say anything he wants in his book. It just might be all made up.

    But it might also all be real.

    Debbie and I were talking about this. She made the comment,

    “If they had listened to the prophets back in Biblical times, we wouldn’t have all the problems we do now.”  She thinks we need to listen to the prophets God sends to us today. And this little boy just may be one of those prophets.

    You can read the book and come to your own opinion.

  • The Suit That Never Was

    The Suit That Never Was

    Our church consists of two separate church buildings connected by a central hall. There is the mid-1800’s era church we now call The Chapel. Our main church, the one where all the Sunday Masses are conducted, is on the other side of the hall. We call that one The Church. The Church’s entry doors are located inside the hall.

    So everyone leaving church after Mass must go into this central area, that we have given the imaginative name of The Gathering Space.

    Parishioners gather in The Gathering Space after Mass to catch up, chat and have a bit of fellowship.

    As we moved through the post-Mass crowd the other day we ran into Carolyn Gregory. Her son Andrew was one of Richard’s friends in youth group. About a half dozen of the guys in that high school group became known as The Posse. As you can see, we’re big on snappy names in our parish.

    As we talked with Carolyn, we of course asked about Andrew. Carolyn told us about his progress in school where he is getting close to graduation and the big job search. She mentioned about how they were going to go shopping for a suit for Andrew to wear on his interviews.

    Oh Oh. I was expecting Debbie to start crying. I had a lump in my throat.

    You see, Richard was getting ready to start his junior year in business college at the University of Kentucky. He was making plans for interviews and internships. He’d asked Debbie to go shopping with him to pick out a new suit for those occasions.

    She was looking forward to it a lot. I’m not sure if Richard was more interested in her taste in suits or her use of the check book, but his momma was thrilled with the request.

    But that shopping trip never happened.

    And our conversation in The Gathering Space served as a reminder of that. And the reason why.

    That’s how easy it is to get tripped up on the grieving path.

    We both left church with a heavy heart, but neither of us cried. I guess that’s progress.

    Photo credit: The image above was borrowed from The Men’s Warehouse website. I hope they don’t mind. If you need a suit or clothing, buy something from them to make it up to them.

  • Expecto Patronum

    Expecto Patronum

    When the kids were young one of my jobs was reading to them at night. First I’d read to Richard, then I’d go upstairs and read to Sarah. It gave me a chance to spend one-on-one time with my kids.

    I got to read a lot of good books I wouldn’t have ever read on my own.

    It was one of my favorite times. I read to them long after they could read to themselves. It was just a nice time.

    Richard was a Harry Potter fan. The Harry Potter series was on our reading list.

    Unfortunately because of my work schedule, I was only able to read on the weekends when we were reading the Potter books. If you’ve ever read them, you know most of these novels are long. Reading them only a couple of nights a week, it took a long time to plow through them.

    Richard couldn’t wait. On weeknights He’d sneak into our bedroom and get the book (I kept his current book on my bedside table), and read ahead. He then put the bookmark back where we had left off so I wouldn’t know.

    So he’d get a double dose of Harry Potter.

    If you’ve somehow managed to miss out on the Harry Potter story, Harry was a young wizard. Most of the action takes place at Hogwarts, a school for apprentice wizards and witches.

    His studies at Hogwarts included classes on spells. There were many exciting moments as the young students tried their luck at spell making.

    One spell was intended to call up their Patronus – a personal protector that guarded them from the dark forces.

    The spell required the use of a magic wand, thinking of powerful good thoughts and shouting out, “Expecto Patronum!”

    Here’s what Wikipedia says that phrase means:

    Expecto Patronum is correct classical Latin for “I await a protector”.

    Wouldn’t it be great if we could work the Expecto Patronum spell and protect our children?

    You could just point your trusty magic wand at the bad guys and other dangers of life, think up lovely thoughts… I’d probably remember the fun I had reading to my kids… take a deep breath and scream out at the top of your lungs…

    “EXPECTO PATRONUM!!!”

    Out would pop the magic Patronus to protect your kids. They seemed to take the form of an animal in the Harry Potter books, so Richard’s would probably be a cat.

    But that’s in Harry Potter. Fiction. This is real. There are no magic wands.

    So we end up at a website like this.

     

  • Church On TV and A Marathon

    Church On TV and A Marathon

    It was the Sunday before the SuperBowl. This was a Sunday with no football. Yeah, there was the Pro Bowl but come on, really, that’s not football. I didn’t want to watch that. What to do?

    The USA Network came to the rescue. They ran a 12 hour NCIS marathon. Starting with the very first episode, one I was sure I’d never seen, at 11 AM and running till 11 PM.

    Debbie and I watched the entire thing from start to finish.

    We decided we didn’t want to go out and deal with anyone that day. We just wanted to hunker down together and not face the world.

    The Archdiocese of Louisville has Mass On The Air every Sunday at 10:30 AM. We decided to go to church on TV.

    This turned out to be much like going to church at church. Mass On The Air has a rotating cast of characters; the priest, deacon, choir and participants from several local churches tape the shows ahead of time for airing on Sunday mornings. They usually tape two Masses back-to-back on Wednesday evening. As luck would have it our priest and parishioners were the ones on TV this particular Sunday.

    So we watched Mass on TV with Father Bill. My little sister Ann was even singing in the choir.

    At the end of the televised Mass we switched to the NCIS marathon on USA.

    I’m not sure why we still watch this show. Autopsies are a regular part of the show. It gets a bit, shall we say… uncomfortable, watching these scenes. I can’t help thinking, “They did that to my kid.” I don’t like the thought. But still we watch the show every week and we usually have on any marathons that get aired on the weekend.

    I think the show brings back nice memories for Debbie. While Richard was still in high school and living at home, they used to watch NCIS together.

    So we just spent the day… all of the day… sitting together on the couch watching TV.

    The truth is I’d like to spend every day like that. It’s really tiring going out into the world, putting on the game face and acting like the world isn’t spinning off it’s axis.

    It was a nice day.

  • Another Stumbling Block

    Another Stumbling Block

    After Richard’s death, one of the items I had to decide on was about cars.

    I was using a 1995 Toyota Camry as my driving to work car. Had 160,000 something miles on it. Richard had a 2004 Toyota Corolla with less than a third of the miles my Camry had.

    I needed to figure out which one to keep.

    I liked my old Camry. It was comfy and it had cruise control. But the Corolla was much newer and it got better gas mileage, but only by a few MPG’s. And no cruise control.

    The very last vision I had of Richard, I was watching out the front door, through the opening in the hedges, as he drove past our house on his way back to Lexington. I never saw him again. So there’s some emotional attachment to the Corolla.

    I started driving the Corolla to work. And the Camry just sat in the driveway. I really intended to sell it, but just never mustered the willpower to get it done. It was one of many loose ends that are still just dangling out there.

    The car sat in the driveway for a year and a half. I almost never drove it.

    Out of the blue, people started knocking on our door, wanting to know if the Camry was for sale. It didn’t have a “For Sale” sign in the window and I wasn’t advertising it anywhere. In the space of a week there were 4 people asking about it.

    The last was a young girl. She had a 3 month old baby and was pregnant again. I was at work when she showed up with her husband and her dad. Debbie gave her our phone number.

    The next morning she called and asked if I would sell her the car.

    “I probably would. I haven’t really thought about it much.”

    “What do you want for it?” she asked.

    “I have no idea what it’s worth. I hadn’t been planning to sell it,” I told her. “What would you give?”

    She made me an offer that was what I’d paid for it two years before. In the heated negotiations that followed I managed to talk her down by $500.

    So I sold my Camry.

    Before turning it over to her, I cleaned out the console and glove box of my stuff. Papers and gloves and ice scrapers and spare change that were floating around the interior.

    And that’s where the stumbling block comes in.

    In the glove box I found the receipt from the pharmacy for the last prescription I bought for Richard. The one for the generic substitute for his seizure medicine. The one that killed him.

    It wasn’t a good find.