Hope Renewed: Picking Up the Pieces After Loss

By Christy Lowry

Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss leaves the reader knowing how to survive a personal loss and how to better understand others and their struggle with loss. Everyone, at some point in their lives, will go through a loss, be it a parent, sibling, child, friend, hopes or dreams. None will escape! Among other things, this book details the best way to break bad news, explains how shock is really a gift in disguise, what body mapping and an anger allowance are, and what corrodes a marriage after a child dies. It shares why closure is not closure, and finally, how love is constant beyond death. Hope Renewed speaks to you as you seek comfort -- or comfort others. It truly is Hope Renewed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publication Consultants
• Release date: Dec 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781594332197

Christy Lowry

Christy Lowry received her AA from El Camino Jr. College, Lawndale, and a BA in History, with an English minor, from Cal State University at Long Beach, California. Christy and her husband, Paul, retired to Boise, Idaho after 28 years in Anchorage, Alaska to be closer to their two surviving sons and their families. Christy's second offering in her Curious World series, Nomad On the Go! continues her launch into the marketing world of children's books. Its intended audience is children ranging from pre-schoolers up through middle school children capable of reading to themselves and others.

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Dedication

I dedicate Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss to grievers and their comforters everywhere, who need an encouraging word and helping hand getting through one of life’s hardest challenges: LOSS.

Acknowledgments

It takes a team to write a book. It also takes a vision. These deceptively simple statements cover a complex process, from its earliest inception into primitive roughs, drafts, and ‘manuscripts,’ followed by myriads of rewrites until—finally! That prized polished product the public sees and reads shines through. I can’t thank my team enough for conscientiously proofing, honestly critiquing, and thoroughly editing this work—all without losing sight of the vision.

My deep appreciation goes to my husband Paul, life issues consultant Dr. Debra Lighthart, licensed family and marriage therapist Maureen Christiansen, friends Anita Davis, Amy Darrell, and Penny Applegate, Dan Levey (National President of the Parents of Murdered Children), authors Connie Freitag and Margaret Kerouac, plus certified funeral director and Certified Death Educator Fred Kehl, and funeral home associate Rosalie Tadda.

How can I adequately thank my editor Michele Howe and my publisher Evan Swensen, who put the final touches to Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss—and launched it. Its send off wouldn’t have happened without you.

Finally, but no less important to this work, are the many other unnamed contributors who enriched this book by graciously sharing their stories with me. Whether at book signings, grief groups, schools, seminars, phone or in-person interviews, they generously shared their time and interest. Their enthusiastic participation has been invaluable, enriching this book by giving it depth in ways not otherwise possible.

Thank you, everyone, for joining me in the vision: Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss!

Psalm 121

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,

from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord,

which made heaven and earth.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:

he that keepeth thee will not slumber…

The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy

shade upon thy right hand…

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:

he shall preserve thy soul.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and

thy coming in from this time forth,

and even for evermore.Psalm 121: 1-3; 5, 7-8

Introduction

Readers of Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss will recognize some of the territory visited in PAM. Both books come from my 1,000 page grief journal. At first, I planned to include both under one cover; but the amount and depth of material quickly showed me that two books were necessary: 1) PAM, our family’s inspirational grief walk, and 2) insights and healing helps mined from having gone through such traumatic, and all-too-common human loss. As such, people can read them separately, or as two complementary volumes.

Writing Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss showed me how many kinds of loss and degrees of death there are: family members, their jobs, moves and new homes; retirees forging new identities while coping with reduced income and changing health realities; and finally the big one—death itself. We all share the same boat. Yet we can choose to sink by panicking and bailing out, or seek and find doable options that help us the rest of our lives.

Which do we choose? Because loss is loss and pain is pain, and they’re such large all-encompassing life passages, I don’t try to address every aspect of them. Instead, as a healing facilitator (not counselor) to everyday readers, I offer our family’s experiences (past and ongoing), supplementing them with composite anecdotal observations and insights from extended family, friends, and acquaintances in a broad variety of settings. They range all the way from informal one-on-one conversations at book signings and other author events to interviews with members of the helping professions.

May Hope Renewed: Picking UP the Pieces After Loss give all seekers helpful, constructive, and healing food for thought, and above all, comfort!

Preface

Griefs well known stages are familiar to multitudes of people worldwide, regardless of the loss involved. But to clarify them for the bereft and their solicitous comforters, they include: shock, disbelief, denial, anger, guilt, blame and regret, bargaining, and finally—resignation and acceptance.

Shock strikes immediately after a tragedy occurs. It’s our immediate and initial response to a sudden overwhelming, unexpected loss. Disbelief follows: we can’t believe our loved one has died, the job didn’t come through, etc. Denial is more of a choice— even over time, we refuse to accept what’s happened. Anger follows: furious that someone or something we love has been taken away, we indignantly rage, Why me?? This isn’t fair!

Guilt keeps us on the hook. Rightly or wrongly, we assume responsibility for what happened—even for the anger we just felt! Next we add blame and regret to the mix, blending in the if onlies, wishing we could change both past and present. When preparing that recipe has exhausted us, we lower slightly to bargaining, If you return my loved one, I’ll do __for you. When negotiations and trade-off attempts fail, resignation sets in. Finally, we admit our loved one isn’t coming back, nor is life as we knew and preferred it, ever returning to normal—this is acceptance.

This description of the grief journey is deceptively linear. Instead, its stages (initial shock the exception) repeat themselves many times. The emotionally bedraggled griever finds such unmanageable repetitiveness totally disconcerting. The one major comfort in the midst of this mayhem is that these stages gradually wind down—especially if we can be flexible, allowing each to unfold. Such release, even surrender, moves us to the light at the end of the tunnel that much faster.

And true healing meets us there. As we absorb it, God helps us move on to create something new from our loss—often in ways helpful to others –which then, surprisingly blesses us as well!

CHAPTER ONE

The Unthinkable Happens

Calm Before the Storm

I glanced around my neatly arranged living room. Sunshine streamed through the front windows that August 31, 1983 afternoon, highlighting the glistening freshly dusted furniture and fireplace mantle; even the carpet looked new! Feeling the satisfaction of jobs well done I went into our bedroom and, acting on a sudden impulse, picked up a book off our dresser. Sitting down on our bed, I opened my book and began reading. Thoroughly engrossed, I barely heard the phone ringing insistently beside me…

Mrs. Lowry? It was the secretary of Sand Lake, a nearby elementary school that Pam passed every day on her way home from the public bus stop. But Pam was an eighth grade middle schooler; why would this woman call me?

She told me there was a good chance our daughter had been in an accident. I didn’t become overly alarmed at first, not even when she suggested I immediately call 911, because Pam was supposed to be coming home on a public bus.

She’s just over-reacting, I reasoned, but since she took the time to call me, I better follow up on it, just to eliminate the possibility…

I rationalized that Pam, in a moment of childhood nostalgia, might have detoured long enough to play on Sand Lake School’s playground equipment before coming home. Surely it was nothing worse than a skinned elbow or knee. I’d just run over and pick her up and wipe away her tears as we commiserated over the hazards of being careless on playground equipment.¹

The 911 operator seemed to be waiting for me as, startled, I found myself answering a barrage of questions from a police dispatcher:

What did your daughter wear to school? Did she have on gray cords? Gray print sweater? Was she a blonde? Did she have a backpack?

The increasingly detailed and accurate questions alarmed me; and for the first time I began to believe that something terrible had happened. The dispatcher’s momentary confusion as to the victim’s age gave me only fleeting relief from a now-escalating avalanche of stunned fear. Had the unthinkable actually happened? To us?

tapa

Fast Forward Crawl

Incredibly, awfully, it had. And over the next hours, I surrealistically watched events around me immediately speed up. A policeman arrived and told me how Pam had died. Getting off the public bus, she had suddenly darted out into the street without looking, and was struck down by a single approaching car. Death came instantly.

As I went into shock, he took over making phone calls, first to friends for moral support and companionship until my husband, houseguests, and older son got home. Then to our pastor and family who were spread across the country. Our early dinner-theater engagement plans dissolved into irrelevance as the horrifying responsibility of identifying our daughter at the funeral home took precedence.

The late afternoon ride with our pastor over to the funeral home felt like a high speed chase down the freeway. Upon arrival, with our pastor at our side, Paul and I stumbled out of his car and edged toward the funeral home where our daughter’s body lay. Clueless, we had no idea what was in store for us, or even what identifying a body entailed—least of all, our daughter’s. Filled with dread at the unknown, months would pass before we understood that this trip, and subsequent pre-funeral service viewings, were necessary steps in accepting Pam’s physical death. Novices to grief, we felt swept along by unbidden, mysterious, and irrevocable forces set in motion by Pam’s sudden death. We both felt swallowed up by darkness.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

The mortuary attendant met and took us to a room where Pam lay on a gurney, dressed in her brand new school outfit. Pam wasn’t mutilated, she even looked peaceful as though she were asleep. Despite regulations dictating ‘proper’ handling of corpses, merciful hands had cleaned her bruised face except for the blood trickling out of one ear. I noticed every detail, and one of my mother’s white earrings she had given Pam during our latest family reunion, barely three weeks earlier, was sadly missing.²

As tears coursed down our stricken faces Paul and I gazed upon Pam’s unresponsive form.³ This daughter of ours who had enthusiastically played on the girls’ summer softball team, generously decorated her brothers’ birthday cakes, helped me wrap family Christmas presents, and decorated the tree with us was now gone. How could one so young, and who had given us all so much, be dead?

On the Edge of Reality

As Paul and I wordlessly looked into each others’ brimming eyes, we couldn’t absorb this cruel, uncharted reality. We didn’t realize it, but that day’s poignant first-time shocking event, as we stood on the edge of our unknown future, was actually a gift. We couldn’t see or appreciate it, but it became our introduction to one of grief’s protective buffers shielding us from the unbearable. This numbness, lasting on average 14 days, immediately sets in to protect the grief stricken from excruciating pain victims would not otherwise survive. A pain that can only be taken on and worked through in stages. Stages which weave in and out, repeating and overlapping each other.

Daunting Decisions

What next? Paul and I had no idea. We would need to choose a mortuary, plan the funeral and graveside services, select who would perform them (our pastor seemed the natural choice), select and order flowers, pick a burial plot and casket (plus our own funeral attire), and finally certify the entire process according to correct legal health regulations.

From practical necessity, we began by choosing the funeral home—a daunting prospect since we’d never given it a moment’s thought. We went with our pastor’s recommendation: an establishment that offered us vital continuity, solace, and security without baiting and switching us to more expensive options. Had we heard a thinly veiled sales pitch such as Your daughter was an active, esteemed, and well-known member of the community, so you’ll want a casket and service commensurate with, and acknowledging, that fact, we would have immediately left. Innately, we knew that we needed an empathetic funeral director who would give us, the buyers, what we wanted. Such a compassionate specialist is the best bet from start to finish because he or she gets to know our preferences. That dynamic is the foundation for developing a working style and relationship together.

Amidst this busyness, Paul and I managed to slip off to three florists’ shops to comparison price, then buy, flowers for the service. Neighbors kid sat our boys. We found ourselves all over the map, crosschecking details for the upcoming one hour service (i.e. arranging taped recordings for people who couldn’t come), getting our clothes ready the next, deciding what kind of graveside service (if any) we wanted. We instinctively divided tasks according to what we felt up to doing. For example, I couldn’t face writing the obituary, so Paul did it while I concentrated on planning the service with our pastor.

Paul and I also had to obtain appropriate funeral attire. In my case, I was too befuddled to remember who helped the boys dress or how Paul came up with his navy blue suit, dress shirt and matching tie. But I do remember a girlfriend taking me to a local dress shop where she helped me find an attractive, yet appropriately subdued dress. I felt such gratitude for someone taking me in hand and tactfully guiding me through decisions, decisions then far beyond me. Overall, dress for men and women appropriately range from casually comfortable to more formal dress.

Housing Her Shell

At the same time, we had to decide on Pammy’s casket, its size, price, style, color, and whether or not it would be open or closed at the service. I found this task the most difficult after identifying Pam’s body at the funeral home. As Paul, our mortician, and I walked into the casket room, its numerous caskets, stacked end-to-end across the wall, overwhelmed us. Who knew this many different styles and sizes existed?! How would we ever find the one just right for her?

Looking at those caskets I suddenly remembered Pammy’s love for any shade of purple. Wanting to honor her preference even in death, I impulsively leaned into Paul’s ear, We just have to do her casket in pale lavender!

While Paul informed the director hovering discreetly nearby of our choice, nostalgic memory took over, transforming caskets into bassinets, and the eerily dim room into a cheerfully-lit newborn nursery of another time and place. Empty caskets changed into bassinets filled with sleeping newborns, securely tucked into pastel-colored cotton blankets. So many years earlier, Paul and I had stood outside the nursery windowpane, proudly pointing out our tiny pink bundle of joy to happily visiting friends. Oh what a future awaited her!

My reverie was abruptly shattered as Paul gently touched my shoulder and sadly told me pale lavender was out of the question because the service was only three days away. Choking up, I tearily tried to concentrate on the many styles in white we could select from; but I couldn’t get lavender off my mind. Sighing, I finally halfheartedly pointed out a second choice. Paul agreed; and we then worked out embalming procedures with the mortuary.

A mere three days later, immediately before the service was to begin, Paul and I entered the chapel for our last private, family farewell. Although we had openly invited anyone to visit these last days, now, except for our immediate family the chapel was empty. My eyes welled up at the many memory flowers, plants, and bouquets lovingly arranged on either side of Pam’s open casket. These, our friends’ and family’s personal love offerings, completely dispelled the earlier sterile atmosphere, conveying intimate warmth despite our grief.

My eyes automatically returned to Pammy’s casket. It was open as we’d requested; but it didn’t look quite right. What was amiss? Was the muted lighting distorting it into some drab off-shade of what should have been a glorious pristine white? If we couldn’t have lavender as we wanted, couldn’t the funeral home at least get our second-choice shade of white right?

Vaguely disgruntled and dissatisfied by now, I had to check this out at closer range. Moving to within inches of Pam’s casket, a slow smile spread across my grief-worn face.⁴ Incredible! Our shabby off-shade wasn’t white, but pale lavender, the color the funeral director told us we couldn’t have! Who had produced this miracle, a feat which buoyed me up during the service?

And I needed lifting up; we all did. Our several days of multiple visitations open to the public were over, even the private final viewing which lasted a poignant two hours up until the service. The funeral and graveside services, memorials to everything Pammy and our family believed in and felt, awaited us.

Burying Our Hearts With Her

Deciding the focus of our service helped organize and pull it together, producing an inspirational and uplifting atmosphere. We wanted Pam’s service to express her personality, and our family’s personal values and beliefs, especially our conviction of a joyous and eternal hereafter despite today’s gloom. Those values motivated our interactions with others. For example, sensing some attendees’ awkwardness, their not knowing how to approach me, I drew them in by going to them, You’re all mothers, you know how I feel, then hugged them. The tone of the service set, relief permeated the room, freeing people up to be themselves.

Even as I took the initiative in approaching people, part of me longed for temporary anonymity, privacy for the deepest parts of my pain. At first as I watched people arriving, I felt rudderless, wondering how I was ‘supposed’ to act. But even as I felt like a complete novice (which I then was), something within me rose to the occasion, an awareness that ‘this is what I must do, people are counting on me to mentor the way,’ especially those who had never been to a funeral before. I had to demonstrate the ‘right stuff’ (what it took) for Pammy’s sake. I wanted people, in a dignified yet warm way, to be able to see into and share my heart—and my family’s.

Reaching out to the various age groups that were there by walking up and greeting them must have worked; talking with one adult friend confirmed to me that it’s possible to provide a healthy coping pattern that others can relate to, and someday pass on to others, during their own losses. Openly sharing my feelings with friend and stranger alike gave them permission to open up with me, putting us all at ease.

Going With Our Hearts

Unlike our public funeral, we decided on a small private burial and graveside service. Our pallbearers, their numbers based on how many we needed to lower Pam’s casket into the ground, were family friends representing several faiths. Getting to the cemetery proved easy because one of our pallbearers, a policeman, arranged a police escort for us, assuaging our uptight nerves by paving our path.

How did we know what graveside service to have? We went with our hearts and what we, knowing Pam best, felt she would have wanted. We read the 23rd Psalm aloud as the pallbearers threw dirt over her grave, offered some last words, and tearful silence. I also, even before the funeral, pinned a favorite pin on Pammy’s lapel. To this day, remembering I did that is particularly comforting.

Finally, we covered the raw wound of her freshly dug grave with some of the memorial service’s floral arrangements. We were then ready to join the Memorial Wake, a commemorative meal planned for us by our neighborhood and community. Surrounded by these faithful friends cushioned us that afternoon against the excruciating loneliness and pain that would crash in on us during the coming weeks and months—all part of the grieving process. But that afternoon was a brief respite; together we honored Pam by reminiscing our memories and crying healing tears. We would now begin our uncharted new journey without her.

Q & As

Q. What’s an obituary and a eulogy? How do they differ?

A. An obituary is a published summation of the deceased’s life: place and date of birth, where they grew up, lifetime highlights and hobbies, listed family members (deceased and alive), etc. The newspaper’s submittal deadline is usually three months or less. Timely publication gives community and friends their needed time to mourn…and remember.

A eulogy is the grieving person’s chance to verbally or in writing honor and remember their loved one. Delivered by one person (or more if it’s a multiple eulogy) at the service (or subsequent remembrance service) the eulogy may reminisce past memories or praise the person’s admired characteristics. Yet it must be both general and specific enough to relate to everyone there. It should, especially for a young person, acknowledge his or her friends’ pain that is relevant to their age group. Mortuaries include a helpful list of main points that aid the griever and his spiritual advisor (priest, minister, counselor) in putting the eulogy together. It’s a challenge because the grief-stricken person is often unfocused and unable to concentrate. Hence the list becomes a mutual and practical focus point.

Q. How does healing come after such a traumatic loss?

A. Healing comes both from God’s grace and as we look for it, spotting opportunities we see around us. In our case, a few years after Pammy

Reviews for Hope Renewed

[featherstory-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Christy Lowry is a mom who lost her eighth grade daughter in 1983. The book starts well and gets into the mundane early, breaking the momentum of the emotional start. It details the moments following a death in reference to funerals, caskets, funeral homes, burials, etc. It begins with the author’s story of her daughter’s sudden death. She details the many phases of grief and mourning, while also sharing the practical events one goes through after a death. There is so much in depth information here, I was truly surprised. It has been years since I was involved in a death in my family but I remember distinctly that hazy time post-death that the author guides you through in this book.Hope Renewed (Picking Up the Pieces After Loss) is a very comprehensive account of what it’s like to go through the death of a loved one. The book details practically every possible detail a family would experience following death. It also goes in depth about the long process of grieving. The author Christy Lowry lost her young daughter due to a car accident. Since many of her daughter’s friends had never experienced the death of anyone close to them Christy became a model of the appropriate behavior and comforted some of the grievers during her grieving period.I have read about non-Western grieving traditions(recently from Malidoma Some) and how there is much left to desire in the Western sense. However reading this book has helped me to see that in very subtle ways and over quite a long period of time the Western way does provide avenues to mourn completely, this book helps you identify and take advantage of those options. The author has shown how phrases such as “you must move on with your life”, and similar ideas about how long it should take to grieve are most certainly insensitive and unrealistic. She gives a great account of the many instances in which her mind (and that of those around her) struggled with the idea of death even after the practicality of it was taken care of. Death can be a very complex milestone in the lives of the survivors. It is almost surprising how little wrinkles of the past can worm their way into moments that seemed unrelated to the death of a loved one.The book very rarely and in a very subtle way references the Bible and Christianity, but the book is full of resources and universal situations that can appeal to any belief system. The content is mostly psychological, sociological, cultural and often strictly practical in its focus. The author also cushions the content with her personal struggles, memories and experiences with a touch of vulnerability and warmth. The book includes questions and answers, several forms and resources in the back of the book, a glossary and several pages for reader notes.I wish I had this book as a reference when I was a teenager experiencing the death of people close to me for the first time. I really feel this could be very useful to anyone going through a recent death in the family or great as a gift for someone who has lost a loved one. Hopefully some of the overwhelming stress and insensitive comments that can arise during the period of grieving after a death can be alleviated by spreading the full nature of loss as shared in this book.I really appreciated the read and saw that I had some emotions that I still hold on to related to the grieving period. I feel that after reading this book I could be a much more supportive friend or model of sensitive and helpful behavior during this difficult period that we all face when we lose someone close to us.This book is packed with information and emotional depth. I could see it being referred to over and over again. It caters to everyone in any situation and would be a great addition to anyone’s library. I couldn’t recommend it enough because I know so many of us have or will experience grief and the misunderstanding community around could lead to some stifled emotions and inner turmoil. Redefining the reality of grief is what I believe the author is really trying to do with this book and I hope her goal is realized.