Death and Lessons From A Deceased Spouse

This is by no means a comprehensive list. As I continue to process, I continue to grow in appreciation of my wife. But here are a few things that reveal her character and heart.


1. Feeling is important. It’s easy to hide behind tv, radio, video games, Netflix, work, busyness, and even religious practice so as to not confront our feelings. But feeling is important. Kristin would completely and totally express what she felt. She cried for many reasons: in pain, in sorrow, in grief, in the thought of death, but also in joy, in the good sense of being overwhelmed, in feeling the weight of God’s many gifts in her life. We must feel fully. Feeling is fully human. I think the most important verse in Job is “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” Because he says some pretty dark things. “I am nothing.” “Man is a worm.” “Better that I’d have died in my mother’s womb.” In all that, Job did not sin. Kristin also followed the example of Christ in this. For the psalmic verse he quotes on the cross out of any He could’ve is “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Perhaps we forget that the grace of God works in the midst of these sorrowful words. “How long Oh Lord? Will you forget me until the end. How long shall I have sorrows in my heart everyday?” These verses are just as important as “Many are the afflictions of this righteous. But the Lord shall deliver them out of them all.” All of them she has quoted in prayer. We often want to get things together, order our words in prayer, trying to do God’s work of lifting our own spirits. I think we all do this often, even when praying with our own words, we follow a script, something that makes us feel like we understand what is going on. But Kristin never started prayers in her own words with a “Dear Lord '' or “Heavenly Father” or a “Almighty God” or anything like that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s pretty formal. She talked to God like a friend, truly, like he was actually there before her face. When she was upset, she let Him know, when she didn’t want to talk to Him she let Him know, when she was in joy, overwhelmed, angry, scared, she talked to God the way I rarely hear people pray, as if God is somewhere else and they’re sending their prayers to this faraway place where God is. Kristin prayed as if she actually believed he was really present there in the room with here. For her, an image of Christ was a reminder, he actually is that close, this is how near the kingdom of heaven is, it really is at hand.


2. Laughter is essential. The only day that I can remember that we were together and did not laugh or smile was the day of her death. Every day, whether it was early in the morning, during the day or late at night, even in hospice, I managed to get a genuine smile or chuckle out of her. It was just as helpful for me as it was for her, as she would often make me smile too. I still remember that first time after I saw her when she got out of her reconstructive surgery on her jaw, her face swollen up, loopy on pain killers and I said hi to her, completely overwhelmed by her appearance. She reached her hand out to me, I thought to hold but took her index finger and found my belly button and said, “boop.” There are countless moments of levity like this that shine brightly.


3. Sick People don’t always like talking about being sick. Being sick is a full-time job. To be asked about appointments, doctor visits, how you’re doing in regards to sickness, it’s overwhelming. I began to notice that she would drift towards those relationships where her illness wasn’t the main topic of conversation, where conversation could carry on without constantly making mention of those things. We rarely mentioned or talked about Kristin’s having cancer when it was just us. We didn’t avoid it, it just didn’t seem necessary. She had cancer. We were both aware of that. She loved this longish quote by St Paisios:

“Some people tell me that they are scandalized because they see many things wrong in the Church. I tell them that if you ask a fly, “Are there any flowers in this area?” it will say, “I don’t know about flowers, but over there in that heap of rubbish you can find all the filth you want.” And it will go on to list all the unclean things it has been to. Now, if you ask a honeybee, “Have you seen any unclean things in this area?” it will reply, “Unclean things? No, I have not seen any; the place here is full of the most fragrant flowers.” And it will go on to name all the flowers of the garden or the meadow. You see, the fly only knows where the unclean things are, while the honeybee knows where the beautiful iris or hyacinth is. As I have come to understand, some people resemble the honeybee and some resemble the fly. Those who resemble the fly seek to find evil in every circumstance and are preoccupied with it; they see no good anywhere. But those who resemble the honeybee only see the good in everything they see. The stupid person thinks stupidly and takes everything in the wrong way, whereas the person who has good thoughts, no matter what he sees, no matter what you tell him, maintains a positive and good thought.”

4. Serving the poor is serving God. Kristin glowed with the love of Christ any time she saw an opportunity to serve, to give to pray for the needy. Never was there a time, even during chemo weeks, where she would see a beggar in the street while we were driving and say, “give me your wallet.” Or see someone knocking on the soup kitchen door and tell me to go help before they walk away. There is a list of the names of beggars that she actually prayed for, still to this day the only Christian I’ve ever known to do this. I would catch her taking a break from her light garden work to strike up a conversation with a homeless person. She chose to actively hide her good works. But she lived out what St. John Chrysostom, “a man’s need is his own worthiness.”


4. Holiness is ordinary. Media can impact our expectations of what an experience of God is like. Seeing an angel or experiencing a miracle isn’t going to be like an episode of The Chosen (which we both did like by the way). But as we have had countless miraculous experiences (so many that Kristin kept a journal of all of them), what it taught us was that those things don’t define the Christian life, rather they can serve as evidences of moving in the right direction. Much of what makes a person holy is hidden. It would take a considerable amount of time to tell of all the good works, prayer, and fasting, study of scripture, letters, phone calls, intercessions, and more that Kristin did that were hidden from everyone. And now the Father who sees in secret has rewarded her openly in paradise and in the slow revelation of what she has done for so many.


5. Love is not about what you think is helpful. I remember in a book I read in college titled, “Lord, save us from your followers,” author Dan Merchant, confronts the self-righteous Christian attitude of us against the “secular” world. In it he talks about how most of the people aren’t hostile to Christians. On the contrary, they perceive Christians to be hostile to them and and these people outside the church begin to give countless examples of this experience of hatred and hostility towards them. In a similar way, I had to learn to let my wife’s needs be met the way that she needed them to be met, not the way I wanted to meet them. I couldn’t just start doing random things for her out of “love” and become upset that she wouldn’t accept something she never asked for. In that process I became humbled as I realized that I had to learn more about my spouse, to truly know her and not just rely on the version of her that I constructed. Much like in the book I mentioned, I had to realize that this is a real person, not a project to work on or a problem to solve. Yes, I am sure none of us think of others that way, but how do we act towards them? Do we acknowledge their humanity, realizing that they are dynamically beings with shifting and changing desires that we only see when we continually do the hard work of paying attention?


6. All things of this life are temporal. Aging and death are not natural. We were not created to slowly break down over time and perish physically . Yet, we treat it as a tragedy that this is not the experience of everyone. Throughout the hagiography of many Christian traditions, there are countless child martyrs. Aquilina is just one example who was a 12 year old Persian girl martyred for converting the governor of her province’s daughter to Christianity. In the story , God sends an Angel to raise her from the dead. The next thing she does is go back to her town and begin preaching the gospel in the streets and is martyred a second time. This time however, hundreds of people hear and see the boldness of this child who had just died and believe. I think about this story often, that a child can have such a level of fearlessness in the face of death, something that I and probably a lot of us here push away as long as possible, which is why we don’t like thinking about people dying young. We only want to die when we get to do everything we wanted in this life. Kristin and I mourned this for ourselves as well. We wanted to homestead, to have children, to be minimalists, to build our own house, to raise chickens, to grow old, to live “full” lives. But what is a full life? Christ came that we would have life abundantly. While nothing that I mentioned is bad, you don’t need to be a Christian to have a life like that. So that full life must be something else entirely, a way in which we can engage with child rearing, growing veggies, growing old, working our jobs and loving our families. Paul says that to depart and be with Christ is far better than being here. Though till the very end there was a reluctance to let that be a reality for me. I still find myself struggling with that idea, because I can accept it in my mind, but that doesn’t do much if it doesn’t change how I move and act in this life. Kristin’s death was a noble death. Our bishop came and visited her the day before. Her face glimmered in divine radiance the day of her death and she was able to take communion. She died peacefully in her sleep without much fuss, surrounded by family. A beautiful repose. In these events I can see the foundation laid for living in a way that reminds me that the life that is to come is the real life, the true life. Our accomplishments, our education, our family, children, grandchildren, houses, money, prestige, are given to us to propel us into eternity, as they help us in engage in that true life, the life of the world to come as it says in the Nicene Creed.The greatest title we can be given is not scholar, philanthropist, doctor, entrepreneur, or any other title that dies in the grave. The title that we should all hope to receive is “good and faithful servant.” May Kristin’s example serve as a reminder for us all of this.

7. Letting go of our illusion of control. I wrote a lot about control after Kristin’s cardiac arrest. This is a lesson I learned more when facing death and loss. My goal in life is not to keep it together, to present an image, to continue to keep a face up, but to journey towards Christ, to pray ceaselessly, or, as St Gregory of Nyssa says, to think about God more often than I breathe. This is the way that I’m finding that in The Father, and not myself, I move and have my being.

8. Do not seek earthly glory. After Kristin’s cardiac arrest many of us were searching for a motive as to why. There has to be a reason God allowed this. But Kristin and I realized that the reason has nothing to do with anything of this world. Kristin learned to not fear death and to trust that God loved her. To Christ, that was far more important than living a long life. It was challenging for us to ask ourselves that as well. Do we believe that the Psalm is right that says “Your love is better than life?” Only if we learn to let go of earthly glory and temporal comfort can we seek heaven and rejoice from the heart cracked open by the pain of loss and see that there is a blessedness of bliss and rest that Jesus provides from his scarred hands far above what any of us could have ever offered her. And those same hands reach out to us in our own lives, calling us in to rest and comfort in the midst of our mourning and loss.



I’ll end with a quote from Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick about the death of his mother. This is a reminder that our faith practices are not things we come to after all our schemes are done away with. They are not just the first, but the middling and last things that are of ourselves. The quote goes like this:



I have sometimes been asked by people who had lost someone through death or distance or a relationship cut-off of some kind what they should do. “I don’t know what to do” is a common refrain. If they are more churchly-minded, they may follow it up with “All I can do is pray, I guess.” I usually say to them, “What you can do is pray. It may be the only thing you can do, but it’s not all you can do, like it’s the leftovers when you have no other option. It is the best and most critical thing you can do.”

And it is. So we do.