I didn’t think 2020 could get any worse, and then it did.

Each morning I wake up and for a moment I am fine, then it hits me. The recognition of grief. Like grief has been standing beside my bed waiting for me to open my eyes. It wants to be acknowledged and entertained like an unwelcome relative that won’t leave your home. I remember this same feeling when Anna died. You think, oh no, did I dream this terrible thing? Please let this be a bad dream, but you know it’s not a dream. And loss spills like twilight across your day, drenching you in darkness as the sun rises in the sky.

I took this picture of the tire swing with tears running down my cheeks this past weekend. When Anna was little, she loved the tire swing in the meadow. Just like our children, Anna’s cousins, loved it when they were small. Now our grandchildren love it. The swing will spend the next nine months untouched by children. Perhaps encased in snow. I snap the picture early in the morning and I’m already so tired.

Grief can be exhausting.

We spent this past weekend closing up our cabin. I always find this a sad event. The summer five years ago after Anna died I stood in the meadow after boarding up our cabin in the fall and everything looked dead. The grass so brittle and brown. The willows wrestling the last bit of moisture from the dry creek bed that cuts through the meadow. The pines shedding their needles, the way you shed a wet coat when you come in from the rain, but there has been no rain in months. The mountains are so dry this year, fires rage in nearby forests, and yet I looked down and found this tiny flower in a patch of green.

This little flower gave me hope.

Our daughter says she feels like a prisoner of hope. Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you. Zechariah 9:12. “I think this is my verse,” my daughter told me last week. She is pregnant with our grandson. The quarantine conception that delighted us back in March has now become a journey of sorrow. Several ultrasounds and bloodwork have revealed our grandson cannot live for long outside his mama’s womb. We aren’t even sure he will make it to birth. Sometimes you have to board up your heart to keep it from being destroyed by the storm.

In the high Sierra where the snow can reach twenty feet deep around the curve of our cabin, we prepare for snow we will not see since we return to the valley for the winter. We lock everything down tight and wait for spring. But before locking down this year, I spent the weekend mostly reading, playing board games at night with our youngest sons at our cabin, and reading all day while Scott and the boys swam and kayaked in the lake.

I plowed through my Bible, a book on grief titled: A Grace Disguised, by Jerry Sittser, which I highly recommend if you’re grieving, and another book: Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging by one of my favorite journalists, Sebastian Junger. I also am listening to Empire of the Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche nation. I know. Strange bedfellows, these books, but they’re working for me. I’m gaining fresh insight into the human fabric of loss. It doesn’t have to be someone dying. Loss can be a divorce. Loneliness. Depression. Sickness. Financial destruction. Your tribe dispursing. A burned down home like many are facing in the raging California wildfires.

My cousin Pam lost her house, originally my grandmother’s sister’s sweet house in the woods above Oroville. My great uncle built this house before I was born. Pam escaped with her cockatiel Fergie and little else last week. I am saddened by the loss of this family home and I hurt for Pam and everyone affected by the firestorms. We have other friends who’ve lost their homes too in these raging fires.

Loss can hit you fast and leave you spinning. Or start slowly and build in a series of gains and losses that ultimately bemuse and break you because it seems loss triumphs in the end.

But does loss really win?

I believe it depends on how we handle loss. I’ve learned to hang onto God’s promises with all the power I can muster, which isn’t much strength these days. I feel worn down by 2020. The truth is power and control are an illusion. We are not in control the way we think we are, 2020 is proof of that.

Please pray for my daughter, her husband, and all of us. Our 12-year-old son cried because he’s losing his nephew. We’ve all been crying. We laugh too, it almost sounds manic sometimes. One of the boys or even our daughter makes a joke and we all laugh wildly. Like holding the reins of a runaway horse that bucks and kicks and farts and you hold on for dear life laughing but really you’re terrified. Mostly, I just feel bewildered by this slowly unfolding loss in our family.

I have found loss can diminish or expand us. We will ultimately love more or we will withdraw and love less in the wake of loss. My hope is that we love more and trust in the promise, “He heals the wounds of every shattered heart,” Psalm 147:3.

If you are suffering some kind of loss in your own life right now, and many of us are this year, I hope you will lean hard on the Lord. If you can’t find the strength to lean, just let yourself fall. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms, Deuteronomy 33:27.