Hey, friends!
At the end of January, I found out nearly a week after the fact that one of the teenage girls (I’ll call her K) I had the absolute joy of knowing from all my summers interning at a children’s home took her own life. It was my second Friday at my new job; I was sitting in my cubicle; and I remember the progression of staring at my phone, feeling the air leave my chest, grabbing my keys. I didn’t know when I pulled into the football facility parking lot that I would still find myself sobbing in my car even now.
When I left my children’s home job, I thought the hardest days I would have would be days that I missed celebrations—graduations & birthdays, performances & game-winning goals. But this day was harder, this day when I selfishly thought over & over & over again: no one’s going to hold them like I would. It was the hardest day to live with my choice to not be there, the hardest day to live with myself.
Every loss is different, even when it fits into categories that are easy to understand. There’s a certain kind of difficulty that comes when you have to explain a loss with backstory. There’s a guilt in acknowledging the weight of your grief when there’s no easy relational justification. K wasn’t my foster daughter, my sister, or my friend. She wasn’t my classmate, niece, or coworker. She wasn’t a kid I babysat or a kid in my youth group.
She is a kid I love with the full force of my heart. That’s the category, and that’s something I felt like no one would understand.
K was often soft-spoken, and she deeply loved to read. She adored her siblings, and I was lucky enough to be listening sometimes when wonder filled her voice. She could at once bring a seriousness to our conversations that surpassed her age and offer the sort of childlike laughter that spread its freedom to all who heard. There was a kindness in the way she carried herself that I’ll probably always come just shy of articulating well.
I was there when we celebrated her sixteenth birthday, and I was there in the dark on the night we squeezed her one last time before she went to live with family. I was only there for bits and pieces, but she is a kid I love with the full force of my heart.
One of my favorite days is a day I got to spend with K and her best friend. When I think about what I want my life to look like, I think about this day. I picked them up from school early so that we could go to the dentist. She was convinced I was going the wrong way because she was thinking of her orthodontist. We donned our masks & sat in the waiting room; they had their teeth cleaned. We drove back, and I listened as they vented about things going on in their lives. It was a perfect day because I got to spend it with two girls I love with the full force of my heart. Now, I see the image of them in my mind sitting in the back seat while I glance in the rearview mirror, and I wonder how much I didn’t see. I wonder what it might’ve felt like to live through my perfect day as K, as someone who might’ve been having anything but a perfect day.
Impenetrable sadness is difficult to carry to work & to the grocery store, to small talk & to Easter. It hits me the hardest in meetings because how could I talk about parking plans? How could I waste a single second on words that don’t matter when there are so many words I could be saying that do? And then it’s worse if it hits me after the meeting rather than during because how could I enjoy talking about communication strategy? How could I be a person who leaves & a person who could forget even for a second?
My entire existence is wrapped up in what I believe about love, and while I believe with every fiber of my being that God is love & love wins in the end (for every single one of us), I couldn’t (and some days still can’t) help but feel the earth grow shaky beneath my feet with the thought that sometimes love fails. I have to remember what my favorite professor taught me about the difference between success in loving others and faithfulness to loving others, and I have to remember that the point of love is never to produce some sort of measurable outcome. Love only fails to the extent that we fail to love, and even when our human attempts to model the redeeming love of Christ fail, the real thing prevails in the end.
All the ways I tried to tell K, “You’re so loved!” with my words and with my life weren’t enough. And yet, maybe they were. Because I’m glad I told her & I’d never choose a version of the story where I didn’t.
K is a girl I love with the full force of my heart. And I believe in loving that way, even though the cost of full force is that my heart will break.
All the love in the world,
Shan
P.S. You’re so loved!
Room at the Table 