widow

God’s unwanted gift is one of His greatest

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Death, in case you’re under any delusion, doesn’t wear a long, black coat, or carry a scythe. Nor does it only happen in Lewis, although we are remarkably good at it. I don’t mean that facetiously. Actually, I think we have always handled the business of dying with considerable aplomb, and that has somehow earned us the reputation for being a bit, well, morbid.

I don’t have any statistics on this, you’ll be glad to know, but I am fairly confident that the average Leodhasach goes to more funerals than his counterpart anywhere else in the country. Although I’m a wee bit away from pension age (and, unlike previous generations, actually getting more so the older I grow), I could not begin to estimate the number I have attended.

The book of Ecclesiastes says, ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting’. While few of us would opt for the former over the latter, there is – unsurprisingly – the wisdom of Solomon in this.

God draws us closer to Him in the times when we are broken. I think, like any parent seeing their child in pain, His infinite heart goes out to us. He knows what it is to grieve and although He knows our end from before our beginning, He also knows our limitations. Our Heavenly Father knows that we are going to have all tears wiped from our eyes ultimately, but He also knows how our faith can waver. Although we always have that truth to comfort us, we don’t necessarily remember it as we should.

After my father died, six years ago, I felt as though a door had been opened up into eternity – a door through which death might very well come again. Despite my job, I am not much given to premonitions. Nonetheless, I had a very strong impression that death had unfinished business with me. Within two years, my husband was undergoing an operation and treatment for cancer: the illness that took his life a little while after.

I have not written about Donnie’s last hours before now because I supposed no one wanted to know. But I have since read a very brave and honest account by another blogger, who lost her mother to the same disease, of what seeing someone dying can be like. Sometimes, we can handle everything else connected with mortality so well, and yet shy away from the truth of the death-bed.

Before he finally fell asleep, he would drift in and out of consciousness. Every time he awoke, he would look at the clock as though surprised and disappointed to find himself still subject to it. When I asked him if there was anything he wanted to talk about, he told me that he would be fine and then, surprisingly, he quoted, ‘I go to prepare a place for you’. Smiling, he added, ‘but you won’t like the curtains because I’ll have to choose them myself.’

He was still his lovely, cheeky self. But better, because although he was being kind as ever, I think his heart had already left me and his family, and gone on ahead. There had been months of pain and sickness, even flashes of fear and irritability. Here, though, in his final few hours of alertness to this world, it comforts me that his eyes and his soul were already looking to eternity.

The body is frail. He was strong and healthy until this sickness came. In the last hours, as I held his hand, the infection in his chest made a noise like several pots boiling at once. Despite this he – himself – seemed to be in total peace. And then, he was gone. Never one for great shows of drama, his death was typically quiet.

Watching him go, knowing the spiritual significance of that moment, you expect something more.

Why, though?

Physical death, after all, is separation of soul from body. The battle in his lungs had nothing much to do with the peace of his inmost being. What I and that lovely nurse were witnessing was simply his body closing down, no longer needed, for now.

His soul, on the other hand, had gone on. We who had felt so much pity for him in his suffering, and who feel so much sorrow at his loss, are actually the more to be pitied and sorrowed over. Donnie is where he would certainly never want to return from.

After he died, I was troubled by the verses in Matthew 6 that urge us to store up treasures in Heaven, ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. I worried that the treasure I was thinking about was my husband and that I simply – understandably – wished to be where he was.

But this is why grief can sometimes be God’s gift to us. It is not something that can be gone through, dealt with, and shelved away. Two years on, I still get waves of overwhelming, almost physical pain. And in those moments, I can go to my Saviour and show Him my bruised heart.

No one else comforts like He does. I can truthfully say that He has been closer to me in my sorrow than at any other time and, for that reason, grief itself can become a strange sort of treasure.

It was through death that He gave us the greatest gift of all.

 

 

God’s unwanted gift is one of His greatest

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Death, in case you’re under any delusion, doesn’t wear a long, black coat, or carry a scythe. Nor does it only happen in Lewis, although we are remarkably good at it. I don’t mean that facetiously. Actually, I think we have always handled the business of dying with considerable aplomb, and that has somehow earned us the reputation for being a bit, well, morbid.

I don’t have any statistics on this, you’ll be glad to know, but I am fairly confident that the average Leodhasach goes to more funerals than his counterpart anywhere else in the country. Although I’m a wee bit away from pension age (and, unlike previous generations, actually getting more so the older I grow), I could not begin to estimate the number I have attended.

The book of Ecclesiastes says, ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting’. While few of us would opt for the former over the latter, there is – unsurprisingly – the wisdom of Solomon in this.

God draws us closer to Him in the times when we are broken. I think, like any parent seeing their child in pain, His infinite heart goes out to us. He knows what it is to grieve and although He knows our end from before our beginning, He also knows our limitations. Our Heavenly Father knows that we are going to have all tears wiped from our eyes ultimately, but He also knows how our faith can waver. Although we always have that truth to comfort us, we don’t necessarily remember it as we should.

After my father died, six years ago, I felt as though a door had been opened up into eternity – a door through which death might very well come again. Despite my job, I am not much given to premonitions. Nonetheless, I had a very strong impression that death had unfinished business with me. Within two years, my husband was undergoing an operation and treatment for cancer: the illness that took his life a little while after.

I have not written about Donnie’s last hours before now because I supposed no one wanted to know. But I have since read a very brave and honest account by another blogger, who lost her mother to the same disease, of what seeing someone dying can be like. Sometimes, we can handle everything else connected with mortality so well, and yet shy away from the truth of the death-bed.

Before he finally fell asleep, he would drift in and out of consciousness. Every time he awoke, he would look at the clock as though surprised and disappointed to find himself still subject to it. When I asked him if there was anything he wanted to talk about, he told me that he would be fine and then, surprisingly, he quoted, ‘I go to prepare a place for you’. Smiling, he added, ‘but you won’t like the curtains because I’ll have to choose them myself.’

He was still his lovely, cheeky self. But better, because although he was being kind as ever, I think his heart had already left me and his family, and gone on ahead. There had been months of pain and sickness, even flashes of fear and irritability. Here, though, in his final few hours of alertness to this world, it comforts me that his eyes and his soul were already looking to eternity.

The body is frail. He was strong and healthy until this sickness came. In the last hours, as I held his hand, the infection in his chest made a noise like several pots boiling at once. Despite this he – himself – seemed to be in total peace. And then, he was gone. Never one for great shows of drama, his death was typically quiet.

Watching him go, knowing the spiritual significance of that moment, you expect something more.

Why, though?

Physical death, after all, is separation of soul from body. The battle in his lungs had nothing much to do with the peace of his inmost being. What I and that lovely nurse were witnessing was simply his body closing down, no longer needed, for now.

His soul, on the other hand, had gone on. We who had felt so much pity for him in his suffering, and who feel so much sorrow at his loss, are actually the more to be pitied and sorrowed over. Donnie is where he would certainly never want to return from.

After he died, I was troubled by the verses in Matthew 6 that urge us to store up treasures in Heaven, ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. I worried that the treasure I was thinking about was my husband and that I simply – understandably – wished to be where he was.

But this is why grief can sometimes be God’s gift to us. It is not something that can be gone through, dealt with, and shelved away. Two years on, I still get waves of overwhelming, almost physical pain. And in those moments, I can go to my Saviour and show Him my bruised heart.

No one else comforts like He does. I can truthfully say that He has been closer to me in my sorrow than at any other time and, for that reason, grief itself can become a strange sort of treasure.

It was through death that He gave us the greatest gift of all.

 

 

A Silent Voice And The Stronghold Of My Life

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Three months after my husband died, I was mildly surprised to find myself sitting under a tree in the grounds of the Cabarfeidh Hotel, meditating upon Psalm 27. It was an unexpectedly special moment in the midst of what was an awful time.

I hadn’t just randomly decided to do this – whatever else I may be, I am still a strait-laced Wee Free. It was an activity in the program of events at a Christian conference for women. And I think those thirty minutes of peaceful contemplation did more for me than the rest of the day put together.

It was against my better judgment I was there at all. Closed in with Christ, but not yet ‘out’ as a Christian, I had been persuaded into it by a lovely friend who has done more for me than she can ever know. She has been to me what her namesake was to Mary: a trusted and comforting presence in a time of change and new life.

When I arrived at the hotel in the morning, feeling like a fraud, the first people I saw were nurses from the hospital. I wanted to turn and run. It had not been long enough. The wound still felt raw and I was vulnerable.

But then, there was psalm 27, and silence.

It was already my special text. God is the stronghold of my life, He is my light and my salvation. How often I had prayed those words, knowing in the midst of my grief that this much was true.

And then, it was as if He had reached down and placed a comforting hand upon my shoulder. Here was my psalm; our psalm. In the midst of all these women, here I was with my Father.

Silence. I needed it and had not realised. The long battle with cancer does not make room for this kind of silence. There are so many words you do not want to hear. And when there are no words, there is no peace – just anxious waiting and that knot of foreboding. And then, after death, a different kind of silence. It is an absence of something in your home and in your heart. For years, I had lived for Donnie. And for months, I had willed Donnie just to live.

In the last week of his life, I spent every night on a recliner by his bedside. I wanted to hear his breathing and I wanted to be there if it should stop. Nothing could make me go down the corridor to the room that was ready for me. My mind recoiled from the idea of leaving him, and even more from the thought of being sent for.

That last silence came gently. He was just no longer there. It was many things, but it was – most of all – an end to his pain, and if not exactly the beginning of mine, a step-change in it.

Sometimes, I feel my widowhood most in the evening when I wish he was here to read and pray with me. I don’t want to be the head, and the whole household too. In my darker moments, I have ceased praying because I am fed-up of my own voice.

But He is the stronghold of my life and, somehow, even when I’m by myself, I am not alone.

There is silence, though not because I feel that God has gone away. In fact, I am aware of His presence constantly in my home. If He is silent, it is because He is waiting for me, or because He is drawing breath, about to speak. And I have learned to let Him.

It is always in my expectant quietness that He has spoken. And when He speaks, He speaks peace. Hearing His voice only deepens my desire not to utter a word, but just to listen. This, I always feel, is real prayer: His heart speaking directly into mine.

That is one of the reasons that I do not, as a Wee Free woman, feel deprived that I cannot pray aloud at public worship. What can I ever say with my lips that my heart cannot tell Him more honestly?

Last year, the Free Church held a national day of prayer. It remains a special memory for two reasons.

The day began for us in Stornoway with an early prayer meeting. For me, to share my morning devotions with others was beyond beautiful. There is something about the morning and prayer, anyway, but this was so lovely.

Our evening meeting closed with five minutes of communal prayer. I don’t know how many of us there were, but to have every heart joined in that way was moving and powerful. And it was silent.

I have come to the realisation that God does not need to hear our voices, or the words we try to say. We, on the other hand, should learn to simply be quiet sometimes, and let Him speak to us.

Only in the stillness can we hear Him.

Silence for the believer is not mere absence of noise; it is the presence of God.

 

I can’t feel your pain, but I know a man who can

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Recently, I read a blog post by the late Rev.Dr. Iain D Campbell, in which he reflected on his own father’s death. As a minister, he said he felt that he owed an apology to many families for having failed to fully appreciate the pain of parting with a loved one. I rather think he was being a bit too severe upon himself.

You cannot feel someone else’s pain for them. No matter how much you empathise, it can only go so far. If I ever complained to my late husband of an ache, a pain, or a bad day, he would make all the right noises and then say, ‘but, look on the bright side, at least I’m ok’! Of course he was joking, but there is some measure of truth in it.

My father passed away at the age of eighty-one and, when the minister came to visit my mother tried to play down her situation, mentioning the death of a young man that had happened the same week. ‘But’, the minister said, ‘everyone’s loss is painful to themselves’.

There is a limit to how much of another person’s burden we can shoulder, because we are not them. In the moments after the news was broken to me that my husband would die, the nurse said that, were it possible, she would take it from us. I think on that often; I’ve probably written about it elsewhere. But, of course, she couldn’t take it from us. We had to carry it ourselves: first, both of us together; and then, just me.

I had prayed, of course, that God would heal Donnie in a dazzling miracle, and restore him to me. God is unfailingly merciful, though, and doesn’t play with people’s emotions. He didn’t put false hope in my heart. Instead, He opened my eyes to what healing really is.

But my desperate petition reminds me of something else. Our Saviour also asked that the bitter cup of sin and death should pass from Him. In His very humanity, He flinched in the face of what was to come upon Him. And small wonder that He should.

What a uniquely lonely situation He was in: only He knew just what a weight there would be in the sins of the whole world; only He understood what it would mean for us to be parted eternally from the Father; He alone knew that the hope of salvation rested squarely upon His shoulders. And, of course, He alone has viewed death from both sides.

Although Jesus knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead, He still wept with the man’s grieving family. And although He knew that He was fulfilling God’s redemptive plan at Calvary, He still experienced fear and pain. No one could take that away from Him either.

We have to remember that He was also wholly God, which makes Him uniquely capable of understanding our pain. And totally human, which made Him desire to be freed from His fate.

That very fact means  He is weeping alongside every person going through a difficult time – through family troubles, through loneliness, through illness, through death. He wanted to push it away from Himself, but still drank that bitter cup to its very dregs for us. This is no well-meaning, aloof God, patting our hands and saying, ‘there, there’. Jesus has experienced all the horror of death so that we never have to.

I would be lying if I said that the bereaved Christian does not suffer. Of course they do. There is a sentiment I hear expressed in prayer for the bereaved from time to time in church which, I feel, sums up the great emptiness of it. ‘We pray for those who have lost loved ones – how difficult that a familiar voice is gone and that the home is now silent’. That is unendingly hard, it’s true.

Throughout Donnie’s illness, my mother kept getting the same text: ‘This sickness is not unto death’; she and I both clung to that promise. We forgot something, though. Our understanding of death, and God’s meaning in these words, are simply not the same.

After all, it doesn’t end there – it continues, ‘but for the glory of God’.

My home is a lot quieter these days, and a much-loved voice is gone. I would have him back, but I also know that if there are bolts on the doors of Heaven, they are sure to be on the inside.

I have nursed my husband when there was hope he would recover, and when there was none. And I have done many things I had believed were years away – cleared his wardrobe, stopped his mail, picked his headstone – but I cannot feel the pain of other widows doing the same things. Of course I empathise with bereaved people, and yes, probably more now than ever, but I am limited in what I can take on of their suffering.

Jesus is not limited. He is limitless. Our Saviour weeps with us, binds up our broken hearts and gives us not only the one comfort to be had, but the greatest comfort that could ever be: death shall have no dominion.

This Jesus, on the brink of a savage death, was afraid. He suffered unimaginably, but He went through it. My prayer for anyone whose home is silent because of death, is that they would speak to Him. Speak and He will answer. He will not leave or forsake you. He knows what you are feeling – better even than you do yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Identifying as a Wee Free Widow

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‘Identity’ is a word much in the news these days. Gender identity, ethnic identity, community identity . . . It’s the jargon of the time in which we live. Much like anything else, though, once the label goes on, the thing in the jar is already dead. We use the word, ‘identity’ so much because we have lost any real sense of who we are.

There was a time when, if I told my GP that I saw myself as an Irish tomcat, he’d probably have me quietly removed to a place of safety, having first said, ‘no, you’re a boring white maw lady’. But these days, you can – according to the right-on thought police – identify as anything you want.

I have trouble with this on several levels. There is an aspect of my own identity which I don’t like. Much as I may joke about it, I’m reconciled to the Carloway/Achmore/Harris genes; and I’m happy to be fluent in the language of Eden, even if we Gaels are more endangered than the corncrake.

It’s never troubled me too much that there are only two genders to choose from either because you don’t actually get to choose anyway. Occasionally, when my brother would receive his ‘Beano’, and I was stuck with dull old ‘Twinkle’, I’d wish I was a boy. However, antipathy towards Nurse Nancy and her implausible job at the dolls’ hospital was hardly the basis for such an upheaval, so I let it go.

Besides, if I’d mentioned that I seriously wished to switch genders, my father would have counselled me in the time-honoured way of all sensitive Lewismen, ‘Ist, oinsich.’ Conversation over.

The aspect of my identity I’m least comfortable with is the w-word. No, not ‘witch’. Not ‘weirdo’ either, thank you. It’s ‘widow’ I don’t much care for. And I think that a large part of my discomfort stems from the fact that it makes others uncomfortable too.

I keep remembering CS Lewis’ description of himself following the loss of his wife, as a ‘death’s head’, reminding all couples of their inevitable parting. Often, you fret that your very presence will upset people who are ill. Equally, I worry about ruining people’s parties and gatherings – I don’t want to be the hollow-eyed spectre at the feast while others try to make merry.

The problem is mostly in my head, though not entirely. After Donnie died, the MacMillan nurse advised me to change my shopping routine – ‘otherwise’, she said, ‘you’ll meet the same people you always do, people you know. And you’ll spot some of them trying to avoid you, which will hurt.’ She was right: I spotted people ducking up aisles in the supermarket, or suddenly becoming very interested in displays of teabags as I passed by. There were colleagues who never acknowledged my loss, and there were many expected visitors who did not come.

Two years on, I’m probably deemed safe – unlikely to burst into tears, or embarrass anyone by prostrating myself with grief in public. But I’m still a widow: a forty one year old widow. What are people supposed to do with that ? For that matter, what am I supposed to do with that?

Well, it’s simple. I decided from day one that I was going to be as easy as possible to be around. (Yes, this is the manageable version). If you want company, you owe it to people not to make it more of a challenge than it needs to be. That often means being the Catriona people expect even though I’m not the Catriona I expected. Smile though your heart is aching and all that jazz. My grief is mine, and I have no right to thrust it upon other innocent bystanders so long after the event. Two years is a long time. Unless, of course, you’re the one who has lost someone.

But this is where one other facet of who I am comes into play: my identity in Christ. Even in church, I can feel out of place. There are couples everywhere, and there is so much emphasis on young families that it’s easy to wonder where you fit. The answer, though, is in Him, and the answer is: ‘in Him’. He it was who, as Newton put it, brought me safe thus far. And, He intended my widowhood.

That’s the most startling and challenging thing of all. It’s only natural for people who are condoling with you to say how awful it is for Donnie and I to have been parted so young. We view it as though this world is everything, and to be taken out of it is punishment. Donnie wasn’t taken early; he was taken when and as God intended.

The logical follow-on is, therefore, that I was widowed when and as God intended.

So, God meant me to be who I am right now; this has a purpose. I am not where I am as the result of some unhappy accident. Providence knows no accidents; and Providence doesn’t want my self-pity. I do have such periods when I feel hard done-by  – because I’m a self-indulgent, egocentric sinner.

And then I am reminded of the cup that did not pass from my Saviour’s lips, despite His repeated prayer.

If you catch me feeling sorry for myself, remind  me that whoever I identify as, that’s who I’m identifying with – and He suffered unimaginably so that I wouldn’t have to.

 

Your Father’s Side & The Family Name

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It is hard to believe that we Hebrideans have any Viking DNA. I imagine that if a young Lewisman had ever said to his parents that he was off on a summer adventure to sack and loot, to raid and pillage, their reaction would almost certainly have been, ‘ach dè bhios daoine ag ràdh?’ What will people say? Surely marauding on this scale would reflect badly on them and therefore would have to be nipped in the bud.

‘What will people say?’ used to be the refrain of parents and grandparents in the island. Nowadays, people think of this attitude as narrow-minded, judgemental and stifling, but I think it helps to reflect a little on how it developed in the first place.

Your village was your world. The neighbours were as familiar to you as those who occupied the same home and shared the same surname as you. Besides, you didn’t go by your surname – you went by a patronymic, a chain of names stretching back into the distant past, connecting you to people you had never known. Perhaps you had some of their characteristics without knowing it. If you did, some cailleach in the neighbourhood would notice. ‘Iain Dhòmhnaill Sheumais used to walk like that’, or if she was feeling acerbic, ‘It’s a shame you took after your father’s side. Your mother’s people were good-looking.’

People knew one another inside-out, which meant knowing their history. Not just their personal history, either, but being able to place them in the context of their lineage. Forget Burke’s Peerage, your average cailleach had an encyclopaedic knowledge of her own people and those of her neighbours. It meant that they could see where your good points and your bad had emanated from. And so, your personal conduct would be added to that. The responsibility not to tarnish a good family name rested equally with each member, and each successive generation. Any deviant behaviour was likely to be dismissed as ‘rud a bh’ anns na daoine’ – a weakness in your people.

Now, of course, we don’t have villages; we have ‘communities’. Some are more community-minded than others and it’s not always the ones you think. I live in a rural village where there is quite a lot of Gaelic spoken and some crofting still taking place. You will even see the odd peat-stack. Nonetheless, when I was widowed, my immediate next-door neighbours visited, but no one else.

Had I lived fifty years ago, I would have been Banntrach Dhòmhnaill Chaluim and the neighbours might have rallied round; nowadays, I don’t have that comfort, or that status. I am not on their radar. People probably don’t even talk about me, no matter what outrageous – hypothetical – thing I do. It doesn’t matter to them because I am a stranger. Community in that sense has gone and many of us now seek that feeling of belonging and identity elsewhere.

For me, it has come from my church. I have been blessed with a close and supportive family, and my church family has been likewise.

My church family has at least as many quirks as my actual relatives. There are those who make you laugh, who laugh at you, who are always ready to help, who always want you to help, those who encourage and those who gently put you in your place. It has its father figures and mother hens, its bossy big sisters and cheeky wee brothers. This family has get-togethers and minor disagreements, outings and heart to hearts.

And this family knows its own heritage. When we are together, no one has to ask, ‘who do you belong to?’ We have the same father. He knows us all more completely than we know ourselves; and yet He loves us nonetheless. Each of us carries the unfortunate burden passed down from our first parents, and each of us has added some particular sins of our own. It is in our DNA to rebel.

Keeping together, though, returning often to our Father’s house, I think, is the only way we can refrain from bringing shame on the family. Reputation is very important when you are responsible for more than just your own. In God’s family, we need to reflect on our conduct more frequently, and ask the question again: ‘what will people say’? We have to fight against ‘rud a bh’ anns na daoine’.

Surely this is one setting where the ultimate goal is for everyone to see that we take after our Father, and that the family have care of each other. I hope that’s what people will say.

The Emperor of Maladies and the Everlasting Arms

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When someone you love is diagnosed with cancer, your world changes forever. Suddenly, you see everything through the prism of anxiety. You are afraid to make plans, afraid to laugh, afraid to presume. Life is no longer about living; it becomes about surviving. Normal service is suspended. A shadow lies heavy over everything and threat hangs in the air. Your life, that fragile, bird’s egg of a thing that you have constructed so carefully, may be crushed at any moment.

I lost my granny to cancer many years ago, when I was nine. Then, when I was eighteen, news came that my friend’s mother, a wonderful, funny, vital woman, pillar of my childhood, was dying. It was the first time in my life I ever experienced the kind of shock that makes the breath leave your body. And when I was 38, my husband was diagnosed.

All that time passed between my granny’s diagnosis and Donnie’s, and yet the word had lost none of its power to frighten. It feels like the same strong enemy it has always been. There are not too many conditions that’s true of. Small wonder that Siddhartha Mukherjee called it ‘the emperor of all maladies’. A sadistic emperor, I would venture, one that loves to create pain and grief.

What is the purpose of all this suffering? We are no more entitled to know the answer to that question than we are to know the other great mysteries of the universe. Faith is content with the fact that there is a purpose.

I have come to the conclusion that, just as sin is sin, trial is trial: there is no gradation in God’s eyes. If you have Him, you can go through it, whatever it is. Cancer scares us, but He works everything for good; whether that’s healing and recovery, or bringing you home to be with Him.

The biggest question is not, actually, why does He permit this suffering, but rather, how does He want us to go through it? We have already got part of the answer. He wants us to go through it with our eye fixed on Him. And I believe He wants us to be overwhelmed with fear, or pain. Not because He is a sadist or any of the other blasphemy that people like Stephen Fry accuse Him of, but because He wants us to stop trying to do everything on our own. It is possible that, as CS Lewis put it, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Not long ago, our prayer meeting heard of Joshua and the parting of the Jordan. The Ark of the Covenant led the Israelites through the river and onwards to the Promised Land. In our own wildernesses, we need to do the same: fix our eyes on the Lord that leads us through every Jordan.

It’s easy to let sheer sick terror paralyse you when you’re worrying about a loved one. But you need to take that worry to the throne of grace. In my own most despairing moments, I did and this was the answer I got:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
2 Corinthians 5:1

In the awful minutes after hearing that Donnie would die, the nurse who broke the news said, ‘if I could take this from you, I would’. It’s exactly how I feel every time I hear of another cancer diagnosis: the word itself is an assault on my heart. Anyone who has gone through it would not on any account see another suffer that fear and that pain which the word, ‘cancer’ always brings.  Yet, I know that God blesses us in these trials too, if we will only hold fast to Him.

Don’t listen to the people who tell you that you will get a back according to the burden; you won’t. He carries the burden with you and sometimes for you. God WILL give you more than you can bear, because He wants you to hand it straight back to Him. Your strength will not be up to this, but His is more than sufficient.

Shared adversity brings people together. How much more, then,  does it create closeness with God when you allow Him to carry you. I know that cancer brought my late husband into much closer communion with his Lord, and gave Him assurance of salvation. It did as much for me too. Cancer was, for us, the ugly messenger which brought good news. We no longer have one another, but we each have something infinitely better and lasting.

Cancer is not a person. It is not an enemy with plans, or feelings. We give it too much power. When it comes into our lives, like every other test and adversity – or, for that matter, every blessing and joy – we need to commit it into God’s safekeeping. He knows what to do with it because He knows its purpose.

In all of this, we have to look beyond the malady, beyond the sometimes gruelling treatment process, and see the Ark going ahead of us and parting the way. He is in the midst of these troubled waters too.

The Widow and the Devil

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In folklore, the widow was often a witch. I’m unsure whether the assumption was that, without a husband’s restraining influence, a woman was bound to fall into bad ways, or whether there is just something unsettling about a woman who is isolated from the mainstream. Despite living in the reputed witchcraft capital of Lewis, and being a youngish widow, however, I have somehow managed to resist the lure of the darkness thus far.

Gaelic tradition records an unspeakable ritual for summoning the Devil, used by such wicked people – in the taghairm, an unspecified, though considerable, quantity of cats would be roasted alive over a fire. Eventually, their howls would cause the great cat himself to appear to the one foolish enough to have requested his presence in the first place.

And we’ve all seen the Hammer Horror films, dancing women, chalk circles, blood and candles. Awkward, in a good Calvinist community, I’d have thought, buying tapers in bulk. However, the truth is more mundane and, simultaneously, a lot more terrifying. You need not draw a circle, strike a match, nor yet kidnap next-door’s tom. It suits Satan’s ego and his guile for you to believe that bringing him out is such a complex affair. It’s not, though, because he’s already here.

He is interested in everyone and prowls about, seeking whom he may devour. When I, not quite a year into my widowhood, professed faith publicly, I was told, ‘it’s now he’ll really be interested in you’. And this was true, though I already had experience of his torments. The Devil hates Christ and he hates His followers, and tries his utmost to do the impossible – pluck them back out of their Saviour’s grasp. Stealing their peace is his aim. His methods are varied, and sometimes quite surprising in their ingenuity.

One of the ways in which I sought comfort for my loss was in reading CS Lewis’ ‘A Grief Observed‘, adapted from the journal he had kept following the death of his own wife, Joy Gresham. It went well at first and Lewis’ description of grief as being ‘so much like fear’ spoke to me. The death of a spouse leaves you feeling exposed and vulnerable. Just the way the Devil likes it. And then, I read this:

‘How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never believed before – I thought it immensely improbable – that the faithfulest soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has rattled in the throat.It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to take up that belief now. H. was a splendid thing . . . But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured.’

I was horrified. Donnie had gone through so much pain and suffering – was Lewis right to suggest that somehow there was more refining and scouring to be done after death? Instead of thinking that he was out of pain, at rest, his cancer finally gone, I was now imagining him still being tested and tried. It tormented me, this idea that he still had no peace. Somehow, all these months of needles and blood tests, of tubes and scans, of endless waiting in rooms packed with white-faced patients and their terrified families, of bleak diagnoses and grim-voiced doctors, had not ended.

Grief IS like fear, Lewis was right about that. The same horrible ideas now took me over once again, just as they had with his illness. What processes, what tests would he be subjected to? How would these ‘stains’ be scoured? Would he be treated gently? Would he be frightened? And would he come through it?

Fortunately, this anguish didn’t last, and all because of one simple, wonderful fact: Christ’s promise to the thief on the cross, ‘today you will be with me in Paradise‘. I remembered that God, who cannot behold sin, would admit no one who was unsanctified; and Christ would not make a promise that He did not keep.

When you lose someone close to you, people are wary about mentioning death. In church particularly, people were very solicitous if a sermon even touched on the subject. I love them for it, but I want them to know that it’s not necessary. CS Lewis’ idea about death made me sick with fear. Every human being who has loved another human being knows that emotion. What we hear about in church, though, that’s different: that’s the death of death; death defeated by a death – THE death. So defeated that after THE death came life again.

And that thing which CS Lewis could not believe: the leap straight into perfection and peace? Oh yes, that too. Only the Devil will tell you any different.