Here I am again, at the public library. I have my usual seat, looking out the window. I come here to write, hoping to minimize distractions and, perhaps, enter a sacred space. Unlike my last writing visit, there’s no snow today. Spring is visibly here, and color is pressing into the landscape. Trees are budding with yellow and purple flowers, and the grass in the park is sprinkled with yellow dandelions. Children are playing on the playground across the street. I see a hive of activity. I’m not worried about the children; the ground is padded with a green recycled petroleum composite, and parents are anxiously hovering within arm’s reach.

A homeless man is resting comfortably in a chair ten feet from me, taking a nap, seeking refuge. Maybe he lost a son and could never put it back together. I’d understand.

In early Spring 2023, I took a graduate course in Spiritual Formation. We studied Dallas Willard, a renowned theologian and philosopher. Willard’s work has stayed with me over the last few months, and I spend a lot of time contemplating his ideas, especially now.

Willard suggests that the human person is made up of several overlapping layers. At our core, we have a spirit, sometimes called the heart or will. We have a mind with thoughts and feelings, a physical body, a social nature, and, ultimately, an outward-facing soul that interacts with the world and ties the spirit, mind, body, and social aspects of our life together.

I’m simplifying here, but the idea is that there is a lot going on within a human being that animates our life. Willard argues that as we bring these various components (layers) of ourselves into alignment with God, we begin to behave and look more like Godly creatures.

Christ-likeness, as it were, is about aligning the various layers of ourselves with the Divine.

This framework has helped me process my grief.

A few weeks ago, I had a long conversation with my second child, my son. We were discussing how much Cooper’s death has impacted our ability to think, remember, and cognitively function—especially in the early weeks and months after his passing. He shared with me that when he tells people about Cooper, he shares the story in fragments. This fragmentation isn’t purposeful; it’s just how his narrative comes out, how he’s processing. That sounds about right to me. It’s a fragmented story because it’s so challenging to make sense of—tragic, unexpected, final.

My wife had a great spring break in March. She met with beloved friends for hours and was able to talk about and process Cooper’s death with another mother who lost a son seven years ago under similar circumstances. But also, during this Spring break, my wife was able to see the doctor about some physical ailments she’s been experiencing, none of which were present before Cooper died.

My social life today is not what it was before Cooper passed. I don’t have a desire to spend much time with people or in social settings for too long. I find I need whole days alone to process, grieve, walk, listen to sappy songs, cry, write, pray, think, reflect, and wonder about it all.

I’m experiencing the loss of Cooper as total, consistent with a holistic view of the human person as described by Willard. All my parts and layers are impacted—my spirit aches, my mind is foggy, my emotions are tangled in complexity, my body has pains it never had before, my social life is stunted, and my soul, the part of me that ties it all together and interfaces with the world around me, is numb, smudged, little, dry, thirsty, nauseous, and porous.

These emotions. Emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional complexity.

Around 2006 or so, I visited a counselor for six sessions because I was stressed at work and experiencing anxiety. I remember our last meeting vividly. My coach, as I liked to call her, looked at me and said, “I think we’re done here.” I replied, “Sounds good. So, what’s wrong with me? What’s your diagnosis?” She looked at me and said, “You’re just learning how to get in touch with your feelings.” I was shocked. I asked, “That’s it?” Yep.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s not like my dad was a professor of emotional intelligence. He, like the men in his life and his culture, simply did what men did. All good, except my range of emotional understanding was limited, and would be for years.

As a safety mechanism, I also learned to limit my emotional involvement as a career firefighter. It was never the case that I (or we) could show up to all the emergency calls and become emotionally involved with patients. It wouldn’t have been survivable. I did what I imagine most firefighters do: I shut down my emotions when dealing with sick, injured, and mortally wounded people to protect myself. Then, ideally, when I left shift in the morning and went home, I would magically turn my emotions back on.

Right…

I think about this:

It’s 2010, and life being what life is, and given these landscapes we walk, I spent time with orphans in Eastern Europe. My wife and children were there too. Orphans, on par, have a limited emotional vocabulary. Same as firefighters, I guess. You simply do what you have to do to survive.

Orphans, in an orphanage, tend to quickly notice anger. Imagine me sitting with orphans and showing them feelings flashcards, and together we’re learning about feelings, making faces, and learning postures to discover new emotions—more than just anger. I can imagine it, because I did it. I learned too.

Life marches on, and in January of 2015, I was in the desert at a weeklong mindfulness retreat designed for those who worked in high stress operational environments, like fire, law enforcement, military, and intelligence. At this retreat, I learned to name and sit with various emotions and understand how they showed up in my body. For example, when I am joyful, I feel it in my chest with warmth and lightness. But even during this fairly advanced mindfulness retreat, the range of emotions we learned to work with was limited: happiness, sadness, anger, joy, anxiety, and maybe a few others.

Ever since that particular retreat, I’ve meditated. It stuck with me because it was healing. Call it mindfulness if you like. But also call it prayer, or silence. I am able to—actually, I embrace sitting in silence and going deep within my inner landscape. Have I circumnavigated this inner globe? Perhaps, but doubtful. To think, some folks travel the world and never take the time to travel their inner landscape: their spirit, their heart, their will—that blip of light hiding behind their chest wall, filled with light, heat, and breath.

Maybe, if we travel inside, we find God.

Where am I going with all this waxing? Just here: I have never in my life experienced the emotional complexity and dark, painful inner landscape that I have encountered over the last several months in the aftermath of Cooper’s death.

When I taught high school religious studies for a short season of life, I once introduced freshmen students to a basic meditation (centering prayer). Students sat in silence for a few minutes. In that short time, I had three students in the hallway crying because they couldn’t sit with the intensity of what they found, what they came face-to-face with, in their inner place—the deep place, where the coins are. The silence and inner landscape unnerved them. They left the coins on the bottom of the pond and quickly came up for air.

You know those indigenous pearl divers who dive to the bottom of a sea cove and spend three relaxed minutes exploring the depths? Yeah, it was not that.

Today, I can sit with the myriad grief emotions within me. I can’t, however, easily name these emotions. I can’t untangle them. The emotional complexity of child loss, especially in the early weeks, is intense and very, very difficult. I couldn’t sit with them.

If you’ll bear with me, I envision a thin thread of light running through the center of my body, top to bottom. The part of the strip of light that runs behind my chest, the part in my heart, pulsates—with my breath, with the silence, with the heartbeat of life under the ground that nobody hears but is there. At this place, where the light pulsates, the Universe took a giant ball of emotional complexity and tossed it in.

A spiritual pitcher gathered up all the emoticons, balled them into a spiritual baseball, and threw a 105 mph fastball at my chest. The pitcher said, “Here, sit with this.”

During the first three weeks after Cooper’s death, I walked around the house, probably in shock, muttering, “This is fucking terrible. This is fucking terrible…” My wife would say, “Stop saying that, it doesn’t even begin to describe this.” She was right, of course. It didn’t. But I didn’t know what else to say.

Words failed. I tried: sorrow, hurt, tragedy, sadness, negation, vacuum, tears, shattered, micro-atomic bomb, dark season of the soul, memories had, memories that will not be had, fear, despair, depression, anger, confusion, emptiness, nausea, pain.

All that and more, pressed together like a snowball. Big ol’ hands of the Universe packing a special grief meatball, seasoning it with all the things.

Today, as I sit in the library, I can say honestly, I am okay. I can say, I am going to continue to be okay, and I will make it. I can say with confidence, I am not going to forget my son, which, oddly enough, was my earliest fear.

I want those who have recently lost a child, and those who will lose a child, to know: it’s going to be hard, you’re never going to be the same, but you will make it—and you will not forget your child.

As time moves on, I begin to remember things. Still fragmented…

I spend a lot of time outdoors when I’m home, in the yard, or on walks. Now, I see the Cessna 172 planes overhead and I think of Cooper and smile. These planes have been overhead for months, but just now I’m noticing them. Cooper, I imagine, is literally above me, looking down from his Cessna. Before Cooper died, he was taking flying lessons and would literally fly directly over our house.

Cooper was very intrigued with crows when he moved to the Midwest. He would set silver coins on the fence post in the backyard for them. Crows are very intelligent birds, and it doesn’t surprise me that Cooper would be captivated by them. Lately, without fail, when I take the dogs out in the backyard in the morning, there are three crows making a racket above me in the trees. I smile and think of Cooper. Of course, these crows have been there for months, but only now am I noticing them, and I can remember Cooper fondly without the full thrust of the pain of grief.

A Cooper’s Hawk often sits on a low branch in the backyard. I smile. Has it always been there?

I’m enjoying my new part-time job. Three days a week, morning and afternoon, I drive near the site where Cooper took his life. I say my prayers, I lift my boy up, and I pray for all my family and friends. I know Cooper’s death is hard on me and my wife; we will never be the same. But I also know Cooper’s death is hard on his brothers, sister, extended family, and friends. We all hurt.

Life has certainly been fragmented.

Near our house, there’s a Catholic Church. Before Mass, Saturday and Sunday, the bells toll. Historically, the church bells tolled for Mass, yes, but also for funerals.

John Donne, English poet (1572–1631), writes in his poem For Whom the Bell Tolls, when the church bells ring for a funeral, there is no reason for us to ask, “For whom do the church bells toll?” We don’t need to ask “who” died, because the answer is: we did. The bells, they toll for thee.¹

Donne is arguing that we’re all connected. He’s saying a thousand, million threads of spirit bind us tightly together into a common humanity.

As I say, the smallest indivisible unit in the Kingdom of God is… two. Not one.

When Cooper died, we all died a little death. This complexity of emotions, this fragmentation, and yes, even this healing, we’re in it together. And, we’re going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.

Yes, the bells, they toll for thee.

1. Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel. Vintage Books, 1999, p. 108. ↩︎