I Knew What the Funeral Director Would Ask. That Didn’t Make It Easier.
I knew most of the questions before the funeral director asked them. After burying two husbands and losing my father the same year as Joel, very little about planning a funeral is unfamiliar to me. I knew which decisions were coming. I even knew which ones could wait. But knowing your way around a funeral home is not a skill anyone seeks to acquire.
My mother died less than a week ago, as of this writing, and her death placed me back in that painfully familiar setting. What surprised me was that the same feeling of fear did not come over me when I walked through the door. I could not tell if that came from experience, exhaustion, shock, or some combination of all three. I’m still not sure.
For years, people have considered me a “grief expert.” Apparently, losing two husbands so close together, along with my dad the same year as one of those husbands, makes people assume you know what to do with that level of loss.
I soon found myself counseling* new widows that friends had sent my way. I shared my story and tried to offer the kind of comfort I had needed in the first weeks and months after my own losses. I had a responsibility to say yes because Scripture tells us that the comfort God gives us is meant to be shared:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. —2 Corinthians 1:3–5, NIV
That passage mattered to me then, and it still does. God gently carried me through things I did not think I could survive, and I wanted other women to know He had not left them either. My faith gave me something solid to hold on to when I had no useful words of my own. I know my story would have looked very different without God. That is a hill I still choose to die on.
Many of the widows I met did not share my faith. Those conversations taught me a great deal. I became less judgmental, listened more carefully, and biblically examined what I believed so I could answer honestly when someone asked. I also learned that a woman in fresh grief usually does not need a speech from me. She needs someone who will listen without trying to talk her out of what she feels.
The problem is that I have spent most of my life loving people while also trying to avoid them. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but listen to me. I truly do love people. I love sharing stories and tear-filled moments and even speaking to a roomful of strangers. I am not shy. I just need quiet afterward, and usually quite a bit of it. That speaks to the introvert in me.
Before I became a widow, I traveled for speaking engagements here in the United States and abroad. I often spoke to women about the loving God who could still use them despite their backstories. After each session, I needed a nap, a walk, or a little time alone before I could do it again. Quiet was how I refueled.
After Joel died and I became a widow for the second time, I accepted very few speaking invitations. Some of that was because the invitations did not come as often. If I am honest, I was relieved. My life looked nothing like it had after my first husband died.
The main difference was my children. I had previously navigated divorce and widowhood as the solo parent of one biological daughter. This time, I became the only parent of four neurodivergent children, each with needs that did not stop simply because their father had died. Neither did the appointments, schoolwork, meals, medications, behavior struggles, laundry, or anything else that pack our days.
Now, my life is still filled with constant noise and almost no time alone. Even an infrequent attempt at a nap usually ends with “Mom, this...” or “Mom, that...” I get up early to do my Bible study or write before the kiddos wake up, then stay up far too late completing chores because the day never seems long enough. Yes, I know I could let more things go, but that is a topic for another essay.
This very full and complicated life I now live might have made the funeral home experience feel different this time, because my life offered me no space to simply fall apart, even when I might have emotionally needed to. The task list that called for completion after my appointment wouldn’t simply evaporate. Experience may have seasoned me, but responsibility did too.
The funeral director still moved through her list with my sister and me. But the person at the center of every question was our mother. That fact changed all of the answers.
I have wondered since then if my lack of dread meant I had at last learned how to handle grief. I doubt that’s the case. Maybe my mind knew there was work to finish before it could absorb what had happened. Maybe God gave me enough steadiness for that moment and no more. Maybe the grief is simply taking its time.
After all these losses, I have come to realize that simply knowing the mechanics of funeral planning is not the same as knowing how a loss will affect you. For example, I know where to sign the papers. I’ve also learned to order more death certificates than I probably will need. I’ve learned that some decisions might feel urgent when they really aren’t. Unfortunately, none of that tells me how I will feel two weeks from now when everyone else has returned to normal, and I have not.
Perhaps my hardest question: Where will this grief fit into my already jam-packed days? Days that were already way too full before my mother died. My children still need daily help with just about everything, and a mother who can finish a sentence, even despite a foggy brain. Grief doesn’t care about my calendar, though. It will come when it comes, whether I have made room for it or not.
I may know more about funerals than I ever wanted to know, but I am not a grief expert. I am a daughter whose mother just died. I am also a mother myself, with four children at home and very little quiet in which to sort through what I have lost. I have to be both, whether I feel able to or not.
What comforts me is that God has met me after every funeral I have had to plan. He never asked me to handle any of them like an expert. He has allowed me to use what I learned to help other women, but He has never confused my experience with self-sufficiency. I still need Him every bit as much as I did the first time.
I knew what questions the funeral director would ask, and I answered them. The harder questions can wait, as I do not yet have those answers. For now, I will trust the same God who carried me through every loss before this one to carry me through the loss of my mother, too.