Life After Death

sudden-death tragedies and the resurfacing of trauma

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Where do you feel it in your body?

If I would have been sitting in my former therapist’s cozy office this morning, I would have quickly replied, “Everywhere. I hurt Everywhere,” before narrowing down to the ball of dread presenting itself like nausea in my stomach.

Aside from the hours I spent asleep, my body has been physically reacting to the news of the DC plane crash since I heard about it via a text from my sister at 9:11 pm Wednesday. From that moment on, I haven’t been in a great place. It doesn’t matter if the people involved are strangers or friends, news of sudden-death tragedies make me re-live my own. The trauma I faced at 15 with the drowning death of my younger brother tangles itself into the new story until my body reacts to it like it’s one and the same.

It’s a strange phenomenon that I’m no stranger to.

I still feel IT deep within me. In moments like these, the trauma claws its way to the surface like a consuming monster.

The agony of the wait. The grasp of hope for good news, no matter how slim. The search and rescue…in the end turned only to recovery. The death grip of silence as law enforcement approaches with shattering news. The shock of waking up day after day into a nightmare. The brutality of a world that keeps spinning when yours has stopped.

It’s a lot to re-experience. And I’m confident it’s absolutely horrendous for those experiencing it in their real lives in real time and in a really public way. I don’t share my experience to steal from them, but to hopefully remind others that like me, those left behind are real people with real faces and real emotions and real relationships and they were suddenly thrust into a type of club no one seeks membership for…the horrible club of tragic, sudden death and loss. Sixty-seven lives lost. Sixty-seven people who left behind others who love them dearly and face the rest of a lifetime without their presence. It’s agony.

During the last couple of weeks, I read an Instagram post by Brianna Lambert that she captioned, “If you have suffered then you know how to pray.”¹ She wrote that people who experience various types of suffering are positioned to be the best kind of prayer warriors for those currently in a similar state because of IT. She writes, “We know the insecurities the other person isn’t voicing, we know the fatigue that comes with that affliction. We know the fears that don’t seem to leave, and the grief that washes up in the most random and inopportune times. We know the guilt, the doubts, and the specific sorrows that come with that sorrow. And we can pray *specifically* for them.”

In the post, Lambert also references 2 Corinthians. This book, chapter 1:3-7 in particular, is a scripture I’ve clung tightly to since the days of miscarriages, but it applies to the death of siblings, too: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.”

Like Lambert, “I wish I could fix the sorrow these people feel, because I know how much it hurts.” I wish these people didn’t know what I know. I wish these people didn’t feel what I feel. I wish these people didn’t have days of shock and funerals stretched before them. I wish they didn’t have to stumble through the fog of unexpected grief. I wish I could prevent them from experiencing the sorrow that hurts. But that’s not in my power.

What’s in my power is to share and to pray.

Lord, have mercy.
Hear our prayer. 

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