Harrison
Today marks the 13th anniversary of the death of my brother Harrison.
My cancer diagnosis was not the first time I had to face the reality of unanswered prayers and death.
Grief does weird things, it can make something feel as close as yesterday or as far away as a lifetime ago. Right now it feels like it only happened yesterday, there are moments I vividly remember, and others as hard as I try I just can’t. It’s almost like I am not allowed to. But the pain is always there, it still lingers.
The details that lead to Harrisons death were ones that spiraled out of control quickly, one night he was complaining of flu like symptoms and the next morning he was unable to get up for school. Harrison was rushed to Lutheran hospital in an ambulance with my mom by his side, where he was conscious for the last time. It was discovered that he had bacterial meningitis, and what he actually died from was sepsis and a brain injury caused by the disease. He was on life support for several days, completely brain dead. On January 31st my parents made the difficult decision to take my brother off of life support and donate my brothers organs so that others were given a second chance at life. His life, was a gift to so many families. But he was only 14, no one should have to face making this decision with their own child. Looking back on this, I think about how much courage my parents had to posses to make this decision and face a parents biggest fear, burying their own child.
There were so many people who came alongside my family to make sure that they did not feel like they had to go through this alone. That made all the difference in my families ability to survive this hurricane that they were thrown into. People just showed up, they didn’t wait to be invited. It was the most sincere and active display of love and community and it had no strings attached. During a time that was so dark, we felt so seen, so loved. To hold so much love and grief at the same time is an interesting dichotomy. You can hold two very different feelings at once. I watched my family move through the next few days of my brothers death rather gracefully. But this was just because they were in shock, they were in survival mode.
After the viewing was over and the funeral ended I had come to a crossroads, I had to personally learn how to come to terms with the fact that it didn’t matter how many prayers were uttered, my brother was dead. He died for what seemed to be for no reason. No explanation.
So what happens when God doesn’t answer your prayers? Not just your prayers, but the prayers of your entire family, your entire church and your community? I was left to reconcile with the fact that I prayed to a God that chose not to bring healing. We were all begging for God to grant healing for what felt like days and nights on end. No one understood why healing wasn’t granted, some refused to believe it and even continued to pray that Harrison would be raised up from the dead. But at the end of the day, all hope was lost, healing never came, Harrison died and we left the hospital with one less person.
As a side note, I later learned that the only grief I could console was my own and that I couldn’t do the work for those I loved that were suffering. Even though I felt like I could, that was the first thing I tried to do, relieve everyone’s pain. No matter how many cakes you bake, meals you prepare, or activities you plan you can not take away anyone’s grief. But that realization came years later after many failed attempts to “fix everyone”. This was a valuable lesson that I am thankful to have learned through my own journey of grief.
I could have asked why he died, but did it really matter? Can you come up with a reason worthy of a child dying? No, you can’t, because it doesn’t exist. It’s not supposed to happen. Those questions seemed so meaningless to me. Even if God did supply the answers to me as an act of clarity, did it really matter how or why he died? There were no answers to these questions and even if they did exist it wasn’t going to change what happened. Instead, I felt like I had to ask different questions about my families loss and suffering, about my pain.
What was I going to do with the unanswered questions and the fact that our family would never be the same again? These things were agonizing to ask, but I knew they were valuable. What I was going through was valuable, not because suffering inherently has value, but because going through it cost so much. It cost my brother his life at an early age and I didn’t want that to be something that didn’t matter. It was far too precious. If I were to become obsessed with the need to ask why he died or how it happened, I would miss out on the opportunity to learn from this pain. If I wanted his death to mean something to me and to others I had to choose how I was going to let it shape me.
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, but I’m saying this with all the usual caveats I hope you have the grace to give me anytime I write something. “This is what I know to be true, for me in my heart, with what my experience has lead me to understand up to this point. It could change tomorrow.”.
This is the event that lead me to believe that things don’t happen for a reason, because there isn’t a reason for a child dying too soon. I wasn’t going to tell people that his death happened for a reason to make them feel better about it. I wasn’t going to create a cover for what God allowed by saying “Everything happens for a reason”.
As I tried to make sense of all the trauma I was experiencing, I knew that the way I chose to respond to his death is what would or would not, bring meaning and purpose to his life. That is what motivated me to shift my perspective and face my fears. I had to be open to allowing my pain to teach me. I was given an opportunity to dig deep and find out if I truly possessed any real courage. If I didn’t, I knew that Harrison’s death was going to provide me the opportunity to develop the courage I needed if I decided to face the pain. I wasn’t going to waste that, it was too precious, it cost too much. I couldn’t change the situation, but I could ask if anything of value or beauty could come out of something so tragic. If I had the courage to ask that question instead could something good come out of all of this? Could his death mean something and was there anything valuable to find? This was not about living in denial or avoiding the grieving process, it was about learning what pain and grief could teach me in my darkest hours if I let it. But I had to have the courage to face it, and that was’t easy.
I think we get to choose if something has meaning, we get to choose if things matter by the way we respond. We determine if things happen for a reason by giving them a sense of purpose, of worthiness in their existence. These acts of suffering and pain have already happened and there were no take-backs. These events don’t have to be a child who died or a terminal illness. There are many situations that have occurred when loss has no explanation and there are no second chances. These are written in stone. So what can you control? You can control your response and your perspective so that the pain and suffering that is inevitable isn’t wasted, because there is no avoiding it no matter what you do. So when you are ready, let it teach you if it already has to exist because you can not avoid grief and pain forever.
Suffering can teach us, it can illuminate the darkest places of our soul that we are afraid to go. It can provide us with overwhelming amounts of empathy for others that we didn’t have before. It can teach us to be a better friend or even a better stranger to someone in need. It can allow us to see the world the in a softer way and release us of our judgments. At least it did for me. The question we have to ask ourselves is “How are we going to allow pain and suffering shape us?” because it will shape us regardless of if we want it to or not. The pain I felt wasn’t just about me, it was also about Harrison, if he had to face death, I could face my fears, unanswered prayers and loss. I decided I was going to honor his life instead of allowing the loss to destroy me, and that is when I saw this pain as an opportunity.
As a child, you could say I was born with a sense of urgency. I don’t know why but I have always felt like time was running out for as long as I can remember, and this situation only confirmed how temporary I already felt like life was. So I hit pause bottom on my life and school in LA to be home with my family for that year. I knew I would recover that time and school would always be there, but my heart was telling me to be home, at least for a little while. As a result I also devloped close relationships with Harrison’s friends through youth ministry. That was where I felt like I needed to be. I didn’t have a plan, I just showed up, I didn’t know what to say most of the time, but I was there. We did a lot of things outside youth group, that was just the spring board for whatever activities we were going to plan. We went to concerts, late night tee-peeing, and pizza parties —all with my little sisters trailing alongside. Being a part of his world was a way for me to honor him, because these kids were his best friends, they mattered to him and that was reason enough for them to matter to me. Those relationships developed into lifelong friendships I still treasure today, every single one of them. Now these kids are adults with their own kids. There was a lot I learned about life and teenagers. I started to see how much everyone just needed someone to show up and listen, to be present and spend time, or be brave with them as they faced something hard. That’s all it takes, they are just asking you to show them that they matter. They aren’t always expecting you to solve their problems, you can’t do that for anyone but yourself anyways.
I started coming to terms with how finite life is, and that sometimes God doesn’t give mercy on this earth, people die and we don’t get to know why. I realized in those hard, agonizing moments of deep sorrow that life is truly a gift on this earth and it is nothing short of a miracle that we exist. We are guaranteed nothing in this world, we are owed nothing, it’s strange for me to think I used to move about this Universe thinking that I ever was. I had to identify what was truly worthy of my time and attention and live in light of that everyday. We need to have the courage to think about death, to know that it could knock on our door at any moment, this should not discourage you, it should empower you to act on your dreams now. Harrison loved risk, he loved to break rules, and he rarely gave a second thought to what other people would think, he just did shit, and he always knew he could sweet talk his way out of the consequences later. Which he always did successfully. Now this was not how I was going to live my life all the time, but I did sprinkle my life with this lesson. As a result anytime I did something that scared me or I took a risk, I thought of Harrison. He is always in the back of mind, egging me on to take the road less traveled. My life would not look the same without this, because death has always scared me. But once I actually faced it I saw it as something that allowed me to start taking more risks and saying yes sooner. The reality of death was working for me, it started to illuminate with great clarity what truly mattered.
My brother Harrison left so many things to equip me for the journey we all call life 13. It was his death that gave me the choice to find and receive love and strength in the midst of pain and suffering. It could have gone another way if I would have chosen the path of least resistance, the easier path. But instead I faced all the ugly realities of grief, suffering and loss, and allowed it to take me to the hard places to teach and soften me. This response eventually lead me to find more hope, more healing and more love that I had ever known. But I had no idea that this would lay the foundation for me to face what I am facing now, that I would need to draw upon this courage to face cancer and death three times.
Harrison, thank you for showing me how to bravely face the darkest moments of my life and teaching me how precious each moment it is. I won’t waste a minute. I would not be the person I am today, without you. You are still teaching me everyday, 13 years later.
