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Please enjoy an excerpt from Ree’s upcoming book:
“It Is Not Well With My Soul: Surviving, Healing & Forgiving God After Tragedy”
(A Multi-Media Memoir with Creative Prompts)
All Rights Reserved. Ree Boado © 2024
Chapter 4 / Searching for Goodness
We set out on the open road in our 1998 Chevy Explorer conversion van that my husband and I had bought to take our expanding family on weekend trips. This was a luxury vehicle in its time. Leather seats that swiveled, a TV/ DVD player in the back, mood lighting, and a bench seat that suspensefully transformed into a bed with the push of a button. With a sticker on the back saying “van life” next to the peace sign fingers, we were all prepared to be those embarrassing hippie parents with the old school van, traveling around and camping out. We seriously loved that thing. But our first big trip in our stylin’ new ride was downright depressing without our extra passenger cooing and crying in the backseat.
It had only been one month since we left the hospital with empty arms and now Thanksgiving was upon us. How untimely. A holiday that’s all about family and gratitude. Historically, it’s been my favorite holiday, since it was the only real holiday we celebrated when I was a kid. Long story, but I guess my dad couldn’t find anything wrong with pilgrims eating.
So how were we supposed to celebrate my favorite holiday when neither of us felt like we had anything to celebrate? I had fought for most of my adult life to work through all the holiday blues that try to come on every year, remnants of earlier times. I wasn’t about to give up and hate the holidays. I knew I had to search for goodness or I’d be swallowed up into a black hole of depression.
Toes sinking into warm sand sounded a lot better than our sink full of dirty dishes. A few weeks before the holiday, I had a passing thought that I’d love to see the ocean. Staring off into a distant horizon over a large body of water has always reminded me of the vastness of eternity. The ocean is peaceful, mysterious and awe inspiring all at once. A place that I could hopefully find some solace. God must have overheard my thoughts and a few days later I got a call from a friend offering us her condo near the ocean in Florida. When you get offered a beach house near the Emerald Coast, you take it! Sounded like the perfect getaway from our empty and miserable house.
We hid out for a week in a home not far from the beautiful, white, sandy beaches of Destin, Florida. Palm trees, sunshine and a location where no one knew us or our horribly sad story. The perfect Thanksgiving after the perfect storm.
On that first day, David and I never left the beach house. We ate the food we had brought in a cooler, listened to some music, read, and tried to survive the numbing sadness. Since Thanksgiving was approaching, we figured we should go grocery shopping and try to make some kind of decent meal, though neither of us had the energy to roast a turkey. We settled on salmon, mashed potatoes and green beans and hit the local Publix for supplies. Wandering the aisles like a zombie and going through the motions of normalcy, I suddenly realized I was surrounded by nothing but families. A mother and teenage daughter, a family of 4, a mom and dad with an infant in a carrier. I told my husband “we have to get out of here, I need to go” and we hustled through the self check-out line as fast as possible, to get to the safety of our car and away from the reminders of the life we almost had. A life with our daughter still alive.
Back at the condo, I decided to read over my journal entries to God from that previous year of pregnancy. It was time to face my old friend, though I’d been avoiding him. For the past two and a half years I had been using a journaling process from Dr. Caroline Leaf’s 21-Day Brain Detox course, to help cleanse my mind of toxic thinking. As a christian neuroscientist, she shares her research on the power of the brain to transform our thoughts and alter our lives. It made a huge change in my thought life, curing the mild depression I had been struggling with for years, so I just kept up the habit. I no longer did it daily, but rather a couple times a month. It was very cathartic.
Through these reflective writings, I had finally started believing that I could hear God’s voice as I sat with him and really listened. Not audibly, but more so an inner knowing of who he was and how he would respond to me after knowing him through his word for so many years. But now that he allowed my daughter to die, I doubted I was ever truly hearing him. Maybe it had all been wishful thinking that God would truly care enough to speak to me about my daily life. I was angry, confused and so deeply hurt by him that I didn’t know how I’d react to these conversations I had held so dear.
I slowly opened my computer, afraid of the confrontation that lay ahead. Tears flowed as I reread all the words the Lord had spoken to me throughout pregnancy. In my anger and disappointment, I looked for anything specific that I could call him out on, proving him to be a liar. Either he was a liar or I was crazy for believing I could hear him.
I landed on some entries that said he would help me mother Wynter and that he was bringing me into a season of joy. I suppose he could have meant he’d help me mother her from afar through remembering and honoring her, but what about this “season of joy” I was desperately hoping for? This seemed cruel and yet I knew that all throughout God’s word, suffering always seems to precede a deeper joy. And that joy is knowing him more closely as he’s nearer to us in our suffering. Of course I had hoped it meant less suffering.
As I hunted to find something else to indict God with, I instead stumbled upon a phrase that brought me to tears but gave me hope that perhaps I was hearing God’s voice all along. I had written down “hold her tightly, but hold her loosely”. This is exactly what I had to do that entire week in the hospital. I had to learn at exponential speed, what all parents must learn as their child grows up. How to let go.
Wynter’s ashes were packed in my suitcase, with plans of releasing some of them into the ocean. On the day we were ready, I went to get the container that we kept them in. Pausing at the top of the stairs, I sobbed as I cradled it in my arms like a baby. It was all I had left of her physical body and I wanted so badly to hold it close and never let it go.
Making our way to the ocean’s shore, my sweet husband made a heart shape in the sand with his feet, poured a bit of her remains in the heart, and then we watched as the waves rolled in to take her away. Part of me wished I could’ve been taken away too, but I knew this was another step in letting her return to the Lord.
Thirty minutes before sunset became our favorite time to sit on the beach in Destin. The way the sunlight at that hour shone upon the entire setting was otherworldly. Pale blue reflecting on white sands, which melted into the blue ocean on up into the blue sky streaked with pink. Every part was connected to the next. Absolutely stunning. It reminded me of Aslan’s country from the Chronicles of Narnia movie, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This well loved story by C.S. Lewis portrays Aslan, a lion king, as a symbol of Jesus and Aslan’s country as a symbol of Heaven, which lies beyond a large ocean wall. I couldn’t help but sit there every evening, wishing for a magical glimpse of my daughter and what lies ahead beyond this difficult world. The beauty was soothing, so I just soaked up as much as I could, thanking God for his incredible creation of nature and my daughter. Even then in my paralyzing sadness, I knew that expressing gratitude for what God had given me was helping something inside my mind and heart.
The act of looking for the good we currently have in life has been studied by researchers and found to have incredible benefits for our mind and body, changing our brain pathways and even our chemical makeup. Though extremely difficult at times, I think God was onto something when he told us to be thankful in all circumstances.
“Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for
you who belong to Christ Jesus”
(1 Thessalonians 5:18)
It can seem cruel to read this verse while thinking of child loss or trauma. Surely God doesn’t expect us to thank him for our child’s death or whatever heinous thing has happened, does he? Of course not. He never asks us to thank him for the evils that happen in our world or to deny our feelings in the aftermath of tragedy. But there is room to search for his goodness in spite of the awful circumstances we find ourselves in. To listen for his whispers of hope that keep us going. To be thankful for the experience of being alive, with all its glorious joys and heartbreaks. To feel immense love, even when it’s in the form of grief. To learn resilience through our individual stories, rising from the ashes of defeat again and again.
Most of us have heard bits and pieces about the positive effects of gratitude, but may have written it off as “that positive thinking crap”. I used to do that too until I started a gratitude journal at the suggestion of a counselor several years ago, when I was struggling with depression and low self-worth. I felt the shift in my thinking and would even look back over those bullet point gratitudes months later and they’d still cheer me up in low moments.
Pain puts our brain in a state of fight or flight. We’re waiting on guard for the next awful thing to happen. It can be a helpful indicator that something isn’t right, but intense pain can also make us have tunnel vision and some of us can even get stuck in fight or flight for years. Our nervous systems become overactive and we can’t seem to return to a place of inner calm. Many of us will need help from a skilled trauma therapist to cope and heal. In our deepest mourning, this state is inevitable and human. We do need to fully experience our God-given emotions and not shut them down if we want to heal, but there is an important balance of grief and gratitude that can help our mental health. Mourning without gratitude leads to despair and hopelessness. Gratitude without mourning leads to superficiality and a lack of compassion for others. Both are necessary on the road towards wholeness.
Searching for good and expressing gratitude even for small things when we’re hurting, guides us towards a perspective outside of ourselves. It’s usually focused on the gifts coming from others and from God, which gives our tormented, grieving minds a break from our stressful feelings. That break can help our nervous system learn to calm itself again. Turning our minds to see a bigger picture of life outside our pain can feel forced at first, but that’s how it feels to change brain patterns and to fight our toxic thoughts. The struggle is real.
Though I’m still working towards forgiving God for his choice in allowing Wynter to die, I’m also choosing to be thankful that I ever got to have a daughter at all. Many people will never experience the mystery of pregnancy or the exhilaration of laying eyes on a child that came from their own body, yet I did and it was an absolute joy that I don’t take for granted. If “every good and perfect gift comes from above” (James 1:17), then clearly Wynter was and is my gift from God, regardless of how short her days were on this earth. I will always be grateful for her life, amidst the pain of being separated from her.
Thankfulness usually comes from remembering someone’s good qualities. This can be a major challenge when we’re really angry at them. When my husband and I get into regrettably heated arguments, it’s easier to be mad and react to the injustice of whatever I think he did, than it is to remind myself that he is a good husband and perhaps I’m misunderstanding him.
It’s the same with God. I knew in order to repair our relationship, I would need to actively remember his goodness and entertain the thought that I could be completely misunderstanding his intentions for allowing this tragedy in my life. I mean, who was I to know what the Everlasting God was doing here? He’s not a man, he’s outside of time and he knows things we can’t begin to understand. I was aware of this and yet Wynter’s death had put me in a triggered state of fight or flight. I had a lifelong, strong relationship with God and yet my brain still associated being in that state with my early childhood trauma. The old roots within my mind had begun to tell me once again that no one cares about my emotional needs. Between the current grief and battling my old trauma messages, remembering God’s goodness and choosing to be thankful was not easy.
Before Wynter’s birth, my husband and I had started a practice of sharing nightly gratitudes right before bed. I suggested we continue this routine, though some nights the blinding numbness made it too hard to see much good. We knew good was still present, so we were determined to spit out at least one or two gratitudes, even if they were simple things. A beautiful sunset, a lingering butterfly, people’s kindness towards us, the gift of a beach house getaway during our most difficult Thanksgiving holiday to date. And of course there was the recurring gratitude for Wynter’s life and the experience of becoming her parents. Doing this at the end of each day helped a bit in keeping our nighttime, racing thoughts at bay. It was a healthy rebellion in the face of despair.
The darkness would love nothing more than for us to believe our tragedy has taken everything good from us, but that’s a lie. I may have had no choice in the loss of my daughter, but I do have a choice to believe I will see God’s goodness again as I continue to search for it.
“I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see
the goodness of the LORD In the land of the living.”
(Psalm 27:13)
SONG LYRICS
(sample songs from the upcoming album that accompanies the book)
How Long (Psalm 13)
How long oh Lord, will you forget me?
How long oh Lord, must I weep in the night?
How long oh Lord, will you forget me?
How long oh Lord, must I weep in the night?
Each day I wake, my body aches
I cannot get relief
So how long oh Lord, must I wait for peace?
(Chorus 1)
I will sing to you
Like I’ve always done
Speak your words of truth
Show me you’re enough
That you’re stronger than the waves of grief
In my darkest night
You can be my peace
How long oh Lord, will you forget me?
How long oh Lord, must I beg in the night?
How long oh Lord, will you forget me?
How long oh Lord, must I beg in the night?
Each day I wake, my spirit aches
I’m hoping for good things
So how long oh Lord, till you answer me?
(Chorus)
I will sing to you
Like I’ve always done
Speak your words of truth
Show me you have won
Over all the wrongs my eyes have seen
In the perfect storm
You can be my peace
In the perfect storm
You can be my peace
(Bridge)
Peace… save me from this wretched life
Peace… the darkness is thickening
Peace… I’m searching for your light
How long oh Lord, did you forget me?
I need you Lord, be my peace in the night
Oh I need you Lord, be my peace……. in the night
All Rights Reserved. Ree Boado © 2024
River
I been up and down this river
Looking for what washed away
Water running through my fingers
Lying in the dark by the riverbanks
I been up and down this city
Watching all the faces shine
But the sun is going down so quickly
Stealing the light from these innocent eyes
(Chorus)
Oooh
Down by the river
Meet me down by the river, river, river, oh
Pretty little bird, come nearer
Won't you take me on your wings
Fly me off into those mountains
Up on the heights where the sorrow won’t sting
Cause I been waiting by this river
Watching my reflection show
All the water falling into water
I’m slipping away here and nobody knows
(Chorus)
Oooh
Down by the river
Meet me down by the river, river, river, oh
(Bridge)
Meet me down
Don’t let me down
All Rights Reserved. Ree Boado © 2024