A Good Gift — Grateful, yet Grieving
My husband of thirty years had a medical procedure in June 2016. The doctor indicated that the 20-minute procedure was routine. Based on this innocuous description, I didn’t invite anyone to wait with me during the procedure. Instead, I sat alone in a small waiting room in the hospital basement, across the hall from the procedure. After an hour, I grew fidgety. After an hour and twenty minutes, my husband’s doctor stepped in, sat next to me, and started to rapidly describe the results of my husband’s routine procedure. He could not make eye contact as he informed me of the presence of a rare terminal cancer and the follow-up surgery that he already scheduled.
In that moment, everything in my world changed forever. We catapulted into 22 months of prayer, hope, surgery, recovery, metastases, grasping every moment, hospice, and the finality of death. We faced it together, with courage. We did not run or hide. We told the truth to each other and to our young adult children. We loved well, and he took his last breath at home as I held his wasted body and released him from this world into eternity with his Savior.
Seven months before his passing, we learned that his cancer was widely metastasized. One afternoon after this crushing news, I wept openly, asking my husband how I could possibly live without him. Our marriage was flourishing, fun, full of hopes and dreams, rock solid, and built on our mutual faith in the Lord. I could not envision any future without him. “Listen,” he said to me, “I’m going to die, and it’s going to be hard, really hard for you. But you’ll get through it. When you do, I want you to remarry and have a good life.” I protested, but he was insistent.
About a year later, while having my morning devotions, I gazed at the large poster that we had displayed at my husband’s memorial service. He was almost life-size, smiling, looking so ‘real’ and so ‘present’ I said to the Lord, ‘He was such a good gift.’ Immediately, the Lord replied, ‘Don’t you think that I can give you other good gifts’? I was humbled. ‘Of course,’ I told Him and confessed my shortsightedness and miniature level of trust in His providence.
A year and a half after my husband’s passing, after I had grieved deeply and taken many steps toward healing, I felt open to the possibility of remarriage. The route toward remarriage was circuitous; there were skinned knees and mishaps along the journey. But God, as we are assured, is faithful. He did, in fact, provide a good gift in the form of my current husband, to whom I have been married five years.
