Happy Valentine's Day all! This past week, my cousin Monica sent an email to my family explaining that she would be teaching her young women's class about dealing with the challenge of death this Sunday. She asked if we could provide her with any insights about how we had dealt with my Dad's sudden death, and how we had found comfort through the gospel. I thought I would post my response as my post today, some of which I've likely said before.
For me personally, one of the keys to finding comfort after Dad's death went back to some earlier experiences that I had had. Over the span of my adult life, I have had a few experiences that caused me to turn to the Lord in search of healing. Struggles getting married, struggles finding employment, the stress of school, etc., all provided me with opportunities to seek for His healing touch in my life.
In trying to understand these experiences, I have spent a lot of time trying to heal. I have spent several hours meeting with my bishops. Additionally, I spent a lot of time in the scriptures and in the temple. And finally, I became very, very engaged in my callings in the ward. I had been doing all of these things before this happened (though my temple attendance hadn't been as consistent as it should have been), but I'm not sure that my heart was fully there.
Little by little, He completely healed me in these experiences. More than that, He made me happier than I had ever been before. In actuality, I was better off because of these experiences than I had ever been before. I could have given all of the right answers to the questions and I really believe that I had a close relationship with the Savior, but it wasn't close enough. These experiences made me cultivate that relationship with Him to the point that my testimony changed. It was no longer just an idea that I knew and had felt confirmation of, I had experienced what it meant to be healed. It turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me because it helped me to come unto Christ.
Flash forward to December 19, 2015. Dad's death was the most shocking and unexpected thing I have ever experienced. When Rob and I rushed to the house at 2 am, we thought that he had fallen or something and we were rushing to give him a blessing. We expected to find an ambulance there or to find that Dad had been taken to the hospital. But when we got there, there was only a police car and the door to the house was open. Mom and Jeni were sitting on the couch crying and I could see Dad with a blanket over him. None of it registered and I even asked the police officer what was wrong with him and what we could do, at which point he explained to me that Dad had passed. I literally had not been able to piece together what had happened (which is essentially my job) even though it should have been so obvious. It was unthinkable.
It hurt and continues to hurt. In one instant, so many things that I had always expected changed. Dad was not going to physically be present to see me get married; he was not going to get to hold the children I will have; he wasn't going to be there in person to see me receive my doctorate; and on, and on, and on. All of those things hurt then and are occasionally hurt me now. Just the other day when I scheduled the Temple, for a moment it stung so deeply.
But, during the previous year, I had learned how perfectly and completely the Savior heals wounds and rectifies life's losses. Because I had already experienced His healing touch in that powerful way, I knew that I would experience it again. I knew that if my Dad couldn't be mortally present as a witness at my sealing, that he could be there as one of the onlooking angels. I had learned that the Lord has a purpose in everything that He does, including and perhaps especially in asking us to undergo the hardest experiences of our lives. And I knew as the Prophet Joseph had said, "All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection provided you hold out faithful to the end. By the vision of the Almighty, I have seen it!" I knew that somehow the Lord would make this up to me and my family because He's done it before. I knew that comfort would only be as far away as a heartfelt prayer, a verse of scripture, a trip to the temple, or an act of selfless service. And not even 2 months after that difficult day, I find myself smiling and I find that the Lord has indeed sent many great compensating blessings in the midst of my grief. And I'm grateful.
So I guess in response to the question of how do we prepare? We gracefully and even gratefully accept the tragedies in our lives and utilize those experiences the way that the Lord intends us to utilize them: by allowing them to bring us to Him so that we can experience His atonement. We prepare by learning to trust Him and by learning to let Him heal us from all of our afflictions. We prepare by allowing the atonement to become real in our lives.
Brett
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