Marriage, past and future

Today would have been the 9th wedding anniversary for Paula and I. We were married on July 29, 2000. For those of you who were there celebrating with us, it was a very memorable day. I can’t believe that was nine years ago already. Sadly, the last wedding anniversary we celebrated together was only our 6th. I missed Paula so much today. In fact it was hard to hold myself together at times today. It has been two years, two months, and two weeks since she died. I am still grieving, and I suspect I will continue to for a long time to come. Paula was so amazing. There is much to grieve.

Yet, in the midst of this, my life is a paradox. In spite of grief and sorrow over what has been lost, there is great joy and hope about things that have happened in my life, and for what the future holds. Over the past year, I have fallen in love again. Jessica (a girl that both Paula and I knew from our time in Vancouver) has become a huge part of my life during this time. She has walked alongside me in my grief, and we have carved out the beginnings of our life together. She is adored by Micah. A few weeks ago, we decided to get married and are planning a wedding for Thanksgiving weekend (or Christmas if we can’t get ourselves organized). We are both extremely excited about joining our lives together.

It has been a strange and wonderful experience falling in love again after losing the first love of your life. I feel that we have and continue to honor Paula in our relationship, yet we have made sure that our relationship is its own thing. I love Jessica because she is Jessica, not because she can replace Paula. Jessica has been a gift to us. I have a strong sense of God’s provision and grace in bringing us together. She seems to be just the right person for a person who has gone through what I have gone through.

Getting married again doesn’t mean that I’m “fixed” now, or that I’ve made it through the difficult part of losing Paula. This loss will always be with me. I will always miss her. But in that, it is possible to love again, just as wholeheartedly as I ever loved Paula. And this new love brings so much hope and joy.

This will be my last blog posting. It has been quite a journey and although it’s still not over, the blog part of it is. I thank everyone who contributed their comments. This will be an extremely valuable resource for Micah to know Paula, and for me to remember her. I will keep the blog on the web and keep comments open so that people can still read and make comments if they would like.

Please keep Jessica, Micah, and I in your prayers as we forge this new life together.

Thank you for journeying with me.

Paula, you are so dearly missed.

Love, Darren

Families fighting careless driving

As many of you know, the driver of the truck who caused Paula’s death, was charged only with careless driving, after the initial charges of dangerous driving were dropped due to the difficulty in securing a conviction. The sentence was a $1000 fine and a ban from driving commercial vehicles for two years. There is a strong sense that this was not just.

There is a gap in the law between “dangerous driving” and “careless driving” that has been a source of frustration for other families who have experienced a death of a loved one in car accident.

A group called Families Fighting Careless Driving has been organized and they have a website (click here). Although I am not involved in this organization, I invite you see what they are trying to accomplish and to sign their petition.

Chapel address at Redeemer

Earlier this year, I addressed the Redeemer University College community in one of the weekly chapels. The theme of this year's chapels were "God's power in weakness".

Shortly after I left Redeemer I met an amazing girl. Paula was pretty, smart, funny, kind, athletic, and passionate about many things. She was Irish and played rugby with fierce determination. She was like no other girl I had ever met. I was intrigued. I fell in love. After a few years, we got married. We lived in Vancouver, moved to England for a few years, and traveled Europe together. Eventually we made it back to Ontario, setting up home in Ottawa where I had landed a good job, and shortly after we had our first child, a son named Micah. We had big dreams for our life together.

But, these dreams would never come true. Almost two years ago now, Paula was killed in a car accident. She and Micah were struck from behind by a dump truck. She died a day later from a very serious brain injury. Micah was miraculously spared, without any serious injury.

This life with Paula and all our dreams came to a sudden and tragic end. All of a sudden I was a widower and a single father to a ten-month old boy. I was thrust into a new life that I did not want, full of pain, loneliness, confusion, shock, bewilderment, surrealness.

Let me tell you, when your wife dies – and all your hopes and dreams for the future die with her – you are about as weak as it gets. There is a profound mystery in marriage of the two becoming one. Losing your wife is like having half of who you are being torn from you. Your life, which seemed so much in your control, is all of a sudden spinning out of control. You are powerless to do anything.

In the weeks and months that followed Paula’s death it become clear that the one thing I had some control over was how to respond to this tragedy. I had to choose between two roads. One was to retain my own power and pride and play the part of a victim and become bitter and angry. The other was to allow God’s power to enter into my weakness and transform me and this terrible situation; to be open to God’s grace and comfort. I resolved to assume a posture of being open to God working in this situation.

I don’t want you to get the impression that this was or is easy, because I was really questioning where God was in all this (and still do). This quote from Nicholas Wolterstorff is very meaningful to me:

The Bible speaks of God over-coming death.... God is appalled by death.... I cannot fit it all together by saying 'He did it' but neither can I do so by saying 'There was nothing He could do about it.' I cannot fit it together at all. I can only, with Job, endure. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric's [Paula's] death.... I can do nothing else than endure in the face of this deepest and most painful of mysteries. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and resurrecter of Jesus Christ. I also believe that my son's [wife's] life was cut off in its prime. I cannot fit these pieces together... To the most agonizing question I have ever asked I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him [her] die. I do not know why God would watch me wounded.... I am not angry, but baffled and hurt. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.

Wounded, hurt, baffled, enduring, agonizing, questioning, deep and painful mystery… this is a fair description of my grief over Paula’s death. I don’t have answers to my suffering and loss, and I probably will never have answers. To demand those answers is to demand power. I can only remain weak and not know.

About a month after Paula died, I had a series of visions. One night, my mind was racing with thoughts about what this new life was going to look like. It was like God was giving me a roadmap of where I was to go and what I was to do: move into a house with some friends in Ottawa, quit my job, return to Vancouver to study theology at Regent College, move to Hamilton and work at Redeemer. This is the closest I have ever been to God “speaking” to me. I could not rest until this was written down in my journal.

Not having a clue of my own as to what I was going to do with my life without Paula, I decided to go with what I felt was God’s plan. When I did pursue these things, the doors would fly open. All of these things have happened. Last semester I was at Regent College in Vancouver. Here I am speaking to you today at Redeemer.

But still, this was not easy, especially making the final decision to come here to Redeemer. I must confess that I struggled with my pride. Why would I give up this great job to teach chemistry at Redeemer? Again, I felt that I had to submit to God’s call, rather than try to do things on my own power. I don’t exactly know why God has me here, but I am excited to be here, and open to the fact that he may work through me.

Another aspect that I have experienced God’s power is through his Church. I have had to learn to set aside my tendency to try and do things myself and to accept help. And his Church has offered so much support and comfort and prayer, in very powerful and meaningful ways.

Help with raising my son, for example. He won’t grow up with his mother, but rather will be raised by a combination of me, aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends. There’s no other way. I can’t do it by myself.

Another example are the Christian friends who have invited Micah and me to live “in community” with them. In Ottawa; in Vancouver; and now in Hamilton in a very significant way. My friends offered to sell their house so that we could buy a house together so that they can support Micah and I. We live in a big old house downtown and share much of our lives. I am far less lonely that I would be if the Christian community – God’s hands in the world – did not surround me with their love and support. But I have had to be weak to accept it.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that all this “God’s power in weakness” business means that I have recovered from my loss, that everything is fine and good now. My life is full of paradoxes. I have intense moments of simultaneous joy and sorrow; of being baffled and hurt by God, but also feeling his tremendous comfort and provision. In fact, what I am learning is that I will never “recover” from this loss. Life will never be the same. I have been and will be changed by it and affected by it for the rest of my life. It’s like when Jacob wrestled with God. I have to learn how to live with this limp.

I know that life can be good and rich and joyful again, perhaps even richer than had I not suffered this loss. But don’t get me wrong. I would trade all this sorrow to have Paula back. But that’s not up to me. I don’t have the power to do that. I can only allow God into my weak and broken situation. He is faithful. Frustrating, bewildering, confusing at times. But faithful.

I want to close by saying that you will suffer. You are kidding yourself if you think that you will not suffer a significant loss of some sort during your life, perhaps sooner than you think. And when you do, I want you to encourage you, in the weakness of suffering, to be open to God’s grace and his ability to work powerfully in your life. Please choose this over bitterness and anger.

Two years

This coming weekend will mark two years since Paula died. When I decided to leave Ottawa last year, I resolved to return with Micah every year around the May long weekend in order to remember Paula. We leave for Ottawa tomorrow. In a way, I am scared to enter into the pain of the past, but I know that it is important for us to do this. I have learned that just because something is hard, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t good or important. Hard things, like entering into memories of suffering and loss, are important to do.

But, I don’t want this time to be entirely about Paula’s death. I want to try and celebrate her amazing life as well. During the past week, as I was pondering this trip to Ottawa, one of my desires was to be with all our close friends and remember her. To talk about her. To talk about the things we miss about her. To tell stories. But, since we have so many good friends, during many different times of our life, spread out all over the world, it’s not possible to get the full story of her on this one weekend in this one place with one set of friends. I thought that perhaps this could be done over this blog.

So, I want to invite friends to write a comment about what it is that they really miss about Paula, now that we have lived two years without her. I plan to finish up this blog in the next few weeks, so this would be a fitting conclusion to the blog. Everything on this blog is really helpful for me and especially for Micah as he grows up (and is he ever growing up fast!).

These are some of the things I miss about Paula: I miss her passion for life and her care for the people in her life. I miss her keen sense of justice and compassion. I miss her warm, inviting smile. I miss her smooth dark skin and brown eyes and her funky glasses. I miss the depth of her love for Micah. I miss being her “rock” when life was difficult and chaotic for her. I miss the adventurous spirit we shared. I lament the fact that she was really flourishing in who she was just before she died. I just really, really miss her.

I invite you to share.

Reset Button

So, here I am living in a new house in a new city, part of a new community and a new church, starting a new career at a new job. It seems that the reset button has been pressed on my life. All of these things are significant changes from my life with Paula. Most of the time I am confident that I have made good decisions, decisions that are in line with the trajectory of my life with Paula. Other times, I wonder if there have been too many changes and that life now is too different from life with Paula. This new life promises to be good, but seems so disconnected from my previous life. Often it seems like I have lived two different lives: life-before-Paula and life-after-Paula. Sometimes it feels that there have been two different persons: Darren-with-Paula and Darren-without-Paula. There is a living link between these two lives - Micah. However a ten-month-old baby is a very different person than a two-and-a-half year-old boy. I think this discontinuity is unavoidable and there's really not much I can do about it. How could life ever remain the same when a person you love so much dies?