The days and weeks following Daisy’s earthly departure were of a strange sort. Hovering in our home was an empty feeling, much like when a door slams shut in your face. You feel the rush of air forcing your hair back for a brief moment, then a wall directly in front of you, so close up that everything else is out of focus. We sat around that first day, drinking coffee and looking about the room, blinking for lack of recognition of our surroundings. We said good-bye to her in the night, and sat in the darkness together as the remnants of the gloomy wee hours surrendered to the gradual appearing of the winter sun.

I found myself staring into nothing, moving sloth-like, actions and words suspended in midair—both requiring more effort than I could afford. All drive had been released from me, like a burst tire. I was flat, slow, nearly useless.

Death had come for my daughter. The words made no sense. To me they sounded like a different language. One I didn’t know. Death. Dead. Deceased. I couldn’t compute. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t grasp how she was here chattering in her sleep just hours ago, and so I stared.

Hours passed in our living room, where family joined us in the sorrow. It’s too strenuous to look someone in the eye during times like this, so I fixated on a stray fiber in the rug, refilled my mug, found reasons to close my eyes for extended periods. Maybe it would all disappear.

After the initial blow settled in, there crept up in me an amplified hatred of all things that reminded me of Daisy’s cancer treatment and subsequent suffering. In a frenzied, brief burst I rid my home of all medical paraphernalia. I hastily threw away all bandages, needles, sharps containers, medications, tubes, pumps, and alcohol wipes, shoving them deep into the trash can, slamming down the lid. What I couldn’t throw away, I stashed out of sight while we waited for the medical supply truck to pick it up: various machines for pumping drugs into Daisy’s veins, a commode, a tiny wheelchair. The very sight of these accoutrements of torture turned my stomach, and they couldn’t be gotten rid of quickly enough.

Toward the afternoon, I spent some time in her tiny bed that had been at the foot of our large one: the one she died in, the one we crowded together on as a family while we cuddled her empty body in the night, while we said our last good-byes as a family of four. It was an old pine bed my dad had built for me when I was a toddler. Daisy had still been so small she fit perfectly in it, like a little mouse in a pocket. The bedsheets smelled of her, and I wanted to breathe as deeply as possible, as if the act would magically bring her back.

The following day, though, Britt and I dismantled the bed. We knew that if we didn’t, we would both continue to lie there individually, folding our bodies into the last place she had breathed, unwilling to accept the truth. It would become an idol to us, an altar of suffering, a pitiful attempt to keep things the way they were and not let them out of our desperate grip.

After the house was rid of physical reminders of the toll cancer takes, I was left fumbling with my hands—empty arms that for twelve years straight had been busy holding babies, making messes with preschoolers, or caring for my cancer-riddled daughter. I felt naked, exposed, and strangely self-conscious. The fight had ended, and I was the loser.

Days went by, all melded together. How does one go through the motions of life when death has swept through your world? It was like trying to speak, but emitting barely a squeak; trying to walk, but wading through quicksand; trying to breathe, but choking on life.

C. S. Lewis says in A Grief Observed,

Grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

I felt suspended, waiting, helpless, incredibly self-conscious in those early days. The awkwardness has taken a few years to subside.

Like a pair of old jeans with a memory of its own, that once fit every curve, I had to relinquish life as I knew it before Daisy left for heaven. I had to get used to a new pair, a new life. A new pair with different faded spots, different belt loops, different worn parts. No longer a family of four, we had become a family of three. No longer a balanced bunch, I had become the only girl in the house. No longer a crusader for healing, I had become a bereaved mom. No longer Daisy’s best friend and fiercest defender, I had been stripped of my immediate mission. Instead I became bored and lonely. They fit now, this new pair of jeans, this new life without her. They fit. Though I want my old jeans back.

And yet, though hollow in the missing of one of its crucial members, my house is filled with gifts. Gifts that speak to me when I’m uncomfortable in my own skin, when I’d rather leave and never come back. The toy mouse she hid by the stairs to frighten unsuspecting passersby, complete with a mouse hole made from construction paper. A grocery list in the drawer—all her favorites written in her quirky spelling style—keewee, rut beer, q-cumbers. Her tiny leopard-print leggings folded on the dryer, each glance I give them flooding me with memories of the way she looked in them—a tiny booty and bird legs, sticking out from underneath tie-dye. And the graffiti. My darling angel would draw a pile of poop surrounded with buzzing flies or an anchor-tattooed, hairy-chested princess on her grammar worksheets, sufficiently raising the bar on inappropriate artwork. Once in a while I run across a tragically moving journal entry she wrote, hopeful and optimistic for the future. But really, anything she wrote is my favorite, because not only did she touch the paper, but what was tucked in her heart came out onto the page. Though Daisy is gone, she left love notes at every turn. It has taken two years to go through the things in her room, two searing years of a little here, a bit there.

I look for these little treasures every day. From time to time I run into something new and enjoy the memory flood, no matter what type of tears it brings. It’s a weightless feeling, walking through grief. The body still needs food and sleep, the house still needs to be cleaned, the family still needs attention. It’s almost like there is such a deluge of emotion all the time, it’s easier to shut it out and become a zombie of sorts just to get on with the necessaries of life. I may be robotically going through the motions, yet when I happen upon a treasure, I experience a brief spark of life.

Even so, God has provided. He didn’t leave me to grieve alone—I have a family who suffered the same loss. And in his kindness and generosity, he gave me the gift of another daughter to wrap my arms around. The gift of someone new to love, a diversion for the family, a little someone to care for in her sister’s glaring absence. A generous gift.

I don’t journal much, but I found this entry I wrote while I was pregnant and still reeling from loss:

There is a stretching pain both in my heart and in my body. The kind that pulls the fibers so thin that some of them snap, finding refuge in the curling, hiding where they came from. Most waking moments, sometimes hours, are spent wondering at the audacity that life goes on, remembering what has happened to my Daisy, feeling simultaneous pain and hope, depth of belief. Yet the breaking and retreating of various fibers of my soul are not quite ready to be grown to this point, not ready to carry the weight of the life gone from this world into the next. The life of my girl, whom I love so much, whom I can’t see anymore, touch anymore, who is not dependent on me anymore.

Yet I believe God gives me glimpses into her existence, an existence I won’t understand until our flesh embraces once again. One of possible time and space, of flesh as we know it, and of what is visible to the eyes God has given us. Strange, that the fibers of my soul should mirror the fibers of my body, growing, stretching, painfully preparing to carry the weight of new life. A life that is dependent upon me for oxygen, food, even elimination.

There is new life inside me, already mixed with aching and joy and wonder. A life that will give us new reason to love, to sacrifice, to share. A girl to bring joy and brightness, to give us opportunities to laugh, pray, cry. As certain as we are that we will hold the little one making her home in my womb, we will hold the little one who has made her home in heaven.

As my heart and body go through conflicting changes—heavier, lighter, made stronger, weak fibers tearing, making room for love, pouring out and being poured into, wondering, praying, moving in the realm of God’s provision—one thing is certain. In the midst of darkness, in the still gray of dreariness, in the depths of sorrow, God has given us sunshine.

And such is life. A mixture of sunshine and rain, mountains and valleys, births and deaths. When Job’s wife suggested he curse God and die, he responded with something simple but so profound: “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” (Job 2:10). It was time to walk in everything God had destined for us, and to do it with guts.

You know how sometimes we convince ourselves we are the only souls to walk the earth who have ever ___________? You fill in the blank. Been cheated on? Been stolen from? Been abused? Lost a child? Personally, I know the drama can escalate when I’m self-focused to the point of believing no one else has ever even had a pimple, much less a bad day. We too often make ourselves the center of the universe. That’s exhausting.

Being around someone like that is incredibly annoying, and slowly but surely, I have come to realize I am that annoying person. God is dealing with me and giving me a restored perspective. He has informed me that, no, I’m not the only woman on the planet to experience such heartache. There are plenty more, an entire community of women who have suffered, perhaps even more so than I. News flash to me.

He is kindly leading me into a community of the suffering, and it’s surprisingly comforting. Mortifying, but comforting, because in order to work through stuff we have to be aware of it first. I have been known to point out the speck in another’s eye while there was a giant sequoia in my own. Oops.

The community of suffering is a heroic bunch. A strong, effective, hilarious, rock-solid bunch I would be honored to be lumped in with when I grow up, although on the surface it doesn’t seem like the best of company. After all, the community I’m talking about consists of a woman who was used for sex, and whose infant son died. There’s a woman with a reputation as an adulterer and deluded liar, who witnessed her son’s brutal murder. There’s a woman who slept with her boss’s husband and got pregnant, and there is a rich old lady known for laughing at inappropriate times, as well as getting busted for lying.

I’m talking about Bathsheba; Mary, the mother of Jesus; Hagar; and Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Women who suffered. Women who made a difference. Women like me and you. God surprised me with these lives of faith and, using them as guides, gently walked me through the years following Daisy’s departure. These women’s stories are filled with pain, yes, but thankfully also with honesty. Honesty that is crucial to healing, crucial to repentance, crucial to walking tall and strong.

Remarkably, I have gained an appreciation for suffering. Not in a sick, masochistic way, or even as a desperate undertaking for attention, but in a clearer understanding of the deeper things. Things like love, faith, eternity. I have learned not to fear suffering, because it’s not my enemy but my teacher. I’ve encountered a deeper love of God than I thought possible, like a marriage that weathers the storm—both souls grateful to have held each other tight while the ship heaved unsteadily. Beauty is seen more crisply than ever before through the eye of the sufferer; gifts are heartily received and rejoiced over by the one who is able to take what is given. I never thought I’d say it, but suffering has been life-giving for me. I just never recognized it before.

God has taken me from that inability to move, that zombielike existence, to one of fullness of joy, one of dancing feet and swinging arms. Come with me while we uproot the plank from my eye—while I display the cards I’ve been holding too closely to my chest. I pray you find some comfort in my community, that you can let down your guard.

It’s time.