You know, it’s funny. No, not ha-ha funny, but “I just came out of the church bathroom with the back of my skirt tucked into my undies and now the entire congregation has seen my unfortunate nethers on the way back to my seat” funny. A euphemism for something rotten. Rotten occurrences that come frequently—like a pattern that seems sickeningly typical of my life.

Remember the birds I told you about? Well, what I didn’t tell you was that just as those darling birds were almost grown, almost ready to leave their smelly but precious nest, I went out to check on them. I was feeling lighthearted that morning, glad to be alive, grateful to be free and, well, feeling like things were going my way for once in a really long time. It was one of those days when you begin to forget the past heartaches and some of the present troubles, a day when you see fit to be brave and take a chance on life. Sun shining, deep breath of ranch air in my lungs, I was feeling perky in my pretty jammies and a messy bun.

So, chai tea in an Anthropologie K mug in hand, I checked on my feathered friends. I couldn’t see them over the edge of the nest, so I kept moving closer to get a better look. Just a little closer . . . One more foot . . . So excited to get a glimpse of these delicate creatures God had kindly placed in my life. I inched up on my tiptoes, enjoying the warmth of the mug and of a pretty morning, of life. Convinced my birds knew and loved me and desired me to come hear them sing a personal concert, I was shocked when they popped their itty-bitty fuzzy heads up and looked at me in panic.

All three freaked out and jumped out of the nest, frantically flapping their adolescent, partially grown wings. Unable to fly. They landed in the nearby lime tree, and that’s where they stayed, eyes wild, huffing and puffing their tiny bird chests. There was nothing I could do. Their mother would reject them if they had my scent on them, and they couldn’t make it back to their nest on their own. I had killed God’s nature gift to me; theirs would be a drawn-out death of starvation and helplessness.

I felt so lame, so defeated. I had only been enjoying the little shred of beauty found in such a simple thing, innocently wanting to delight in the gifts God had placed about me. Then, just like that, I knocked them to their doom.

Too often the joys we experience are so fleeting, so small, so easily spent. Relationships end, homes burn, bills pile up. Seems like summer always comes to an abrupt halt, plopping us into the stark and hungry landscape of winter, when all we were expecting was endless warmth, endless green, endless fun. Life, real life, with all its complicated and unsavory problems, with all its precariously balanced departments, never fails to surprise.

And then we find ourselves questioning God when things go awry. We shout beneath the stars and in the darkness of our cars as we drive. Questions run down our cheeks, onto our bodies in the shower, and slip down the drain. But then more well up and hover just beneath the surface of our skin, looking for a way of escape, a satisfactory answer.

Why suffering, God? Why sin? Why are you letting them get away with this? Why such darkness? Why the crushing of dreams on a regular basis? And why me?

Silence.

I have yet to hear the reason why. Oh, I’ve heard “answers” from the well-meaning. Answers that leave me thirsty and malnourished, sickened, or downright angry. I’ve heard every cliché, every Bible verse taken out of context, every flimsy offering of comfort said hurriedly with hopes of plugging up neatly what is spilling out of every crack of my being; sloppy, messy, dangerous. Things carelessly thrown about, hoping to gloss over the whole soiled lot.

“The Lord gives and takes away!”

“So many will be saved from your testimony!”

“Isn’t it great her suffering is over?”

“God is good all the time!”

“He has plans to prosper you!”

Piles and piles of answers.

But I haven’t gotten an answer from God. In fact, at this point I’m pretty sure I won’t get one until I see him face-to-face. I have searched Scripture, screamed until my throat was raw, turned the questions into a dirge, a lament, an empty wailing that evaporates into thin air. There is a reason why my God has not seen fit to reply to my very human questions. My best guess is that I am not ready for the answers.

My story is the kind of sad story we have all read on a random blog that a friend has told us about, eyes wide, voice subdued. It seems like we all know someone in crisis, a person we’re rooting for. We secretly love the drama, feel invested in the outcome. We cheer and say how good God is when things go their way, and we pray on knees when they don’t. It’s Stuff That Happens to Other People; it’s horrible, put-your-hand-on-your-chest-and-gasp stories we “could never handle.” It’s repelling and addicting, and close enough to feel the secondhand pain but far enough away to thank God it’s not happening to us.

But, alas, it seems that this time around it was me. It was my family. I was the one with the cancer kid, the one whose blog you followed, the one who received your teddy bears and cards and prayers. I was the one who learned what an oncologist was and how to give an injection, who held handfuls of my daughter’s silky blond hair as it fell out in clumps. I was the one who spent countless days and nights in a hospital room, cursing the incessantly beeping IV pole. I was the one who had to wake her twelve-year-old son in the middle of the night to tell him that his sister had gone to heaven.

Now I’m the bereaved mother you avoid in the aisles of Trader Joe’s. I’m the one who has received puppy-dog-sad-face looks from countless well-meaning people, making me want to hide my head in the sand or pretend I don’t notice. I’m the “unfortunate” who has weathered the kind of storm normal people do all they can to avoid. I’m the woman who handed her daughter’s body over to men in suits in the predawn hours, who spoke at her daughter’s funeral—the woman who, with every heartbeat, feels cruelly marauded by our enemy Death. The very thing Jesus wept over, roared at, and even experienced himself.

Grief is like a bathing suit. It fits every person differently. Some hang out a bit here, some a bit there. Some shouldn’t leave the house with it showing, and others make it look fabulous. Some grieve privately, never inviting another soul in. You might never know how they really feel; you might start to think they have checked out or are callous and coldhearted. Others do it openly, blogging as therapy, sharing their tears because it feels cathartic, because they need to grieve in community.

How is anyone to know what to do, how to help, how to survive? Some of the brokenhearted feel hurt if you don’t ask after them, if you don’t acknowledge their loss or their crisis. Others never want you to mention it, as if speaking of the lost loved one acknowledges the fact that he or she won’t come back. What do you do? Do you “go there” with a hurting person? Do you risk the discomfort of snot and tears and a breakdown at the farmer’s market or the coffee shop?

And then there’s me.

In all honesty, I’m still not really ready to be open with grief. It feels like a water balloon, and if I spring a leak and let a little bit out, I might explode all over the place. I carefully keep these surges of sadness to myself, occasionally sharing them only with my husband, because they’re private and sacred to me. But I’m trusting you with these things that I’m writing. I’m trusting God to do a good work in the sharing of human feelings, the acknowledgment that we are emotional, created for love. That being said, this book, fortunately, is not about me. It’s about Jesus, the Most Beautiful. But I share my life because we learn from each other, we are relational beings, and, well, it’s what I’ve got.

If at any time you feel like throwing this book across the room, then go for it. I have thrown many books across the room at different points in the last several years. It’s actually quite satisfying to bark “Grow up!” at the author while the cover yawns open with pages ruffling willy-nilly until coming to a punctuated halt on the wall across from you. Harsh? Not really. Your story could be worse than mine. I mean, if you’re reading this book and you have lost more than one child, do it now. Then go pick it back up. If you are still sitting in the ashes scratching your skin like Job, and if your grief is new and you aren’t ready emotionally to look up, chuck it now. Then go pick it back up. If you have ongoing misery, if you have a painful disease, if you have any reason to grit your teeth because you don’t feel happy or clappy, pitch it. Then go pick it back up. Not because I want you to listen to me blather on, but because Jesus is worth it. He’s worth signing up for, worth staying married to. He’s worth the effort, the tears, the doubt, the confusion of life.

This book is not intended to take the place of grieving; rather, it speaks to what to do when the tidal wave washes past, when the sizzle from the burn settles, when we finally look around and wonder what’s next. When we wonder if it is actually possible to come out of the paralysis of darkness and find laughter again. Really find it—the deep sense of peace and joy that leans into faith and away from the fear your experiences tempt you to live in. I want you to know—whether you have weathered a tempest, whether you are currently wading knee-deep in sin, whether you are disappointed, disillusioned, or disgusted—laughter is for you. Whether you’re nursing relational wounds, fastidiously covering up your self-inflicted scars, or if you’re alive and have walked this earth long enough to stumble, crash, or burn, this is for you.

This book is not saying your life on earth doesn’t matter. This book is not saying that you can never be sad. This book is not a manual on how to come through tragedy stronger than ever. This is not about how to be happy in ten easy steps. This is not a theological case for laughter, or why there is evil in the world, but rather how God has worked in my life and can work in yours too. I may not be a scholar, but I do know what I’ve experienced. I’ve read the testimonies of biblical women and gleaned truth from their very real and imperfect lives. And because Satan the accuser is defeated by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimonies (Rev. 12:11), I will offer mine.

I’ll start at the beginning of the end. In September 2009, Daisy Love, my darling girl of five years old, was diagnosed with kidney cancer. It was a Monday, the third week of school. I was so excited that fall because for the first time in nine years I would have a bit of freedom. Both kids would be in school full-time and I had a fall bucket list all lined up. By far the best way I could think of spending that freedom, and what’s always at the top of my list, was going surfing with my husband. He was a pastor and happened to have Mondays off, so we packed the car accordingly before we loaded up the kids for school.

It’s mystifying to see the little ways God works in our lives. Sometimes it’s a monumental, cosmically cool event, and other times it’s as simple as the order of how things go in a day. On this Monday, we dropped off the kids and headed south on the freeway in Carpinteria, California, to Channel Islands, my husband’s family’s surfboard business. We headed into the factory to pick up a new board for Britt and a demo of a new model for me to try. My newfound liberation from mom duties that Monday made it fun to do even mundane-ish things, like hanging out in a dusty surfboard factory talking to old friends. Our loitering took longer than standard loitering usually does, and by the time we were back in the car and heading to the beach, we got a phone call—the call we would have missed if we had left sooner and headed straight for the water.

“Daisy has fallen down and is not feeling well. She is vomiting and in pain,” our dear friend at the school said on the other end of the line. Daisy, our sunshine. Daisy, our creative and hilarious girl. Daisy, our freckled and funny and cool and kind and loving and full-of-life daughter. Hurt.

After many hours in the ER and myriad tests, the pediatric doctor in charge of her case called for an oncologist. A nurse came in with a peculiar look on her face, setting down a box of tissues. I didn’t know what an oncologist was, but I knew what the box of tissues was for. And so began the years of sickness, of physical and emotional agony, of soul-searching, of gut-wrenching real life. The kind I was convinced we were immune to.

While my son learned multiplication tables, my daughter had a massive tumor removed from her abdomen. While her friends went to birthday parties, Christmas cookie parties, and ski trips, Daisy went to the clinic for chemotherapy and home to vomit. While my friends decided which extracurricular activities would most benefit their little ones, I decided which beanie would most gently cover my little one’s tender, naked scalp. While the rest of the world went to school and work—while life went on and plans were made—our family hunkered down. Our family washed our hands until they cracked, afraid of every germ. Our family was trapped in our home without visitors for fear of any virus that could kill my kindergartner, whose immune system had been obliterated by treatment. Our family counted on nothing further than today, when often the today was sketchy.

We spent three and a half years in treatment, three and a half years searching for a cure for the monster that kept coming back to take over Daisy’s spare body. She had multiple invasive and dangerous surgeries, countless sickening chemo treatments, and we fried her guts with daily radiation for weeks on end. We fed her sprouts and we juiced kale. We put her on a mostly low-sugar, organic, anti-cancer, grow-out-your-armpit-hair diet. We prayed and fasted and cried out desperately for healing, and when all else failed we traveled to Israel for three months seeking advanced experimental treatments. All to no avail. Her body was ravaged, ragged, full of tubes and patched together. It finally gave out altogether in February 2013, and she took her last breath in our arms. Her daddy and I overlapped with arms and legs and faces covered with tears and murmurs of loving words too holy to repeat.

In our bedroom in the deep of the night we held her reed-thin body, never wanting to let go. We pulled out all the horrid tubes and wrapped her in her favorite soft blanket. We covered her little bald head and wept and kissed her face over and over. Then, as we fell to our knees and worshipped God—who had given her to us and to whom she had gone—we felt the presence of angels and knew we were not alone.

I never want to do that again.

My life is forever changed, and I am forever changed. I have aged in this deep grief, this unknowable experience. I have grown tougher. I have become different. One of the differences in me has been hiding silently for a while. I don’t know when this thing crept in, when I gave it a space to live, when I told it to pull up a chair and get comfy. This deceptive and subtle and poisonous thing called bitterness.

Just a teeny bit, just enough bitterness that I feel justified about it. Just enough bitterness that it colors my sense of humor and peppers my thoughts, but it doesn’t show up on my face. Hidden so well I didn’t even see it at first. I almost missed it. A slight hint of bitter, just a little on the side, for dipping in now and again.

It doesn’t matter too much which things in life I’ve chosen to flavor this way. I haven’t been a picky bitter person. But there it is. Bitterness at the desolation of life. Bitterness at people who apparently have no pain. Bitterness at women who have kids to spare. Bitterness because I lost. I lost the contest, the race, the fight.

I have been bitter at well-meaning people who see the new baby girl in my arms and say, “Oh, isn’t that so amazing! It all comes full circle.” Come again? They talk as if I had crashed my car and the insurance company paid for a brand-new one. Would you like it if I said that to you about husband number two? “Oh, it’s not so bad now that you have a new husband. Forget about how you were cheated on and had your heart smashed to bits and were left alone in life. It’s all totally cool now.” Getting a new whatever it is that you lost completely makes up for it, right? Wrong. As if!

See? Bitter.

I drown in my thoughts and memories of dark days, of excruciating pain, thinking, Is this really how my life is going down? My daughter has died, and her body is wrapped in linen and buried in a tiny pine box in the local town cemetery. And there’s nothing I can do about it except curl up in the fetal position.

Thankfully, bitterness is not the only change in me, and it’s not even the most obvious or most impactful. In fact, the bitterness was just the beginning—the pothole, the roadblock to moving forward. Moving forward is where I want to go, heavenward. But we can’t do that until we look honestly at our situation—the good, the bad, and the nasty. Bitterness is bad, yes, but the good? It took some searching, some scratching the surface, some deep cleaning to find it. Becoming aware of my hindering attitude of bitterness started a chain reaction that has since led to those bigger, better things—a deepening of faith, a realization that all things point to eternity; and this life, with all its troubles, is quickly coming to an end. I’m banking on this unseen eternity with my very next breath, holding on to the confidence that what I hope for will actually happen.

All I have endured and traveled through over the last six years has brought me much closer to Jesus, even while it has simultaneously flung me into the deepest crevice of loneliness and pain and confusion. It’s the strangest dichotomy; this tarnished life has given me confidence and maturity and has at the same time shown me how small and foolish I can be. I’m daily trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out how to live in grief while at the same time actually live.

We all have a story. We all have tragedies and losses and heartaches and miracles and real life, and while so much of life is glorious, sometimes it gets ugly. No one is exempt. We share in this thing called humanity, and I want us to feel—really face head-on—the reality of life with all its pimples and less attractive bits. I believe it makes the joy more vibrant, the laughter louder and stronger. So bear with me, cry with me, but please, please, laugh with me.