Laughing in the Rain

There’s just something about her smile. Beautiful and resilient, an untapped spring that could thaw any winter. A beacon of light that could guide a wayward soul across stormy seas.

I know, because that wayward soul was mine.

In the first few months after becoming a widower, during the violent vicissitudes of early grief, I became a shadow of myself. A gossamer metaphor of the man I had once been. It was as though my grief had soaked me in some kind of flammable fluid, and as my desperate heart yearned for healing, to beat despite its brokenness, to overcome the world’s stalwart efforts to stomp out my attempt at continued life, my rage struck a match.

The flames engulfed me.

I have since learned that this is not an uncommon grief response, especially for men. But back then, it caught me horribly off guard. It overwhelmed me, swept me away; I was just so struck by the injustice of it all, by the perverse juxtaposition of these two items: 1) My wife dying from cancer and 2) The world rebuffing a 26-year-old widower’s desire to continue living.

The fire intensified by the day, the flames driven higher by a rage that wouldn’t seem to go away. That fire changed me. Charred and misshapen, I was no longer recognizable. Not even to myself.

I was a lost cause. A broken heart with a calloused hide. An angry man with a hole inside him and agony coursing through his veins. I really don’t blame people for running away, for leaving my life en masse; if given the choice, I would have run away from my life, too.

But for reasons I may never fully understand, she stayed.

She possesses an indomitable kindness. A gentle spirit impervious to injustice, unflapped by the shifting social alliances of a world that doesn’t understand pain. She believes in the general goodness of people, even when they give her every reason to believe otherwise; she smiles when she has every reason to cry; and she stays when she has every reason to flee.

She is my beloved. And on a warm spring morning, her smile thawed the winter of my soul, as illustrated by this passage from The Lazarus Within:

“A few days later, we went for a walk at a local park. 

It was early on a Sunday morning, before she headed off to church and I begrudgingly went into work. We took our dogs and a devotional and set out along a stream cut between two ridges. There was a wooden walkway that led to a small deck overlooking the water, and as the morning sun slipped behind a sheath of wispy gray clouds, she opened the devotional and began to read.

I listened with rapt attention, enamored by how such a familiar voice could sound so different. The warmth was still there, my feelings teetering along a razor’s edge, but then something happened that changed everything.

It started to rain.

Gentle at first, then harder. A shower became a downpour, and a downpour became a deluge. And all the while, I watched her. She kept reading, didn’t even look up, until finally the page became so sodden she could no longer make out the words. It was then she met my eyes and started laughing. Like the rain, it was gentle at first, then harder. A giggle became a cackle, and a cackle became the kind of laughter that takes your breath and won’t give it back.

Joy like that is contagious, so I was laughing too. But beneath my smile, my heart lurched and tears stung my eyes. I knew instantly—I was in love with her. When considering the context of the last five years of my life, the moment was pure poetry. Standing before me was a beautiful woman, reading a smeared devotional, laughing in the rain. I was overwhelmed by it, both then and thereafter; swept away by the creative generosity of a God who destroyed my life with a hurricane, then provided a companion who laughs in the rain.”

I told you last week that The Lazarus Within is the story of an avalanche. And it is. It tells the tale of how grief and loss can consume a person, overwhelm them, crush them, sweep them down the mountainside toward a seemingly insurmountable demise.

That happened to me. And maybe it’s happened to you.

But The Lazarus Within not only tells the story of the avalanche, of the consuming fire fueled by grief and rage.

It also tells the story of the love that can put it out.