The Christophers: Making Space for Grief
- Editor
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
By Tony Rossi,
Director of Communications
When her sister Roxanne died of skin cancer, Leanne Friesen encountered an overwhelming grief she wasn’t sure how to handle. She learned there is no easy way to process grief, but that there are choices that will eventually move you through the darkness towards the light. Leanne shared her insights in the Christopher Award-winning book, “Grieving Room: Making Space for All the Hard Things After Death and Loss.”
During a “Christopher Closeup” interview, Leanne said she felt like she was encased in a “grief bubble” following Roxanne’s death. “I was living sort of separate from the world and...seeing everything in my life through this lens.” While people were supportive during the early days, they had mostly moved on a few weeks later, whereas Leanne had not. And when someone did ask Leanne how she was, she was too embarrassed to tell the truth, so she made “I’m hanging in there” her default answer. Then, she would walk away thinking, “Why did I just lie? I don’t feel like I’m hanging in at all. I feel like I’m a complete disaster.”
Leanne learned to offer grace to the people in her life because they were not thinking about grief constantly the way she was. And she found a core group of people she could talk with, some about her grief and others to get her mind off of it.
Leanne also had to navigate the unfairness of life with belief in a good and loving God. She noted, “I have a chapter of the book, I call it Room to Reconsider...[your] faith that was very black and white and made sense…My sister was a person of faith. She prayed all the time to be healed. Her church had prayer meetings for her…It’s one of those deaths...that was hard to make sense of. This is a special needs teacher who teaches Sunday school and has nothing but good to offer the world, and what on earth is the logic of this woman dying?”
“Initially I had those questions, and I felt at peace with the not knowing and not understanding,” Leanne continued. “But…just a few months after my sister died, my father and my two nephews (my other sister’s two sons) were in an absolutely catastrophic boating accident...My dad had broken his back. My nephew, who was 16 at the time, was in a coma…My 14-year old nephew was in ICU with life-threatening injuries...And I remember saying, ‘God, I did real good the last four months. I haven’t yelled at You. I have stayed faithful…And that has been sincere. But this is unreasonable!’”
Leanne, her family, church community, and friends prayed for healing. And this time, it came. “I have no idea why God answered one prayer in the way we wanted and the other in a different way,” Leanne reflected, “but I believe God was listening at both times…I have learned to say—and feel comfortable saying—’There are things I do not understand.’...That was part of reconsidering [my faith] because I was raised in a very evangelical tradition that liked clear answers. Letting go of clear answers was important for me. But [I also leaned] on what I did experience to be true of God, which was: I’ve never felt God any closer than I felt sitting at my sister’s deathbed, and I was so certain He was there. That will remain as true to me as any other clear answer that I have. I’m sure someday it’ll all be made clear.”
For free copies of the Christopher News Note BEAR ONE ANOTHER’S BURDENS, write: The Christophers, 264 West 40th Street, Room 603, New York, NY 10018; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org
