Surviving Ambiguous Loss Pt 2-Pat & Tammy McLeod, episode 138

0:00 If you love a prodigal, you can discover help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal, and also help and hope for your own life journey. Welcome back to our conversation with Pat and Tammy McLeod. If you missed last week's episode, you will want to listen to it to understand the loss that they have experienced, and then to gain the most from today's conversation. As always, remember to jot down any information or application you may want to follow up on. Welcome back, Pat and Tammy.

0:41 Thank you. Thank you for having us. We are so grateful for your willingness to share your hard story. Last week you told us about your son, Zach, his accident and the hard journey that has been for your entire family. This week we're looking forward to hearing a little about the discovery of ambiguous loss and how that has been helpful to you, but also just the things that God has done in your lives and in your family and with other people that God has given you that you could actually minister to them because of this hard journey.

1:23 Give us a brief reminder just for people who didn't hear last week of who you are and what you do in your family, and what happened to Zach. We are on CRU staff in Boston. We work with CRU at Harvard. Zach, we have four adult children, Zach is our second, and I had a really close relationship with him, not just as a mom, but as having a very deep spiritual connection. I'll never forget the night he ran out the door at age 16, first call saying goodbye, Pete, I love you, that was his nickname for me, and that was the last time I heard his next real voice.

2:16 That night our second son, Nate, called us at a meeting, unloaded on us. Coaches have been calling our house. Parents are calling. They'll have hospitals calling. Zach's injured. They say they need your permission to do emergency brain surgery. So we raced to the hospital, bused through the emergency room doors, and a doctor advised us to do emergency brain surgery, which could result in deaths, a full recovery, or anything in between. So we signed the paperwork as we stared at Zach, who lay there before us unconscious in his football gear. We kissed him goodbye, prayed for him, and they wheeled him away. And Zach survived the surgery, but a portion of his brain did not.

2:57 Hard, hard stuff. I'm trying to figure out, maybe you could help our listeners, how does a part of the brain work and not the other part? Actually it's so he had multiple infarcts, which is another name for strokes, in his brain because of the swelling and compression that was put on the brain. It just kept blood from going to parts, all different parts of the brain. So he has impairment of his vision. He doesn't see very well. His voice, he can't speak very well. He has lost a lot of control of the right side of his body.

3:37 So he's not very stable, his balance isn't very good. So it's just all different. It was pretty brutal, by the way, Judy went. They gave me that report. A couple of days after in the ICU, they went through all these portions of the brain that I didn't even know existed and where there were indications of just loss of brain mass. And what part was working and how does that impact him now? It was mostly a left brain injury. So his other things I said about ambulation and right side weakness where it was affected by that, but the other side of the brain, which is more of your creative side, was pretty much unscathed.

4:30 And so he's emotionally very with it and very much the personality of Zach has been sustained. But the athleticism, of course, is gone. It's interesting, he knows better how you're doing than you do. Yeah, really? Yeah, he'll ask us, are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. And then a minute later, I'm not really fine. It's more like, I'm fine. Actually I'm not. So he can talk some, obviously.

5:11 Tiny bit. A tiny bit. Like a sentence or two, and sometimes people can't understand what he's saying, but we can. So he smiles a lot. Yes. He's filled with joy. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually meeting God himself. He's just overflowing with joy. He does show you that like, what if they say 70% of communication is nonverbal? He can communicate a lot without using words. He sees people and they know it, and they know they feel loved by him.

5:52 They feel seen by him. They feel known by him in ways that they don't by anyone. Fuck a dog. So he does have some extraordinary abilities, and this has accentuated those abilities for sure. So last week, you mentioned the concept of ambiguous loss. So can you define that for us and then begin to tell us how that helped you cope with the loss of that? Yes. I didn't find out about this term ambiguous loss until year six. So I wish I would have known about it earlier, but Pauline Boss, who coined the term, describes two types of ambiguous loss.

6:40 And the first is when you do not have the person physically, but you psychologically have them still in your mind. So missing people or people who are not in your life anymore, you don't see them anymore, divorce, adoption, immigration. And then the second type is the type we're dealing with. And that is where you have the person, but they're not the same anymore. So not only brain injury, but Alzheimer's, dementia, severe mental illness, or addiction. And so what did that change for you when you began to understand that? Because you talk in your book about just having all these questions for the Lord and the pain that you were experiencing and that understanding ambiguous loss gave it a name, and that helped you get a handle on it better.

7:35 Yeah, Boss talked about the importance of being able to live well with having and not having the person at the same time. And so that was just super helpful for me. She said, there's no linear process of letting go. And rarely is there acceptance. And so just her understanding of working with people who dealt with ambiguous losses is about the 60th year she's been doing it was helpful for me to see that I have to live well with not only not having Zach, that's the more natural part for me, but I have to learn to live well with having him too and in a different way.

8:23 So she has six key... Yeah, before you go to the resilient stuff, let me add to that. Like I think the big takeaway for me when Tammy was introducing me to her discovery of Pauline Boss and this idea that the key to living well with ambiguous losses, learning to live with both having and not having at the same time, that just like the light came on for us because typically people will do one or the other, but not both. And sometimes they do neither. So that's part of what complicates this is that you have to learn how to do the one you're not doing.

9:04 But when you're in a relationship and one person is doing one and the other is doing the other, it gets even more complicated. And that's really the story of our book because you have one person who's basically obsessing over the sun he still has, but in complete denial about the sun that's been lost. And the other is a person who is mourning and grieving the loss of the sun, but failing to revise her attention, her attachment to the sun that she still has. That's kind of the journey that we were on. So how did that change things then when you began to walk along that path and understand and understand each other better too, what began to change for you?

9:55 I think the moment when this began to change, Tammy and I were actually away on a personal planning retreat and she had been working on this paper about this topic and big as lost and she dropped it on my lap. I just hate you should probably read this and I had other things I wanted to do and I looked and I wasn't at all surprised that it was something about grief because that's the world she was living in. What I was surprised by was that she had a name for the kind of grief we were experiencing and big as lost.

10:35 And one of the things she had been wanting me to do for this is probably, I don't know, four years into it. On the anniversary of Zach's injury, his injury happened two days before the birthday. And so that year, the anniversary of his injury was on a Friday and his birthday was on a Sunday. And so on that day in between, Tammy made a proposal. This is actually one of the recommendations that Boss puts in her book on how to increase your resilience in the midst of ambiguous loss. She said, what if we had a get together and every year she wanted to do something commemorating like this moment that our lives were radically changed.

11:23 But this year between those two, well, first she asked if we could do something like that, gather together some family and friends and just acknowledge the loss and validate the loss, something we had never really done communally. We'd done it privately but never communally. And I said, well, okay, I'll make a deal. We can do it as long as we also celebrate his birthday. And the Zach, we still have. And so we did that on that Saturday. We did the time to mourn, the time to dance. That's what Tammy called it, taken right from Lennon. Is it the line? Where is it? I can't remember. And so what did you do to have at those things?

12:07 That's tricky. And who came? Yeah, so we had about 150 people at the ceremony of ambiguous loss. And they came in and they looked at items of socks on tables like the Lover of God table, the Lover of Sport table, the Outdoor Adventurer table. And then they went in to the sanctuary and Pat did a slideshow of Zach before his injury. And so we showed that with some of Zach's favorite songs. We talked about what we missed about Zach as a family. Each of our children got up and spoke to. And then we gave people a moment of silence just to write their own losses.

12:52 So we had pieces of blue paper and they wrote what they lost. And then some people stood up and shared what they lost too. So we were able to share those losses in community. And then as they exited, people put those pieces of blue paper with their losses into a bottle. The scripture that talks about how God holds our tears in his bottle. We just thought it would be a great way to end it. People could just put them in the bottle as they left. And then that night we read through them all. So we got to see the losses of our whole community that night when we got home.

13:33 And Zach was not at the ceremony. People ask us, why are you doing this? Because he's not dead. That's the one thing that's really tough about ambiguous loss is that there's usually no validation of it. And there are no ceremonies because the person didn't die. And so people thought we were kind of weird doing it. But after it was done, they said, thank you so much. We didn't know how much we needed this. That would be the question people would ask. He's still here. Why are you mourning? Well, we're mourning that the person we knew is not here.

14:17 The person that we have, though, matters. So then the next day, did you do the birthday or did you wait till his birthday? So two hours, well, an hour later, we did the party. So we walked out of one into the other. And that one, Zach was there. And he was just, they'll have you when everyone walked in the door. It's super. I'm sure, yes. And then we had people write on gold cards what they appreciate about Zach. And they get up at a microphone and read that. And then we had another slideshow there, Zach's recovery. So it was a great way to actually focus on the having and the not having together two things back to back that showed both.

15:05 So I don't know if you can tell this, but is there anything that your children have expressed that you're free to talk about or tell your other children? Yeah. Because they've been definitely affected. I think that event was really a turning point for our entire family. I remember that day that I, Nate had come home from college. Chelsea was now starting her career. Was she or was she still home coming home? I can't even remember now. Anyway, I remember the day that they all got home, they were home.

15:45 And I was so excited because I'd been working on this slideshow of Zach, the kind of a time to mourn slideshow, which was all the pictures of him before his injury and just who he was. And I put these pictures to his favorite music. And I was just proud of myself that I could actually do something on a computer. And I was kind of free to show that off to the kids that your dad can make an eye movie. I just asked someone who knows what they're doing to do those things. Yeah. But I forgot that every time I sat down to do that, I started to just weep. Like I couldn't get through it.

16:26 The combination of the music and the individuals and the memories. I was just emotionally cleansing for me, as I mentioned earlier. I was finally grieving and acknowledging the loss. And so I came out and they were in the kitchen and I said, okay, you want to see what dad did? And I show them this and it isn't a minute into the video. And one of our kids just ran out of the room crying and Klamy then followed. And pretty soon it was just me and Sora, you know, I left the load like, what just happened? And we go in. And it was the first time, and this was a gift from God to us that Tammy was just huddled around our son who was weeping and just acknowledging that he had lost a brother.

17:25 And that, so for me, that was just a moment. That was a milestone marker in our journey where we for the first time were able to really as a family together, grieve and acknowledge, even though this, we still have Zach, that there was a real loss here and as a loss that has shaken us all. Our youngest son wasn't sure he was going to share anything at the ceremony, but after that moment he decided that he was going to. So he actually joined the next day. It just, well, those are beautiful stories. And I think that what you did with the morning and dancing celebrations or morning recognition and is just a fabulous thing that others could do.

18:13 Sometimes you can do it in other circumstances as well, where there is that kind of ambiguous loss where you do have to mourn and recognize. But then there's also to look at what you still have, even if it's not what you started out with and it can look different. So I'm hoping that these comments will really be a blessing to an awful lot of our audiences as they think about it. But I wanted to ask you about one last thing. Tell us about Tim Tebow. Yeah. So that was an interesting moment in our story when we were, we had just gotten home after the Denver Broncos had beaten in an overtime victory.

19:02 What an incredible season. This is the, you know, this amazing season that Tim Tebow had with the Denver Broncos. We get this call saying, hey, you know, Tim Tebow, before every game he meets with a kid and we line these up way ahead of time, but they just won a game that we didn't expect him to win. So we don't have anyone lined up for him and he's playing in New England right next to you and we would like you to be, we'd like Zach to be his make-a-wish person who meets him on the field right before the game. And so we said, yes, of course. I mean, Zach loves Tim Tebow. He used to actually do the things Tim Tebow did when he would get down on his knee and thank God when he scored a touchdown.

19:48 And so yeah, they arranged it. We got a chance to meet him. We still are part of his network. In fact, we'll be going in a couple of weeks to his golf tournament again and Zach and he and Zach have a great, great connection. They really do. That's great. It was fun seeing they gave big hugs and got excited and that kind of thing. And that's something to say thank you, Lord, that God can bring into the very hard some joyful things. And they may not be the, again, the healing and the restoration that you would want, but they can still be positive, uplifting things.

20:31 And that's just one. You've had others where God is used, Zach, not only to do work in your life and we didn't get to talk about that as much as we might, but to do work in other people's lives too. And I love what you said about the kids. Your children, that they had struggled for the book I could understand that they struggled kind of privately for a while. You didn't really realize how much they were missing him and how much loss they were experiencing and yet were able then to come together and do that.

21:11 So thank you. Thanks for being open and vulnerable and willing to share your story. Judy, I did what there was one other thing I wanted to add if I can add it in. Yeah, dear, and me too. You go first, son. One thing that was really great for me to see during this whole trial is that God is near us in suffering. And I knew that by reading Bible verses before this happened, but in actual experience, it happened to me. Like I just experienced a love of God like never before during this time. So strengthening me through the Psalms.

21:53 I pretty much stayed in the Psalms for four years and read those. And then I started doing examin at the end of every day because one of the things the polling boss says is really important is discovering new hopes. And so examine at the end of the day when you're looking back what was life giving, what was life sorting. That really helps you see you when you look at the life giving things, the hope that's breaking through. So we do have the hope. Zach's going to have a new body someday, but we actually need hope now in breaking hope as Henry now uncalls it. And so the discipline of examine at the end of every day helped me to see that.

22:36 And there's so many ways that God has brought hope to us in the middle of suffering. So I just wanted to make sure to say that. One thing I wanted to say to your question about God in suffering or loss, maybe two things. At least one is that Tammy and I actually, once we had written this book and several times we were being interviewed by secular outlets and they were kind of shocked that we are professional Christians, they would call us. You'd like to hear minister as you believe in God and yet you have this terrible thing happen to you.

23:17 How did this ever cause you to question your faith? And I remember the first time that was asked of me that I was like, well, I mean, we both looked at each other like, no, not really. But that was not a very good answer. And so I just thought, you know, actually, it's almost exactly the opposite. So I've answered that. I now answer that question differently. If a person wants to know, do I ever doubt my faith? The answer is yes, of course. I often deal with questions that bother me or that are doubts that I have about God and what I believe about him.

24:01 But during that time of loss and pain, I would say that not only did I not doubt him, but it was really actually at those moments where the greatest moments of real connection and belief and sort of almost like a physical awareness of the presence of God overwhelmed me. It wasn't the God that met me in those moments of these deep moments of excretion and pain and loss was not the unmoved mover of Greek philosophy. It wasn't that kind of a God.

24:41 It was a crucified God, a God who suffered, a God who knew my pain, a Father who understood what it was like to see his own son suffer on behalf of others. And it was in those moments that I just felt connected like I never had and brought more deeper into my understanding of who God is, who God has revealed himself to be in Christ. And that's carried me. And so, and maybe one last thing, sorry, on having this, like the whole issue of healing which I value the idea of praying for healing, I still found it very, I experienced peace when I do have a chance to pray.

25:30 I just feel like I've learned and come to appreciate a new perspective on what healing is that it's not just having the pain or the loss taken away, but it's actually an introduction into and being drawn into a peace and a love and a joy that can be found in relationship with Christ. And so that to me is the kind of healing that I feel like we've been allowed to experience on this. So that's the answer to the question, you know, how has God met you in the midst of this? I kind of derailed us earlier when you had asked that question and we went right to the ceremony.

26:12 And I wanted to make sure we got that in there. And I understand that since I've experienced a pretty big loss recently and with Steve leaving for heaven without me. And but to write, it's God is there and he meets you and where there's a hole in your heart and mind kind of, then he can come in and flood that with peace and with understanding with trust in him. And so thank you. Thanks for that. Thanks for sharing. And I'm just so grateful that we got to talk and that I read your book and speaking of your book.

26:52 We are giving it away three copies that we're going to give to listeners who sign up, but they'll get the instructions on that. So God bless you. Thank you. I'm grateful. Thanks for taking time to have us. Did God speak to you, my listeners? Did He give you new insight, ideas, hope? Be sure to check out the show notes. I've included some more resources from Pat and Tammy for you that might help you on your lost journey. We're also, as I said last time, giving away three copies of their book, Hit Hard, and instructions for being in the drawing for those books are in the show notes.

27:34 I hope you always read the show notes because there's other material there for you. I try to put one or two other things that will be helpful to you there every time. God bless you.