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

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If you love a prodigal, you can discover help and hope for your wilderness journey right

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here at When You Love a Prodigal, and also help and hope for your own life journey.

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Welcome back to our conversation with Pat and Tammy McLeod.

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If you missed last week's episode, you will want to listen to it to understand the loss

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that they have experienced, and then to gain the most from today's conversation.

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As always, remember to jot down any information or application you may want to follow up on.

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Welcome back, Pat and Tammy.

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Thank you.

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Thank you for having us.

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We are so grateful for your willingness to share your hard story.

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Last week you told us about your son, Zach, his accident and the hard journey that has

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been for your entire family.

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This week we're looking forward to hearing a little about the discovery of ambiguous

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loss and how that has been helpful to you, but also just the things that God has done

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in your lives and in your family and with other people that God has given you that you could

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actually minister to them because of this hard journey.

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Give us a brief reminder just for people who didn't hear last week of who you are and what

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you do in your family, and what happened to Zach.

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We are on CRU staff in Boston.

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We work with CRU at Harvard.

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Zach, we have four adult children, Zach is our second, and I had a really close relationship

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with him, not just as a mom, but as having a very deep spiritual connection.

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I'll never forget the night he ran out the door at age 16, first call saying goodbye,

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Pete, I love you, that was his nickname for me, and that was the last time I heard his

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next real voice.

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That night our second son, Nate, called us at a meeting, unloaded on us.

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Coaches have been calling our house.

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Parents are calling.

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They'll have hospitals calling.

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Zach's injured.

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They say they need your permission to do emergency brain surgery.

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So we raced to the hospital, bused through the emergency room doors, and a doctor advised

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us to do emergency brain surgery, which could result in deaths, a full recovery, or anything

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in between.

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So we signed the paperwork as we stared at Zach, who lay there before us unconscious

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in his football gear.

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We kissed him goodbye, prayed for him, and they wheeled him away.

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And Zach survived the surgery, but a portion of his brain did not.

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Hard, hard stuff.

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I'm trying to figure out, maybe you could help our listeners, how does a part of the

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brain work and not the other part?

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Actually it's so he had multiple infarcts, which is another name for strokes, in his

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brain because of the swelling and compression that was put on the brain.

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It just kept blood from going to parts, all different parts of the brain.

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So he has impairment of his vision.

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He doesn't see very well.

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His voice, he can't speak very well.

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He has lost a lot of control of the right side of his body.

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So he's not very stable, his balance isn't very good.

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So it's just all different.

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It was pretty brutal, by the way, Judy went.

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They gave me that report.

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A couple of days after in the ICU, they went through all these portions of the brain that

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I didn't even know existed and where there were indications of just loss of brain mass.

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And what part was working and how does that impact him now?

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It was mostly a left brain injury.

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So his other things I said about ambulation and right side weakness where it was affected

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by that, but the other side of the brain, which is more of your creative side, was pretty

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much unscathed.

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And so he's emotionally very with it and very much the personality of Zach has been sustained.

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But the athleticism, of course, is gone.

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It's interesting, he knows better how you're doing than you do.

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Yeah, really?

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Yeah, he'll ask us, are you okay?

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And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine.

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And then a minute later, I'm not really fine.

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It's more like, I'm fine.

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Actually I'm not.

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So he can talk some, obviously.

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Tiny bit.

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A tiny bit.

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Like a sentence or two, and sometimes people can't understand what he's saying, but we

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can.

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So he smiles a lot.

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Yes.

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He's filled with joy.

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Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually meeting God himself.

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He's just overflowing with joy.

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He does show you that like, what if they say 70% of communication is nonverbal?

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He can communicate a lot without using words.

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He sees people and they know it, and they know they feel loved by him.

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They feel seen by him.

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They feel known by him in ways that they don't by anyone.

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Fuck a dog.

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So he does have some extraordinary abilities, and this has accentuated those abilities for

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sure.

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So last week, you mentioned the concept of ambiguous loss.

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So can you define that for us and then begin to tell us how that helped you cope with the

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loss of that?

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Yes.

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I didn't find out about this term ambiguous loss until year six.

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So I wish I would have known about it earlier, but Pauline Boss, who coined the term, describes

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two types of ambiguous loss.

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And the first is when you do not have the person physically, but you psychologically

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have them still in your mind.

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So missing people or people who are not in your life anymore, you don't see them anymore,

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divorce, adoption, immigration.

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And then the second type is the type we're dealing with.

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And that is where you have the person, but they're not the same anymore.

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So not only brain injury, but Alzheimer's, dementia, severe mental illness, or addiction.

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And so what did that change for you when you began to understand that?

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Because you talk in your book about just having all these questions for the Lord and the pain

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that you were experiencing and that understanding ambiguous loss gave it a name, and that helped

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you get a handle on it better.

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Yeah, Boss talked about the importance of being able to live well with having and not

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having the person at the same time.

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And so that was just super helpful for me.

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She said, there's no linear process of letting go.

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And rarely is there acceptance.

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And so just her understanding of working with people who dealt with ambiguous losses is

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about the 60th year she's been doing it was helpful for me to see that I have to live

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well with not only not having Zach, that's the more natural part for me, but I have to

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learn to live well with having him too and in a different way.

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So she has six key...

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Yeah, before you go to the resilient stuff, let me add to that.

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Like I think the big takeaway for me when Tammy was introducing me to her discovery

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of Pauline Boss and this idea that the key to living well with ambiguous losses, learning

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to live with both having and not having at the same time, that just like the light came

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on for us because typically people will do one or the other, but not both.

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And sometimes they do neither.

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So that's part of what complicates this is that you have to learn how to do the one you're

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not doing.

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But when you're in a relationship and one person is doing one and the other is doing

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the other, it gets even more complicated.

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And that's really the story of our book because you have one person who's basically obsessing

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over the sun he still has, but in complete denial about the sun that's been lost.

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And the other is a person who is mourning and grieving the loss of the sun, but failing

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to revise her attention, her attachment to the sun that she still has.

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That's kind of the journey that we were on.

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So how did that change things then when you began to walk along that path and understand

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and understand each other better too, what began to change for you?

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I think the moment when this began to change, Tammy and I were actually away on a personal

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planning retreat and she had been working on this paper about this topic and big as

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lost and she dropped it on my lap.

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I just hate you should probably read this and I had other things I wanted to do and

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I looked and I wasn't at all surprised that it was something about grief because that's

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the world she was living in.

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What I was surprised by was that she had a name for the kind of grief we were experiencing

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and big as lost.

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And one of the things she had been wanting me to do for this is probably, I don't know,

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four years into it.

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On the anniversary of Zach's injury, his injury happened two days before the birthday.

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And so that year, the anniversary of his injury was on a Friday and his birthday was on a

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Sunday.

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And so on that day in between, Tammy made a proposal.

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This is actually one of the recommendations that Boss puts in her book on how to increase

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your resilience in the midst of ambiguous loss.

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She said, what if we had a get together and every year she wanted to do something commemorating

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like this moment that our lives were radically changed.

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But this year between those two, well, first she asked if we could do something like that,

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gather together some family and friends and just acknowledge the loss and validate the

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loss, something we had never really done communally.

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We'd done it privately but never communally.

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And I said, well, okay, I'll make a deal.

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We can do it as long as we also celebrate his birthday.

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And the Zach, we still have.

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And so we did that on that Saturday.

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We did the time to mourn, the time to dance.

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That's what Tammy called it, taken right from Lennon.

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Is it the line?

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Where is it?

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I can't remember.

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And so what did you do to have at those things?

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That's tricky.

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And who came?

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Yeah, so we had about 150 people at the ceremony of ambiguous loss.

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And they came in and they looked at items of socks on tables like the Lover of God table,

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the Lover of Sport table, the Outdoor Adventurer table.

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And then they went in to the sanctuary and Pat did a slideshow of Zach before his injury.

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And so we showed that with some of Zach's favorite songs.

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We talked about what we missed about Zach as a family.

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Each of our children got up and spoke to.

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And then we gave people a moment of silence just to write their own losses.

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So we had pieces of blue paper and they wrote what they lost.

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And then some people stood up and shared what they lost too.

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So we were able to share those losses in community.

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And then as they exited, people put those pieces of blue paper with their losses into

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a bottle.

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The scripture that talks about how God holds our tears in his bottle.

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We just thought it would be a great way to end it.

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People could just put them in the bottle as they left.

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And then that night we read through them all.

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So we got to see the losses of our whole community that night when we got home.

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And Zach was not at the ceremony.

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People ask us, why are you doing this?

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Because he's not dead.

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That's the one thing that's really tough about ambiguous loss is that there's usually

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no validation of it.

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And there are no ceremonies because the person didn't die.

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And so people thought we were kind of weird doing it.

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But after it was done, they said, thank you so much.

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We didn't know how much we needed this.

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That would be the question people would ask.

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He's still here.

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Why are you mourning?

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Well, we're mourning that the person we knew is not here.

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The person that we have, though, matters.

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So then the next day, did you do the birthday or did you wait till his birthday?

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So two hours, well, an hour later, we did the party.

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So we walked out of one into the other.

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And that one, Zach was there.

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And he was just, they'll have you when everyone walked in the door.

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It's super.

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I'm sure, yes.

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And then we had people write on gold cards what they appreciate about Zach.

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And they get up at a microphone and read that.

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And then we had another slideshow there, Zach's recovery.

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So it was a great way to actually focus on the having and the not having together two

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things back to back that showed both.

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So I don't know if you can tell this, but is there anything that your children have

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expressed that you're free to talk about or tell your other children?

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Yeah.

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Because they've been definitely affected.

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I think that event was really a turning point for our entire family.

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I remember that day that I, Nate had come home from college.

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Chelsea was now starting her career.

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Was she or was she still home coming home?

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I can't even remember now.

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Anyway, I remember the day that they all got home, they were home.

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And I was so excited because I'd been working on this slideshow of Zach, the kind of a time

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to mourn slideshow, which was all the pictures of him before his injury and just who he was.

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And I put these pictures to his favorite music.

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And I was just proud of myself that I could actually do something on a computer.

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And I was kind of free to show that off to the kids that your dad can make an eye movie.

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I just asked someone who knows what they're doing to do those things.

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Yeah.

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But I forgot that every time I sat down to do that, I started to just weep.

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Like I couldn't get through it.

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The combination of the music and the individuals and the memories.

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I was just emotionally cleansing for me, as I mentioned earlier.

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I was finally grieving and acknowledging the loss.

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And so I came out and they were in the kitchen and I said, okay, you want to see what dad

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did?

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And I show them this and it isn't a minute into the video.

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And one of our kids just ran out of the room crying and Klamy then followed.

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And pretty soon it was just me and Sora, you know, I left the load like, what just happened?

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And we go in.

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And it was the first time, and this was a gift from God to us that Tammy was just huddled

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around our son who was weeping and just acknowledging that he had lost a brother.

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And that, so for me, that was just a moment.

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That was a milestone marker in our journey where we for the first time were able to really

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as a family together, grieve and acknowledge, even though this, we still have Zach, that

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there was a real loss here and as a loss that has shaken us all.

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Our youngest son wasn't sure he was going to share anything at the ceremony, but after

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that moment he decided that he was going to.

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So he actually joined the next day.

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It just, well, those are beautiful stories.

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And I think that what you did with the morning and dancing celebrations or morning recognition

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and is just a fabulous thing that others could do.

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Sometimes you can do it in other circumstances as well, where there is that kind of ambiguous

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loss where you do have to mourn and recognize.

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But then there's also to look at what you still have, even if it's not what you started

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out with and it can look different.

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So I'm hoping that these comments will really be a blessing to an awful lot of our audiences

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as they think about it.

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But I wanted to ask you about one last thing.

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Tell us about Tim Tebow.

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Yeah.

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So that was an interesting moment in our story when we were, we had just gotten home

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after the Denver Broncos had beaten in an overtime victory.

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What an incredible season.

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This is the, you know, this amazing season that Tim Tebow had with the Denver Broncos.

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We get this call saying, hey, you know, Tim Tebow, before every game he meets with a kid

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and we line these up way ahead of time, but they just won a game that we didn't expect

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him to win.

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So we don't have anyone lined up for him and he's playing in New England right next to

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you and we would like you to be, we'd like Zach to be his make-a-wish person who meets

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him on the field right before the game.

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And so we said, yes, of course.

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I mean, Zach loves Tim Tebow.

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He used to actually do the things Tim Tebow did when he would get down on his knee and

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thank God when he scored a touchdown.

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And so yeah, they arranged it.

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We got a chance to meet him.

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We still are part of his network.

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In fact, we'll be going in a couple of weeks to his golf tournament again and Zach and

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he and Zach have a great, great connection.

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They really do.

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That's great.

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It was fun seeing they gave big hugs and got excited and that kind of thing.

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And that's something to say thank you, Lord, that God can bring into the very hard some

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joyful things.

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And they may not be the, again, the healing and the restoration that you would want, but

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they can still be positive, uplifting things.

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And that's just one.

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You've had others where God is used, Zach, not only to do work in your life and we didn't

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get to talk about that as much as we might, but to do work in other people's lives too.

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And I love what you said about the kids.

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Your children, that they had struggled for the book I could understand that they struggled

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kind of privately for a while.

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You didn't really realize how much they were missing him and how much loss they were experiencing

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and yet were able then to come together and do that.

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So thank you.

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Thanks for being open and vulnerable and willing to share your story.

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Judy, I did what there was one other thing I wanted to add if I can add it in.

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Yeah, dear, and me too.

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You go first, son.

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One thing that was really great for me to see during this whole trial is that God is

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near us in suffering.

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And I knew that by reading Bible verses before this happened, but in actual experience, it

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happened to me.

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Like I just experienced a love of God like never before during this time.

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So strengthening me through the Psalms.

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I pretty much stayed in the Psalms for four years and read those.

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And then I started doing examin at the end of every day because one of the things the

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polling boss says is really important is discovering new hopes.

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And so examine at the end of the day when you're looking back what was life giving,

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what was life sorting.

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That really helps you see you when you look at the life giving things, the hope that's

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breaking through.

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So we do have the hope.

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Zach's going to have a new body someday, but we actually need hope now in breaking hope

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as Henry now uncalls it.

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And so the discipline of examine at the end of every day helped me to see that.

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And there's so many ways that God has brought hope to us in the middle of suffering.

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So I just wanted to make sure to say that.

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One thing I wanted to say to your question about God in suffering or loss, maybe two

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things.

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At least one is that Tammy and I actually, once we had written this book and several

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times we were being interviewed by secular outlets and they were kind of shocked that

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we are professional Christians, they would call us.

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You'd like to hear minister as you believe in God and yet you have this terrible thing

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happen to you.

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How did this ever cause you to question your faith?

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And I remember the first time that was asked of me that I was like, well, I mean, we both

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looked at each other like, no, not really.

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But that was not a very good answer.

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And so I just thought, you know, actually, it's almost exactly the opposite.

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So I've answered that.

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I now answer that question differently.

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If a person wants to know, do I ever doubt my faith?

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The answer is yes, of course.

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I often deal with questions that bother me or that are doubts that I have about God and

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what I believe about him.

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But during that time of loss and pain, I would say that not only did I not doubt him, but

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it was really actually at those moments where the greatest moments of real connection and

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belief and sort of almost like a physical awareness of the presence of God overwhelmed

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me.

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It wasn't the God that met me in those moments of these deep moments of excretion and pain

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and loss was not the unmoved mover of Greek philosophy.

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It wasn't that kind of a God.

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It was a crucified God, a God who suffered, a God who knew my pain, a Father who understood

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what it was like to see his own son suffer on behalf of others.

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And it was in those moments that I just felt connected like I never had and brought more

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deeper into my understanding of who God is, who God has revealed himself to be in Christ.

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And that's carried me.

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And so, and maybe one last thing, sorry, on having this, like the whole issue of healing

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which I value the idea of praying for healing, I still found it very, I experienced peace

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when I do have a chance to pray.

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I just feel like I've learned and come to appreciate a new perspective on what healing

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is that it's not just having the pain or the loss taken away, but it's actually an introduction

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into and being drawn into a peace and a love and a joy that can be found in relationship

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with Christ.

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And so that to me is the kind of healing that I feel like we've been allowed to experience

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on this.

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So that's the answer to the question, you know, how has God met you in the midst of this?

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I kind of derailed us earlier when you had asked that question and we went right to the

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ceremony.

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And I wanted to make sure we got that in there.

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And I understand that since I've experienced a pretty big loss recently and with Steve

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leaving for heaven without me.

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And but to write, it's God is there and he meets you and where there's a hole in your

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heart and mind kind of, then he can come in and flood that with peace and with understanding

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with trust in him.

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And so thank you.

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Thanks for that.

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Thanks for sharing.

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And I'm just so grateful that we got to talk and that I read your book and speaking of

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your book.

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We are giving it away three copies that we're going to give to listeners who sign up, but

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they'll get the instructions on that.

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So God bless you.

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Thank you.

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I'm grateful.

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Thanks for taking time to have us.

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Did God speak to you, my listeners?

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Did He give you new insight, ideas, hope?

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Be sure to check out the show notes.

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I've included some more resources from Pat and Tammy for you that might help you on your

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lost journey.

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We're also, as I said last time, giving away three copies of their book, Hit Hard, and

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instructions for being in the drawing for those books are in the show notes.

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I hope you always read the show notes because there's other material there for you.

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I try to put one or two other things that will be helpful to you there every time.

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God bless you.