A Passage Towards Faith, Pt. 2 of 4
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 1, No. 5 (June13, 1998)

Editor's Note: In part I of "Passages," PapaJon told us of the traps, doubts, and discoveries he experienced during the first days after Lana's death. He ended by noting his realization that accepting God's help is where comfort and healing begin. In this week's article, PapaJon discusses his experiences of anger and denial, the first two of the five stages of the grieving process.

Losing Lana so suddenly and so untimely demanded understanding, or so I felt. I wanted answers and I wanted them now, not "in time," as so many people said. But God doesn't work that way. Anger and denial took the place of understanding or, at least, hindered what little understanding was available to me.

Anger: the feeling that I wanted to destroy something, trash a room, throw everything I could get my hands on and scream till I was hoarse. Anger at Lana for not going to the doctor sooner, when she knew she had lumps in her breast. Anger at the doctors for not foreseeing, and doing something about, the blood clot that formed in her leg after surgery—the one that ultimately broke loose and went to Lana's heart, killing her in seconds. Anger because I wasn't there next to her when it happened. Most of all, I was angry at God for taking someone so dear and so precious from me, and from her children, when He had this whole world to choose from.

Denial: it begins with, No, this can't be! You must have mixed up patients in the hospital; then, it goes to stranger and stranger places in the mind. For weeks, every time the phone rang, I thought, It's going to be Lana. I would hear her say, with her wonderful—if occasionally perverse—sense of humor, "Gotcha!".

Once my mind even got to the point where I thought maybe, after all, Lana was really this bad person who cooked up these elaborate plots to hurt men, get them to fall in love with her, then break their hearts by faking her death. God forgive me, Lana forgive me, for that thought but it crossed my mind. I think it was a measure of how desperately I wanted her back. My God in Heaven, I wanted Lana back.

Then, one night while standing in front of her photograph, wishing I could push my face through the glass to smell her hair, or feel her cheek against mine—something flickered in my brain. It had to do with a prayer I'd prayed after her surgery.

Having a breast removed and most of the lymph nodes on the left side of her body, Lana was in enormous pain during the week she lived after surgery. I remembered one day praying for her. I asked God—no, I begged God—to give me her pain (sad to say for me, one of the few unselfish prayers I'd ever prayed).

It occurred to me that night, before Lana's picture, God had done just that. He'd taken her to a place of no pain, a place of comfort and given me the greatest pain of my life. I remember thinking, Be careful what you pray for ... you just might get it. It was in that moment I took my first step towards acceptance. I decided that, even if I could, I would not call her back—neither to the pain she experienced nor to the likelihood of a long and suffering death from the cancer which had attacked her body. Calling Lana back then would have been for me, not for her.

Beyond that, there have been no answers. Besides, knowing why God wanted Lana more than I wanted her, or why He needed her more than the children needed her, would neither bring her back nor lessen the pain for any of us.

I still have my moments, occasionally raising a fist towards the heavens and shouting "Why?" There are other moments when I am amazed that life continues to go on around me, that spring is giving way to summer or that a humble petunia in my garden lives and blooms when the dearest flower of my life has withered and gone. There are also days I feel panicked because time is flying forward carrying me farther from that last moment we had together, not knowing it would be our last.

Other people, including Lana, are able to quote the great writers and scripture at the best and worst moments of their lives. Probably since I started my adult life as a professional actor, my repertoire is limited to musical comedy. A line from The Fantasticks keeps occurring to me: "Who understands why Spring is born out of Winter's laboring pains, or why we must all die a bit to be born again."

Maybe God doesn't give us the answers to all the questions our small intellects generate because, in all things we endure, Heis the answer. Unless I accept that, there is no faith. And where there is no faith, there is no peace.

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