Raising Them While She Is Still Alive

There are two small coats on the low hooks she put in three years ago, and a chart on the fridge, and a bag for swimming that has to go out on Tuesdays.

She is sixty-six.

The younger one calls her Nanny and the older one, who was six when they came and is nine now, calls her by her first name sometimes and Nanny sometimes and has never once been corrected on either, because she decided early that the child had enough to be getting on with.

She does the school run. She does the reading records and the assemblies and the appointment with the school about the older one that she does not want to think about. She is good at all of it, better than she was the first time round, which is a fact she finds unbearable in a way she has never said out loud.

Her daughter is alive. That has to be said, because everybody assumes otherwise. She is alive and she is somewhere and there was a message in April.

And there is no word for this. There is no word for what she is grieving, no card anybody sends, no service, no date on the calendar, and no version of the sentence she could say at a school gate that would not either be too much or a lie.

That is you, and there is nowhere to put it.

The grief with no funeral

Let me name it properly, because I do not think anybody has.

You are mourning your daughter. Not her death, which has not happened and which you are not asking about, but everything else: the daughter you had before, the life you expected her to have, the version of your sixties you were owed and are not getting, and the plain fact that her children are here and she is not. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

That is a bereavement in every way that matters and it has none of the equipment. No funeral, so no gathering. No date, so no anniversary anybody remembers. No word, so no way to say it. And, worst of all, no permission, because she is alive, and you feel that grieving her would be a kind of betrayal.

It is not a betrayal. It is what happens to a person who has lost something enormous with no ceremony available.

You are allowed to grieve this, and you do not need a death to make it legitimate. Scripture keeps a whole book of laments in which people mourn things that are not funerals, Lamentations 3:19-20, and the Holy Spirit does not require a coffin before He will treat a loss as a loss.

What the verse actually says

There is a line in Psalm 27 that gets read as comfort for orphans and is more than that.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Notice that the psalm does not soften the first half. It does not say if. It does not explain the parents or defend them or find a reason. It states, flatly, that this happens, and that when it does there is a taking up.

That is a verse for the children in your kitchen, and it is worth knowing it is there for them, in the book, said plainly, without anybody being blamed in the sentence.

And here is the part that matters for you: the taking up in that verse is God's. Not yours. You are doing the school run and the reading records and the swimming bag, and God is doing something underneath all of that which is His to do and which does not depend on you getting the next three years right.

You are not the only thing standing between those children and a bad outcome. Scripture says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up, Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the taking up, which means the whole weight is not resting on a woman of sixty-six.

Two things I will not do

I am not going to tell you what happened to your daughter or why. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has offered you a theory, and the theories offered to grandmothers in your position are almost always about somebody else's fear.

And I am not going to promise you she comes back. That is not mine to hand out. She is a grown woman with her own account before God and her own road, and nothing on this page and nothing in any song will be aimed at moving her will, because love does not acquire authority over a person by being love.

What I can say is that God is with her this week, wherever she is standing, at exactly the strength He is in your kitchen. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence, Psalm 139:7, and the Holy Spirit named there is not divided between the two of you and has never had to choose.

The thing you have not said out loud

Here is the sentence I suspect you have never said, and I am going to say it for you so that you do not have to be the one who says it first. It is written, in Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

You are better at this than you were the first time, and that is unbearable. Scripture settles that in Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

You are calmer. You have more patience. You know which battles do not matter. You are, by any measure anybody could apply, a better parent at sixty-six than you were at twenty-nine, and every time you notice it, something in you goes cold, because the obvious next thought is about the daughter who got the first version. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Hear this carefully. That thought is not a verdict on your parenting and it is not the explanation for where she is. Grown people's lives are not simple outputs of how they were raised; if they were, Scripture would read very differently, and every parent of a thriving child would be entitled to a smugness the Bible never grants anybody.

You are not the cause of this. Scripture says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son, Ezekiel 18:20, and it separates the accounts deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is not running the case you have been running against yourself at eleven at night.

Somebody has to ask how you are

And the practical part, which is not about her.

Everybody in your life asks about the children. The school asks. Your friends ask. The health visitor asked. It is the correct question and they mean it kindly.

Nobody asks about you, and that is not neglect; it is that you have made yourself so entirely into the arrangement that there is no longer a visible person to ask about. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 27:10, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Tell one friend the sentence. Not about the children, and not about your daughter. I am grieving her, and she is not dead, and there is nowhere to put that.

You were not meant to carry this without anybody. Scripture says weep with them that weep, Romans 12:15, and the instruction assumes somebody knows there is weeping going on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets one true sentence out of a woman who has been asked about the children for three years.