Photo by seyed mostafa zamani

By Jerrica Ching

On April 4^th of this year, my 95-year-old grandfather was called home to be with God.  I consider him to be the most independent man I know to date; he cut the grass on his own lawn and drove his car around town up to the age of 93!  To me he was invincible, and I truly believed he would live to be 100 or even older.  Therefore on April 4^th at 7 AM PST, when my phone began to ring with “Mom” displayed across the screen, I knew what she was going to tell me before I even accepted the call.  It was 4 AM in Hawaii and there would be no need for my mom to call me so early unless something important had happened.

Nowadays I find myself experiencing so many different emotions surrounding my grandfather’s death on a daily basis.  A Swiss American psychiatrist by the name of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed a model that follows five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  The stages do not need to be followed in that exact order, and I’ve found that I have been constantly fluxing between the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining throughout the week.

For the first few days I think I was in denial and refused to believe that this man, who I believed would live forever, had passed on so quickly overnight.  Although his health had been deteriorating at a steady pass during the final year of his life, he was still considered to be healthy for his age.  I had even spoken with my mom over the phone the night before and had been told that my grandfather wasn’t doing great, but wasn’t doing bad either.

Lately I have been finding myself moving between anger and bargaining.  I am angry because I was 2,000 miles away from a loved one and didn’t get to spend as much time with him as I could.  The bargaining occurs when I am so angry at something so irrational as death that I try to rationalize it by pinpointing the exact cause of why and how it happened.  I have told myself that it was my fault that he passed away because I wasn’t there to help my parents take care of him.  I have gotten upset with my family members for not doing more for him, even though I know they gave him the best care possible while still granting him some independence.  I have gone over every single scenario in my head to see where or how things could have gone differently.  I am hard on myself.  I fill my head with negativity.  I feel completely out of control.

In trying to rationalize death, I remember Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  I am reminded that as angry as I am, good will emerge from it.  The good may not emerge immediately – or in this lifetime – but it will inevitably emerge in God’s time.  I struggle with understanding that my perspective of ‘good’ is not equivalent to God’s perspective of ‘good.’  In this day and age where results can be given instantaneously, it is incredibly difficult to have unwavering faith, trust, and patience that things will heal with time.  To truly believe that good can come out of any bad circumstance, regardless of how long that may take, is to move one step closer to the stage of acceptance.

Although it can be difficult for me to not try to rationalize this situation, I am learning to step back, take a deep breath, grant myself a piece of God’s grace, and know that despite going through a bad circumstance, good will always prevail.

Jerrica K. F. Ching is in her fourth and final year of study as a Marriage, Couples and Family Counseling student at George Fox University.  She received a B.A. in Psychology and a Minor in Dance from The University of Hawaii at Manoa.  She is currently an intern therapist at Lower Columbia Mental Health Center in Longview, WA and Concordia University in Portland, OR.