I have noticed an interesting trend/pattern within myself ever since my grandma died. I am more sensitive to death. When I hear about a death – even some fictionalized ones, I have a different kind of reaction than I used to have. Before Grandma died I reacted to death with an intellectual type of sadness. Some thing like “Oh, that’s too bad for the family.” Now I have a personal understanding of the emptiness that death leaves in its wake and my reaction is more of an emotional “I know something of what that feels like.”
I understand that each death we face strikes us differently. I am sure that losing my wife or losing one of my children would be a much different experience than losing my grandma, but I have now experienced that vacuum that death universally leaves and I can see that it has changed me. I gives me more ability to understand the loss of others. Leave it to God to make something positive out of something that we all see as not positive.
As I read this post, it was brought home how keenly I have experienced this same sensation. For me it has been not so much in the event of death, but any great painful experience. The last four years of my life have been filled with major depression and, consequently, the suffering which attends it. I have noticed this has made me especially keen to others pain. Most recently a woman I’d never even met whose husband left her two days after the birth of their second child and a good friend of my husband’s whose fiance just called off the wedding after approximately six months of engagement. I am also reminded of Christ and how He ‘descended below all things that he might know how to succor his people.”