Your day, your plans, your family, your story – nothing is too messed up. Nothing is really wrecked when left in the hands of the One who can resurrect all things….
Just look to the manger…. In the time of prophets and kings, in the time of Mary and Joseph, it wasn’t your line of credit, your line of work, or your line of accomplishments that explained who you were. It was your family line… But if you trace Jesus’ family tree? The coming of Christ was through families of messed-up monarchs and battling brothers; Jesus’ family tree is one of affairs and adultery and more than a feud or two, with skeletons in closets and cheaters at tables and babies birthed in filthy stables.
Families don’t have to be perfect to find themselves perfectly loved. People can be messy and be bathed in grace. No matter your family tree, the family tree of Christ always gives you hope. No matter your story – Jesus can write your story into a restorative story.
~ Ann Voskamp
Some things are just hard to write about. Life is messy. LOVE is messy. I’ve debated for over a week on how to write this story, whether to write it at all, what to write, how much to share, what God wants me to say, if He even wants me to tell this story…..back and forth, over and over in my mind. Finally, one evening as I was talking to Garen about it, he said something that made me ask myself, “what do you want people to know from it? What message do you feel God wants you to convey?”
Forgiveness.
One year ago, on December 2nd, I found out that my last remaining sibling died. I was standing in Lowe’s when my son Dylan called me. I will never forget his words: “Mom, I don’t know how to tell you this and I really don’t want to tell you while you’re shopping, but I don’t want you to see it on Facebook. Uncle Rick died.” He saw it on FACEBOOK. Bless his heart, he just couldn’t stand the thought of me seeing that online, so he immediately called me even though he was so upset having to tell me in that way. I love him so much for that.
That’s just the end of the story. How this ended so heartbreakingly begins with the death of Rick’s wife, Kathy. I was 8 when they married; Kathy was just like a big sister to me and I loved her dearly. She passed away from cancer at the age of 49. They had been married almost 30 years with no children and were each other’s best friend. He was lost without her. That’s when the alcohol and drug abuse started.
Rick was the second oldest child and was 16 when I was born. When I got sick with encephalitis and almost died at the age of 6 months old, Mom said Rick would sit by my crib in the hospital and just cry. When I was growing up, Dennis and I loved spending time with him and Kathy in the summer at their home in the mountains of Ruidoso, N.M. When I was first married with little babies and a husband just starting his career (i.e., we were poor!), I walked out on Christmas morning to a suburban with a big red bow on it. Rick had bought me a bigger vehicle for my growing family, and I was blown away. When I was a divorced single mom in law school and struggling, he and Kathy came down and took all of us to Six Flags for Dylan’s birthday because he knew I couldn’t afford it. That trip was the last time I would see Kathy. She had been complaining of back pain all during that trip and would later find out it was kidney cancer.
Rick was athletic, tall, strong and stable - the kind of brother who was steady and loyal. He was a football star and had a scholarship to play football for the University of Texas, until he blew his knee out his senior year of high school. He was still very successful and eventually started his own construction company, which enabled him to help others in our family and his community. Rick was always there for me. Until he wasn’t anymore. When he lost the love of his life, he became someone I didn’t know. He had shoulder injuries from years of construction work and relied on pain medicine to get through the day. Then he started to rely on it to heal the pain of his heart and slowly became unrecognizable to me. Sure, he looked the same, but he was not my brother.
When my mom had a stroke, it seemed the natural thing for Rick to move in and help take care of her. Kathy had passed away and he had no children while the rest of us would have to move our families to be near her so she could stay in the home she loved so much. We had no idea at the time that he would steal everything she had and leave me to pick up the pieces. Mom was an accountant and had made her end of life plans early on. She had given me the keys to her safety deposit box years ago and told me that if anything ever happened to her, take the keys and immediately get everything out. I assumed it was her will that was in it. I later found out it was her cash reserve. I am sure she meant for it to help with expenses since she had made me her personal representative and later gave me power of attorney and Rick healthcare power of attorney, which made sense since I was the legal person in the family and he was her caretaker.
When she passed away in the summer of 2014, Rick met me in the front yard as I was walking up to the house to tell me that I was responsible for paying for her funeral. Without telling any of us, he had the documents changed months before to give him complete power of attorney and leaving me only as executor of her estate. He told me she had no money so as her executor, I was responsible for paying for everything. I immediately went to the bank to see if what he said was true. There was only $700 in her checking account, nothing in her savings. My mother was an accountant; she always had money and investments. She was a saver, not a spender. I asked to see the safety deposit box. It was empty. I was devastated. I was still in the aftermath of going through a divorce with a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old to support. My other two remaining siblings didn't have any money. The only money I had was in my 401K. I remember sitting there thinking “I can’t bury my mother…. I can’t bury my mother.” Panic rose up inside me, and then anger as the magnitude of what he had done begin to sink in on me.
Four months. For four months my mother laid in the morgue until I could get a loan against my 401K to bury her. Funeral homes want to be paid up front; there are no exceptions, at least not where I’m from. My precious mama, my beautiful mother who sacrificed her entire life for her children, who made sure we never went without even after my dad became disabled, laid in a morgue for FOUR MONTHS. I went ahead and had a memorial service for her before I left, planning everything myself in this state of shock, and during the entire service all I could think of was her laying in the morgue and how she didn’t deserve this. She worked her entire life, provided everything we ever needed, and he took it all without batting an eye or at least leaving enough to give her the burial she deserved.
It gets worse. While I was back in Tulsa working and trying to get the process speeded up to go back and bury her, he packed up her entire house and sold almost everything underneath us, keeping every single dime. I went back in October to bury her and he told me if I wanted what was left over to come and get it because he was going to donate it. I remember walking through my house for the last time, slowly taking in each now-empty room, all of her beautiful things she loved so much gone, knowing it was the last time I would ever walk through this house that she loved so much – that I loved so much, the only home I remember - and something deep inside of me broke. My heart was shattered, and an anger rose up in me that I had never felt before. I took whatever he had left, while my lawyer side planned on how to sue him for everything he had done to her and to us, his remaining siblings. He was a monster and I didn’t even know him anymore.
I packed everything up and went back home. The horror of what he did to my mom haunted me every day. I began building a case against him, called an attorney in Amarillo, and set my heart for battle to make sure he paid for everything he had done. And then one night in December, while the babies were sleeping and I was decorating my Christmas tree, I felt my mama whisper into my heart, “I don’t care anymore baby. I am with JESUS. Do you know the glory I am surrounded with now? All of that stuff doesn’t matter to me anymore! What matters more to me is your heart and taking your brother to court will tear you apart. You love him. I love him. And I love you.” And the pain and anger of the last 6 months began to pour out of me.
My mama was with Jesus. She didn’t care about the stuff. She didn’t care about the money anymore. What she wanted most of all was the same thing she had always wanted – her children’s happiness. I let the burden I had been carrying for months go that night. I made the choice to honor my mother’s memory by not fighting my brother. I chose to forgive and love him, albeit it from a far because of his continued drug abuse, in honor of my mother who loved us both.
Here’s the part of the story where you think “now she’s going to tell us he came to his senses, apologized, repaid everything and they lived happily ever after.” Nope. He never apologized. He never made things right. He never spoke to me other than cordially at our brother Dennis’ funeral. That was the last time I saw him.
You see, I didn’t even know he was sick. He had married again, which we also found out about on Facebook, and his new wife never even told us he had cancer and wouldn’t allow us at his funeral or give us any information about where he was. My nieces called her, Dylan tried to contact her, and she simply spewed hate. Not exactly the picture-perfect life my highlight reel can look like on social media.
The thing is, forgiveness is not about them. It’s about us. It’s about letting go of the anger, the pain, the trauma so that we can heal. And I so needed to heal. I have learned through my legal career that statutes and courts don’t solve everything. I might get some of what Rick took back, but I would never get my mother back. It wouldn’t change how long it took to bury her. It wouldn’t give her the funeral she deserved. It wouldn’t suddenly make his drug abuse non-existent. It wouldn’t give me the brother I knew and loved for 40 years back.
Most of all, it wouldn’t take away my pain. But forgiveness would. Forgiveness did. When I heard that Rick passed, I cried. But I didn’t cry tears of anger or vengeance or self-righteousness. I cried for the brother I loved; the one that was there for me my entire life, the one whose heart was broken when Kathy died, the one that never missed my kids’ birthdays, the one that loved his family so much before the drugs and alcohol took over his life. That is the brother I choose to remember. That is the brother I will always love and miss. That is who I long to see one day.
Hurt people hurt people. That’s not an excuse, just a fact. It doesn’t excuse what they have done, it doesn’t take away any of the pain, but it does allow us to see them as people, not just as monsters or criminals. It allows us to put on the lens of love and grace and mercy and love them right where they are, just as Jesus loved and died for us while we were yet sinners. Do we truly understand what that means for Jesus to love us like that? Do you, dear friend, really understand the magnitude of that kind of love? Would I have taken the punishment for Rick in the midst of what he did to our Mom? Would I have said, “No, don’t punish him; let me die in his place” when he had no remorse or acknowledgement of the pain he caused? When he sat at my mom’s memorial service with no remorse, knowing I couldn’t get her out of the morgue because of all he had stolen from her? Let that sink in for a while, because I think the answer for all of us would be no. Yet, that is EXACTLY what Christ did for us on the cross. He didn’t wait for us to be remorseful, He didn’t wait for us to acknowledge Him or the pain we had caused Him or the people He loves. He went willingly to a horrible death most of us can’t imagine, out of sheer love for someone that may never love Him back. That someone is you. That someone is me. That someone is Rick. That someone is the person that has hurt you, that you don’t know if you can ever forgive. My friend, if you only get one thing from these blog posts, please get this: LET THAT LOVE IN YOUR HEART, AND LET THAT PAIN YOU'VE BEEN HOLDING ON TO GO. Lay everything at the foot of the cross. Let Jesus take the pain of whatever has been done to you and wash it away with His very blood. He sees your tears, He KNOWS. And He paid a great price, while we too were in the midst of our own sin, to make sure that all of those tears will be washed away forever one day.
Rick lived fifty-plus years of his life as a loving, giving, kind big brother, son and husband. I will not let his last few drug-affected years on this earth out shadow all of the good he did in his life. I choose to remember the good and let go of the bad, because that is exactly what Jesus has done for me.
I choose love.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
~Romans 5:8
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