Surviving Tragedy

Can you tell us about what happened to your son?

On a Thursday afternoon, my three-year-old son was sick, and we took him to the doctor. The doctor said he had the flu — that it was going around and not to worry about it. Then Saturday night, his breathing got kind of strange. All of a sudden, his eyes rolled back, and he fell unconscious. We tried to resuscitate him. There was a nurse living across the street from us, so she came over and tried to resuscitate him too. We called 911, and they took him away in the ambulance to the hospital. But he was already gone.

What the professionals said later was that they think he caught a strep virus on top of the flu. Some forms of strep are very deadly; they can make your whole system go what they call “septic,” which means it poisons your whole system. So one minute we have this healthy strong little three-year-old boy — very athletic and active, built like a little linebacker — and suddenly he’s gone. It was completely shocking. It was obviously nothing you would ever anticipate happening.

My wife Cheryl went into shock, crawled up into a fetal position and stayed there for about two or three days, crying uncontrollably. I wasn’t quite that out of it, but I went into a period that lasted about 6 weeks of the rawest emotional pain that I have ever experienced. Nothing else has come even close.

I lost my mom when she was really young. But this was nothing like that, because even though my mom died young, it was at least in order. Your parents are supposed to die before you do. When you lose a child, everything feels wrong about it.

Cheryl and I weren’t helpful to each other at all, because we were both in such pain that we made each other feel worse. So we both needed to tap our support systems. When I look back now to that time, my most positive memory of it was people flying in from all over the country just to be with us. We got calls from all over the world, all the people that we had ministered to over the years. That was really the beautiful part of it. But the internal part of it was just this raw pain that wouldn’t go away.

I was angry and needed a physical relief, so for about six weeks I would go in the morning to the gym and work out, lift weights, things like that, to deal with the physical part. I’m also a big journaler; I like to write. I would come home from the gym after getting the physical release part done, and I would write sometimes for two or three hours. I was not writing for anybody else. I was just prayer-writing, trying to process what happened.

At what point in ministry and church life was this all happening to you?

Well, we had planted a church in 1984, and so we had been at the church for 13 years. The church was wonderful, for the most part. They just rallied around us. Our son was an active little kid, and it was almost like he was the kid of the whole church. They took care of us for a couple of weeks. We really couldn’t do much for ourselves.

By that time, people had flown in from all over the place. It was a weird thing; our house had probably 30 or 40 people there all the time. That was good and bad and hard all at the same time, because at times we felt like hosts for this big party that we didn’t want to have.

When people were flying in, calling you and talking to you, what did they do or say that was helpful? What wasn’t so helpful?

There’s not a lot of good to say. Everybody’s attempts at theologizing were not helpful. You know, “Well, God allowed this, but God didn’t cause this.” All of those distinctions fail right away.

The people who were most helpful were a couple on our staff who had lost their 14-year-old daughter a number of years before. They just sort of got it. It’s like a club that you don’t want to get into, but when you are in it, you at least understand to some degree what the other people are going through. They mostly just sat with us and prayed with us. They didn’t offer a lot of advice.

People said very stupid things to us during the time. I had a guy at my son’s memorial service offer me his latest dreams and ask me to interpret them. Everything in me wanted to clock him. Everybody means well, and the smart ones don’t really say too much. They offer to pray for you and do whatever they can do. Especially in the beginning stages, you are so hurt and so confused that there is no way that anything somebody can say is going to pull you out of that or fix it.

So what eventually did happen to get you out of it?

I think it was partly just a matter of time. I remember distinctly at six weeks there being a difference. And the difference was, at six weeks it started to feel a little bit more broken up. Meaning it was sporadic. I wasn’t in pain all day long. I was still in pain throughout the day at different times, but it started to be more broken up.

And throughout the next year, it started to get more and more sporadic, so that I wasn’t just focused on the pain all the time. All the typical stages of grief that you go through in a loss, those all came and went. You get angry, and then you feel sad, and so on. They don’t happen in order. You bounce back and forth between all of them.

Do you think there were any particularly unique challenges to the fact that this happened while you were a pastor of a church and typically on the “other side” as someone offering advice or encouragement?

One of the hardest things about ministry is that you have to live your life in front of everybody. You have talked to these people for 13 years now about trusting God in every circumstance in your life. And now they are looking at you going, “Let’s see how this works out.” I don’t think anybody was really thinking that, but they were looking at us and more or less thinking, “Okay, how is this couple that’s been preaching to and teaching us for all this time going to live at this most crucial time in their life?”

[bctt tweet=”I chose to be with them and be pretty honest about how I was feeling. – Lance Pittluck” quote=”I chose to be with them and be pretty honest about how I was feeling.”]

It is painful to go through something like this, no matter who you are, but being a pastor is a complicating factor. I actually chose to preach through most of the time because I felt like it was something that happened to the whole church. Just to disappear didn’t feel right. I chose to be with them and be pretty honest about how I was feeling. I didn’t make every church service a group therapy session, but I would report to them where we were at and what was happening. I think that ended up being a really healthy thing.

What would you say to church planters and pastors to help them be more prepared for dealing with this kind of personal tragedy and difficulty? Is there anything?

Build your support system in the good times, because when the bad times come, they will be there for you. That really turned out to be true. It wasn’t just the people in the church in New York, but the people throughout the Vineyard and around the world that we had given our lives to. They all really rallied around us. You reap what you sow. We really did reap a harvest of relationships and friendships that we had invested in for probably 20 years.

There is nothing that can prepare you for this, but if you want to survive it, you have to maintain a really good relationship with God and have friends that you can walk life out with. I didn’t really enjoy being around people that I didn’t know before at all. People I liked having around were people I was very comfortable with and that I had walked with for a long time.

A lot of people sent me materials, most of which were not very helpful. The one thing I found that I would recommend to people was some writing by an old Scottish pastor named Samuel Rutherford. He was a Presbyterian pastor, and he lost all his children to childhood diseases in the 1700s. He took up a ministry of comforting people who lost their children. He wrote a book of letters to people he was trying to help through the process of losing their own children. That book was far superior to everything modern that I had read.

The other book I really enjoyed was C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Frankly, most of the modern stuff was garbage.

[bctt tweet=”I remember thinking, I have a choice here: I felt God challenging me to worship. – Lance Pittluck” quote=”I remember thinking, I have a choice here: I can crawl up inside myself and die, or, even though I don’t understand this, I can choose to worship. I felt God challenging me to worship.”]

There was a crucial point for me at my son’s memorial service, where I was in the service and some well-meaning person put my son’s picture right in front of me. I remember thinking, I have a choice here: I can crawl up inside myself and die, or, even though I don’t understand this, I can choose to worship. I felt God challenging me to worship.

I lifted up one hand. That was about as far as I could get, because I couldn’t sing. If I opened my mouth I would start crying. I lifted up my hand, and when I did, I felt the presence of the Lord come on me in a comforting, reassuring way. Like, “There is going to be grace for this.”

From that point forward, while the pain didn’t all go away that day, and I certainly wasn’t okay, the whole idea of grace being sufficient really ended up sustaining me.

I could feel this sustaining grace undergirding and holding me up through the whole thing.