Article October 27, 2003 Issue

Stepping into the sunlight

By Warren Bolon Senior Writer

We Normally Associate Grief with the loss of a parent, a spouse, or someone else close to us. The grief I felt after my dad was killed in an auto accident was the slow-motion, confused kind of sadness. I was in my third year of high school, a time when it was hard to cry and easier to be numb and silent. Many years later, it was the Lord's Prayer—hearing it as though condensed into three words: "Our Father ... forever"—that broke through the lingering numbness.

The message I heard within said, "God really is our Father, Dad's and mine and everyone's, and always will be." I can't explain it any better than to say that at that moment, I was free of the feeling that I'd lost someone and something good. And I also knew that my dad was free to be himself, still needed by our Father and alive and well in His spiritual universe.

When my mom passed on more recently, I was better prepared spiritually and in every other way. She and I had enjoyed many visits over the previous few years, and I saw with certainty something of her God-given identity—that her actual selfhood wasn't in a body or a human history—and I just couldn't grieve over a loss that I now was sure never took place.

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