The Rev. Susan Wintz on being a grieving mother and a chaplain

Death Has Come to Dinner

In my twenty-six years as a professional pastoral caregiver, I have walked with many persons on their life journeys. I’ve been told that I am good at what I do, particularly in my clinical work with children and their families in the most difficult of times, and that my presence is responsive and comforting. I’ve felt competent and compassionate in the care I provide.

All that changed on December 2, 2003 when death came to dinner at our family table, and life has never been the same. Our beautiful and gifted 17-year-old daughter Sarah Elizabeth, in her senior year of high school and eager to go out into the world to make her mark, was killed instantly in a car accident when she and her boyfriend were hit by a speeding driver. When the knock came at the door, and two police detectives entered into our home with that look on their face, everything I thought I knew about being a competent professional vanished. I realized that I really didn’t know a thing.

Of course that wasn’t completely true. My professional knowledge did help with the decision-making that needed to be made during those first hours and days, with knowing that the shock and numbness that surrounded me was a shield and blessing. Being a former-pastor-turned-chaplain married to a former-pastor-turned-college-professor gave my husband and me the basic tools we needed to know the importance of communicating with each other and our twenty-year-old son without making demands or having expectations of how the other ‘should’ be acting. Possessing professional colleagues as well as family and friends to turn to for care, and knowing how to activate that support system (and at times place boundaries on it) helped us begin our walk into the journey that no parent ever wants to take.

Still… all that I thought I knew after so much clinical training and years of experience really didn’t prepare me. The hole of parental grief is deeper and darker than anything I could ever imagine or attempt to describe. The energy required simply to move through a day and make the simplest decisions is so much more than I’ve ever thought. The weeks and months of slow, anguished step by painful step (often sliding just as far back as I thought I’d come); to find out what our new normal will be, to adjust to our family now of three instead of four, to search for and find meaning in Sarah’s too-short life and traumatic death, and to decide who I am now as a person and a professional has been more demanding than any amount of training or pastoral experience could ever prepare me for. The roller coaster ride of parental grief is one that defies description or understanding until one is in the midst of it.

Death has come to our table. And yet, in the midst of grieving my daughter and yearning for her presence I have gotten glimpses of the gifts that I have been handed, the first reminders of Sarah’s presence in our lives, her enduring legacy, and the love our family shares. I’ve also been offered the opportunity to choose how her life and her death will impact me as a person: a wife, a mother, a friend, a colleague, and a professional. Who will I become now, and what will that look like? What priorities will emerge, change, or end up being set aside? How will it impact my professional practice and the care I offer to others?

An empty seat is at our family table now; one that will remain there until we are reunited at the Great Banquet in the life to come. And yet another has been taken, for death has come to sit with us for dinner. I am learning to allow not only Sarah’s life with its hopes and dreams, but also her death to be a constant and familiar presence there as the days, weeks, and months go by. And I am reminded once again that for all my clinical training and experience, it is the lessons of the heart – even the most feared and painful ones – that truly teach me compassion.

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