A Truly Broken Place

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."
- Ernest Hemingway in ‘A Farewell to Arms’


I have been fighting inertia in getting my blog up and running, but today Amy (my fiancée) provided the push needed to set me in motion when she said something to me that was too beautiful not to share and that epitomizes what I want this thing to be about. Before I get to that though you need some back-story.

Amy’s grandparents had their lives radically altered four years ago due to medical malpractice. Her grandmother was given a shot that many people are brutally allergic to. Standard procedure is to watch a person for fifteen minutes after the shot is administered, that way, if they do turn out to be allergic to the medicine, an antidote can be easily administered and thus save a lot of people a lot of trouble. Amy’s grandmother was left alone in a room with the door closed for forty-five minutes after she was given the shot. She turned out to be one of the not too infrequent ones who are allergic to the medicine. She has been in a coma for the last four years.

Amy’s grandfather was a hard man. It has been amazing to witness the transformation in him as taking care of his wife has become his life. To see the harshness turn to tenderness. The self-centeredness into concern for another. This has been the sweet in this, the incredibly bittersweet.

Now, forty-seven months after this initially happened, it looks as though Amy’s grandmother will not live through this week. The family is gathering, preparations are being made, and Amy’s grandfather is beginning to wonder what his life will become when he no longer has someone to take care of.

Now to what Amy said to me today. She said, “I don’t even know if my grandmother can think in the way we understand thinking to be, but I wonder if she can look back on the last four years of her life and say, ‘I have lived a good last four years.’”

I have to admit that the last few times I went with Amy to visit her grandmother and saw here there with here eyes wandering all over the room or rolled back up into her head and machine tubes jutting out of her as she frequently hacked and choked on the phlegm her body produced to attack the plastic foreign object stuck in her throat, I wondered, “What kind of a life is this?” Now I see that perhaps it was a beautiful one.

In her brokenness she helped bring about some wonderful and miraculous changes in the life of her husband. She, in a very real way, gave him a new life. One that a shallow glance might see as heartbreaking, but one that below the terrible surface is real and brilliant. Her recent life was amazing and virtuous because it was completely lived for the good of another, and lead the other to live in the same way. Is that not as Christ lived? Was Christ’s life not both beautiful and heartbreaking?

It is unsure what Amy’s grandfather’s life will become once his wife is gone. Not even he knows what he will do. But what is certain is that God will bring life and strength out of the brokenness that will come with her death just as he did in the last broken place of their lives.