Beyond the Crater
What Four Years of Grief Taught Me About Surrender
Forty Eight
I became older than my husband this year. Older than he ever got to be. It's a strange sentence to write, and even stranger to live. For four years, Joe has been forty-eight.
I've celebrated birthdays. Marked anniversaries. I’ve watched our children become adults. I’ve begun to build a life I never imagined, and all the while, his age never changed, while mine did.
This isn't really a post about turning forty-eight. It's about everything that number forced me to surrender.
No one tells you this milestone is coming. There isn't a card for it. No one pulls you aside and says, "One day you'll become older than the person you loved."
Maybe because it sounds like simple math. Until it isn't. Until it's a number on a birthday cake that quietly becomes a line you never expected to cross.
Joe will always be forty-eight. God willing, I won't.
That's the strange mercy and the strange cruelty of grief. The people we lose become frozen in time. The rest of us keep moving. Keep aging. Keep growing, and learning, and evolving. Keep living years they never received. This year, that realization stopped me.
Forty-eight didn’t suddenly feel old - but I looked around at my life and realized something I hadn't considered before, even though it’s been eerily true for four years...everything from this point forward is a year Joe never got.
Every birthday.
Every ordinary Tuesday.
Every Christmas.
Every grandchild.
Every conversation.
Every gray hair.
Every sunrise and sunset.
Every answered prayer.
Every disappointment.
Every joy.
I'm walking into years he never touched, and somehow that changes the way I hold them - not with fear, but with reverence. Because life feels different when you realize how quickly it can become someone else's unfinished story.
For weeks I've tried to understand why this anniversary of his death unsettled me so much. I don't think it's really about age. I think it's about expectation.
Four years ago, we were looking at land. Dreaming about a family compound. Studying house plans. Talking about businesses we wanted to build. Planning a future we assumed we'd both be standing in. Joe never acted like a man running out of time. Neither did I.
We weren't planning around death. We were planning around life.
That's the thing about tragedy. It doesn't just interrupt your plans. It exposes how deeply you believed tomorrow belonged to you.
Looking back, I think one of the greatest things grief exposed wasn't just my pain: It was my illusion of control.
I used to think I trusted God.
If I'm honest...I think I trusted that God would let my plans happen. Those aren't the same thing.
I trusted the future I had imagined. I trusted that tomorrow would look enough like today that I could keep building the life I expected.
And maybe that's the oldest temptation of all: Not fear, but control.
Maybe that's what happened in Eden before it ever became about a piece of fruit.
A reaching. A grasping. A quiet belief that we'd rather hold tomorrow ourselves than trust the One who already does.
Grief didn’t introduce me to surrender, it cornered me until surrender became the only honest option left.
I couldn't see that standing at the edge of the crater of my life - where the moment that shook our world and created a hole so big we had to ask God, what now?
I’ll tell you something…I can see it now. Surrender didn't start as a choice. It started as a crater.
The Crater
There are moments in life that leave a crack. There are moments that leave a scar, and then there are moments that leave a crater. The kind that permanently changes the landscape around you.
When Joe died, my life didn't simply change. It exploded.
I've spent years trying to find language big enough for what happened that day. "Loss" isn't big enough. "Tragedy" doesn't quite reach it. Even "grief" feels too small. Because grief was only one piece of what remained.
Imagine standing where a meteor struck the earth.
The impact is over.
The dust begins to settle.
But the landscape is unrecognizable.
The roads are gone.
The familiar landmarks have disappeared.
Nothing looks the way it did before.
You aren't simply mourning what was destroyed. You're trying to figure out where you are.
That's what trauma felt like. I wasn't standing beside the crater. I was living inside it.
For a long time, everything in my life was measured against that hole.
Before Joe. After Joe.
Before the phone call. After the phone call.
Before I knew life could change in a single moment. After I knew.
The crater became my reference point for everything.
Looking back now, I don't think that was weakness. I think it was survival, because you cannot rebuild a life until you're willing to acknowledge what was actually destroyed. There was so much more than I realized. The crater had already taken my certainty. I didn't know yet it was about to take my sense of safety too.
What Fear Leaves Behind
For a long time, I thought grief was the deepest wound. Looking back, I don't think it was. I think it was fear. Not the kind of fear that makes you jump when something startles you, but the kind that quietly settles into your body and changes the way you experience the world.
Before Joe died, I knew tragedy existed. Of course I did. We all do.
People lose spouses. Parents bury children. Accidents happen. Cancer comes.
Life is fragile. I knew all of that. But I knew it the way most of us know things from a distance.
Then one ordinary Monday brought it to my front door. The world no longer felt theoretical. It felt personal.
Suddenly every ordinary day carried a question I had never asked before.
What if it happens again? That question followed me everywhere. If I'm being really honest, it still does sometimes. Not because I expect tragedy around every corner, but because once you've learned life can change in a single moment, innocence is gone.
You can’t unlearn that.
You don't go back to believing tomorrow is guaranteed.
You simply learn how to keep living anyway.
If Joe could suddenly die on an ordinary Monday...What else could happen?
If life could change in a single phone call...What phone call was next?
If the future I was so certain of could disappear overnight...What was keeping the rest of it from disappearing too?
Those weren't just thoughts. They became patterns. The kind that quietly shaped how I moved through the world.
I find myself scanning for danger. Waiting for bad news. Preparing for loss before there is loss. Trying to protect myself from pain by anticipating it…as if expecting tragedy could somehow soften its blow. It never did, because it can’t.
Trauma is a strange thing.
It allows your mind and your body to tell two completely different stories.
My mind knows I am safe. My body refuses to believe it.
I know I’m not in danger. I also know why my heart was racing.
I understood panic attacks. I understood PTSD. I understood what was happening neurologically. I understood this all from an educational point of view, until it happened to me.
None of that knowing stopped my nervous system from sounding the alarm anyway.
There have been days I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. Not happy. Just...safe.
That's the word I couldn't find for a long time. Safe. Surviving the fear was one task. Learning to heal from it was another. Because even though death had taken Joe, and grief became a companion,the trauma of it all had taken my safety, and until I began healing from both, I couldn't understand why simply surviving felt so exhausting.
Healing Isn’t A Checklist
For a long time, I thought healing meant finding my way back. Back to the woman I had been. Back to the life I had planned. Back to feeling "normal."
I kept waiting for the day I would wake up and realize I had finally made it through. That day never came.
Instead, there were thousands of ordinary moments.
Some good.
Some terrible.
Some that left me convinced I was making progress.
Others that made me wonder if I'd taken ten steps backward overnight…and other moments that just lived in the middle of all of it.
Healing isn’t linear. It isn’t clean. It isn’t something I could conquer if I just worked hard enough…as much as my innate personality would like for it to be, and that realization has frustrated me. Because if I'm honest, I like progress. Who am I kidding, I love progress.
I like checklists.
I like measurable growth.
I like knowing that if I do A, B, and C, then D will happen.
Grief doesn't care about checklists, and trauma doesn't care how disciplined you are.
Some mornings I wake up feeling strong, while other mornings a smell, a song, or a memory remind my body of something my mind wasn't even thinking about.
For someone who likes to solve problems, grief has become the one thing I couldn't outwork. I couldn't organize it. I couldn't think my way around it. I couldn't pray the "right" prayer to make it disappear. I couldn't hustle my way into healing.
…and somewhere in that frustration, another illusion quietly began to crumble. I wasn't just losing control of my circumstances. I was losing the illusion that I had ever been in control to begin with.
That realization was terrifying, but it was also strangely freeing - because if I had never really been in control...then maybe my peace was never supposed to come from control in the first place.
Losing control of my circumstances was hard enough. I wasn't ready to lose the version of myself who thought she'd never needed it.
The Strength I Mistook for Faith
There was another loss I didn't recognize until much later. It wasn't Joe. It wasn't even the future I thought I'd lost, it was the version of myself I thought I knew.
For most of my life, I would've told you I was confident. Looking back, I don't think confidence was the right word.
I was capable. Dependable. Incredibly resourceful. Independent. The one who organized. The one who figured things out. The one people called when life fell apart. I knew how to carry things.
What I didn't know...was how to put them down.
For years, I mistook competence for confidence. I mistook self-sufficiency for strength. I thought being the strong one meant needing less. Needing less help. Needing less space to exist in the world, because I was handling it all. Less reassurance. Less grace. Less of other people.
There were so many times in the days after Joe died that people would tell me, "You're so strong." My response was almost always the same. "I don't wear strength as a badge of honor." At least...that's what I said.
Looking back, I think there was another part of me that quietly welcomed those words, because if people thought I was strong...
Maybe I was surviving this the way I was supposed to.
Maybe I was doing grief "right."
Maybe if I could just keep holding it together...I'd eventually become okay.
The problem is, strength can become another mask - another way to hide. Another way to convince ourselves, and everyone around us, that we're managing when, underneath it all, we're quietly unraveling.
I didn't need people to admire my strength. I needed permission to lay it down. Grief exposed the difference - because there came a day when I couldn't honestly say, "I've got this." There came a day when I didn't know what to pray. When I couldn't think my way through it. When I couldn't organize my way around it. When I couldn't serve enough, work enough, or stay busy enough to outrun it.
And if I'm honest...I hated that.
Not because people weren't kind. They were.
Not because help wasn't offered. It was.
I hated that I needed it.
Somewhere along the way, I had confused being dependable with being healthy. I had confused carrying everything with loving people well. I had confused being needed with being known.
That asking for help meant I was failing.
That if people saw how frightened I really was...how exhausted, how overwhelmed, how undone. They might see someone I didn't recognize either - but grief has a way of stripping away every version of ourselves we've carefully constructed.
Until eventually we're left with only two choices. Keep pretending, or tell the truth. The truth that I wasn't okay. The truth that I couldn't carry this by myself. The truth that needing help wasn't evidence that my faith was failing.
It was evidence that I was finally beginning to understand it.
Surrendering the mask of strength left a question I hadn't expected: If I wasn't meant to carry everything alone, who was I supposed to let carry it with me?
Somewhere in those years, I began noticing something about Jesus that I had somehow overlooked before. Not His divinity, but His humanity.
For so long, I had quietly believed that if I trusted God enough, I shouldn't need people. That dependence on others somehow reflected a weakness in my faith.
I found myself sitting in Gethsemane. Literally, in that same garden, in the pages of Scripture I'd read dozens of times before. This time, one line stopped me cold: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." Jesus didn't hide His anguish. He named it out loud. And then He did something I hadn't fully registered until I was living my own version of that garden, He invited Peter, James, and John to come closer.
I've often heard people say, "Jesus is all you need," and in the deepest sense, I believe that. He is my Savior, my refuge, the One who has never once left me. But Gethsemane showed me something I'd somehow missed for years: Jesus didn't simply come to save humanity. He embraced it, fully, in His own most desperate moment. He withdrew to be with the Father, and He still asked three friends to stay close while He grieved. Not because He lacked strength, or because He wasn't enough, but because He was showing us, in real time, what it looks like to be fully human.
Community wasn't God's backup plan for the moments we fall short of faith. It was His design from the very beginning.
Somehow I had mistaken self-sufficiency for spiritual maturity. I thought strength looked like carrying everything myself. Jesus showed me something entirely different. Strength wasn't pretending I didn't need anyone. Strength was trusting God enough to receive the people He had already placed around me.
Some of the greatest expressions of God's care in my life didn't come through miraculous moments. They came through ordinary people.
A counselor who helped me untangle trauma from truth.
A friend who answered the phone.
Someone who sat beside me and said very little.
People who prayed when I couldn't.
People who stayed when there was nothing left to say.
Looking back now, I don't think those people interrupted God's work, they were God's work.
Maybe one of the greatest acts of faith wasn't learning to depend on God, maybe it was trusting that God would often care for me through His people.
Letting people in was its own kind of surrender.
What I wasn't ready to surrender yet was my anger.
What I Did With My Anger
There is something I haven't talked about very much, not because it wasn't there…but because I didn't know what to do with it.
Anger.
It showed up early, and often…and then I quietly buried it. It didn’t disappear, I just didn’t think it was allowed. I know otherwise, but again, our knowing and our doing is often at war with each other.
If I'm honest, there were so many days I was angry at Joe, because he died, and because he left me with the wake of a life neither of us planned.
I know he didn't choose it. I know that. But grief isn't always logical.
Sometimes it simply tells the truth about what hurts.
I was angry that he wasn't here to help raise our children.
Angry that I was making decisions we were supposed to make together.
Angry that I was learning how to survive a life I never wanted.
Angry about the things he quietly carried that I only discovered after he was gone.
But underneath all of that anger...I think I was deeply hurt. Hurt that this was our story. Hurt that the future we dreamed about disappeared. Hurt that I was left holding pieces neither of us ever intended for me to carry … and somehow, that hurt kept turning back into anger.
Then came the guilt.
Because how could I be angry at someone I loved so deeply? How could I honor his memory while admitting there were days I resented his absence, and the things his absence left behind?
I became fiercely protective of his memory. Not just for me. For our children. For the people who loved him.
I was afraid that if I gave my anger words, it might also expose truths that would forever change the way other people remembered him. So, I carried that too.
Another weight. Another secret. Another burden I convinced myself was mine to hold. Until one day, I trusted a few people enough to tell the truth.
Not everyone. Just a few. The kind of people who could hold both my love for Joe and my anger toward what had happened without asking me to choose between them.
They didn't rush to defend him.
They didn't shame me for feeling what I felt.
They simply stayed.
It was somewhere in those conversations, I began to realize something, I wasn't letting go of Joe - I was letting go of the belief that I had to carry my anger alone.
Maybe that's what healing looks like sometimes. Not prying your fingers open by sheer determination…but allowing safe people, and a patient God, to loosen your grip one finger at a time.
Anger, it turns out, lives at the edge of the crater too. Releasing it didn't happen all at once. Almost nothing in this story did.
The Hinge
I wish I could tell you there was one defining moment. One prayer. One breakthrough. One morning I woke up and suddenly realized God had rebuilt me.
There wasn't one glaring defining moment, although I could argue that Joe's death propelled it forward. It happened so quietly I almost missed it. Not in dramatic moments, but in ordinary faithfulness, one surrendered day at a time. One honest conversation. One counseling appointment I almost canceled. One panic attack that, for the first time, didn't get the final word. One prayer that sounded more like tears than sentences. One trusted friend who didn't flinch when I finally told the truth. One difficult boundary I was terrified to set. One small act of obedience, and then another, and then another, until the obedience itself started to feel less like discipline and more like trust.
That was the slow work of surrender. Not a breakthrough I could point to, but a thousand small surrenders stacked on top of each other until, somewhere along the way, I realized something had shifted beneath me.
I spent years believing strength was what God needed from me. I don't anymore. I now know God can do far more with my surrender than I could ever do with my strength.
I thought that sentence was the ending. It was only the hinge.
Because somewhere in all of that, I started to understand what God had actually been doing. I had spent time trying to rebuild my life. Looking back, I realize that was never what He was asking of me. He was rebuilding me. There's a difference.
A life can be rearranged. A calendar can be filled again. A routine can be recreated. You can learn how to manage your finances, raise your children, go back to work, even laugh again, and from the outside, it can look like life has been rebuilt. But underneath, you can still be living from fear. Still striving. Still trying to earn your way back to peace. Still believing your value comes from what you can carry.
God wasn't interested in simply helping me function again. He was interested in transforming me, so slowly I almost missed it happening at all - and as I leaned into my own story instead of trying to outrun it, I began seeing God's fingerprints everywhere. Not because He had suddenly shown up. Because I was finally able to see where He had been all along.
I wasn't becoming the woman I used to be. I was becoming someone entirely new.
Becoming, Not Rebuilding
Sometimes I wonder what Joe would think if he met me today - not because I think he wouldn't recognize me, but because I don't always recognize myself.
He knew the seeds of who I was. God knew the harvest.
Joe knew the woman who could organize a room, solve a problem, carry everyone else's burdens, and keep moving no matter what.
God saw the woman who would one day learn that strength wasn't found in carrying everything.
It was found in finally laying some of it down.
I miss the woman Joe knew.
She was good. She loved deeply. She laughed easily. She was doing the best she knew how.
But I also now deeply love and respect the woman God has been patiently forming.
She is softer. Less hurried. Less concerned with proving herself. Quicker to apologize. Quicker to ask for help. Quicker to admit when she's not okay.
More rooted. More honest. More surrendered.
Four years ago, I couldn't imagine life beyond the crater. Today, I know there will still be valleys.
There will still be grief.
There will still be tears.
But I also know this: If God could meet me there... I no longer have to fear where He might lead me next.
Beyond the Crater
The crater is still there.
It always will be. I still know exactly where it is. I can walk back to its edge anytime I want. I remember what it took. I remember who I was when I stood there. I remember believing life could never grow beyond what had been lost.
But somewhere over these last four years, something quietly changed. The crater didn’t change, I did.
For a long time, the crater was the largest thing I could see. Everything else disappeared behind it. Every decision. Every dream. Every possibility. Everything was measured against what had been taken.
One day I realized I wasn't measuring life that way anymore. Not because I loved Joe less, or because I missed him less, or because grief had finally packed its bags and left.
It hadn't. It still hasn't. Grief still comes knocking. Sometimes unexpectedly. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes with enough force to bring tears before I even understand why…but it no longer gets the final word. I've not conquered it, but it no longer occupies the center of my life. God does.
The crater is still part of my story, it always will be - it just isn't the whole story anymore. It actually never was my whole story, I just lost sight of that for a while.
I never imagined I would love again, not because I didn't believe it was possible - but because I wasn't sure I could survive another loss. Loving again required something grief had spent years teaching me.
Surrender. Not surrender to another person. Surrender to God.
The willingness to open my hands again, knowing full well that love has always carried risk…and trusting Him anyway.
Watching my children become adults has taught me something too. They didn't need a mother who never broke. They needed a mother who showed them what it looked like to heal honestly. One who apologized. One who cried. One who laughed again. One who trusted God when she didn't have answers.
Maybe that has been part of the legacy all along.
I thought grief would define the rest of my life.
If this resonated, you might also find these helpful:→ You Don't Have to Call Yourself Okay — When grief changes who you are
→ When You've Been Trying for Too Long — When God feels silent→ About Laura