I have written what I have called a birthday letter on the anniversary of Miles' birthdays. I began writing them three years after his death. This is my tenth letter. I need to write them for my own renewed recognition of his life and have been grateful that they have helped others going through loss.
 
I have had some time recently to mull over time as I quickly approach my 65th birthday. Time for both a self-inventory of the time I have used, and the time left. Fortuitously, I read a NYT article by Tim Urban, "How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get It Back". This February 25, 2022 article is a kind of encouragement to break out of narrow path we may have travelled the last couple of years. A path that narrowed the many choices in life that our optimistic, expansive selves were used to viewing and choosing.
 
Urban created the chart in the photo I've added. It is a helpful way of visualizing, in weeks, our life span if we reach 90. While it can be shocking if you’re around my age to see how much closer to the end we may be than from the beginning, it is also reassuring to think about how what we value can shape how we see each week. He wrote, "once you visualize the human life span, it becomes clear that so many parts of life we think of as 'countless' are in fact quite countable." He argues that as we see our life in this way, we can find motivation to jump start out of a complacency we may have based on the belief that we can or will do something about X tomorrow. Our tomorrow's have limits and our today's need our attention. Our ability to change and see the future choices instead of the lost choices from our past can be very freeing in creating new time for friends, and special schedules for valuable experiences.
 
One exercise I did was to look at the relationships I really value, and at the experiences that bring me joy or fulfilment. Then look back at how many days I spent with those people or experiences. For me, those days were almost always a smaller quantity than what they meant in my life. I believe I am like most people operating from the naive optimism that there will be more time later, so the prioritizing of time today isn't vital to my life. The article helped me focus on how to prioritize valuable relationships, valuable experiences like travel, and valuable values like volunteering. It served as a good reminder that the roles I value most like husband, father, brother, cousin, uncle, and friend should show up in the time I spend each day and week. It reminded me of a simple truth: you never regret the days appreciating relationships or the beauty in front of you.
 
I highlighted the weeks I have lived and stared at the approximation of weeks remaining until I turn 90. I could mark the awful weeks when my son Miles, my mother and father died. They could be marked with an acid that never would eliminate them. I could also mark weeks like the ones when my brother Robert received the then cutting-edge surgeries to replace his corneas, giving him vision throughout his adult life.
 
This, and other wonderful moments, would mark the chart with the expanding sense of how much they have brightened my weeks. High weeks would be the vacations with Miles and Tanner - memories I thought they would have later to recollect their times with me, instead of Tanner and me recollecting our times with Miles. My life with Penny brings a brightness to each week that I don't know how to show with a simple highlighter. There are these bad and good weeks in all our lives. Carrying these anniversaries in our heads helps us as landmarks reminding us of the lives we shared, while our goals and optimism leads us to the open future where our choices, hopes and efforts will be realized.
 
Regret over mistakes and bad choices in my past that has led me to today can be haunting. The risk can be that regret turns to paralysis and the foreboding sense that my choices today are trapped in a narrowed alley by my past. Instead, I try to choose to look at the memories that are written on my soul are written with the determination that they guide me to be a better me. I want to believe that these marks on my soul have brought me wisdom and greater courage to take the risks new choices bring to be a better me.
 
Aristotle wrote that "memory is the scribe of the soul" and I very much believe it. Our soul can be shaped by our experiences with a tempered optimism that continues to see the goodness of the future, or it can become burdened by a past that whispers the limits of our future. I believe my little weekly boxes are filled with weeks that have continued to shape my soul with hope and love. I've gotten up most days with gratitude. When I haven't, I've woken up with purpose. And I knew that this purpose would lead me back to gratitude. Cumulatively, the days with only the trust in purpose would amount to years on the chart. Individually those days and weeks have been easier to bear knowing that eventually gratitude would be my companion again.
 
An early and ongoing influence in my life is the play by Thornton Wilder, “Our Town". Simple and predictable, it was a staple of many high school play schedules; yet it has always been profound to me in focusing on the present and appreciation of today's beauty, and gifts.
 
Toward the end of the play, Emily has a view of her world from the afterlife. She looks at it with longing and a sense of the beauty in the little things she and others took for granted. She says, "I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed .  .  . Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it - every, every minute?" This last declaration by Emily that I first read as a teenager, gave me the words and vision to understand that I should see both the wonders and temporariness of life, embracing it with gratitude.
 
I miss Miles and that will never change. I miss his not living this life anymore and the joys he would have had. I miss the thought that he will never have a 64th year. This simple chart looking at my weeks has helped me see the specific time I had with both Tanner and Miles as they reached adulthood. Time that I knew needed to be appreciated and lived out as fully as possible. Time that is etched on my soul with much more love than tragedy.
 
Perhaps my greatest lesson in the weeks behind me is that to love is wonderful, and to be loved is sublime. This carries me forward to appreciate my time ahead as I live with a soul shaped by my past and pointing me forward - past turning 65 and hopeful for years of purpose and gratitude. I hope I have many years in front of me to experience life, appreciate my world, love and be loved. 

by Eric Christensen
​“All of us are surrounded by ghosts. Now we must learn to live with them.” This insightful quote is from Vera Brittain’s memoir of life and loss 100 years ago in Testament of Youth. How true this is today when we can begin to hope that the major loss of life is behind us following a year when our country lost over 561,000 lives and an estimated 2.92 million worldwide to covid. How true it is for the individuals having to now cope with the loss of their parent, spouse, child or friend.
 
I have lived with loss and understand how grief is in many ways a coming to terms with those ghosts of family and friends taken before we were ready to say goodbye. My son Miles died in a car crash the day before my 52nd birthday. He was 19 and had the world laid out before him. Miles would have turned 31 this April 17. For the past eight years I have taken this anniversary of his birth as a time to write a letter on grief with the hope that my experience with loss can be of help to those facing the death of a loved one.
 
There is hope in my statement that it is a burden I believe can only be lightened in the first year, but not lifted from our soul. Hope and trust that embracing the grief burdening your soul can become an embrace of not just the pain, but the life lost until your love overcomes your loss and regrets. Lightening until you find your compass again and seek a path adjusted by who you lost. My own losses and the losses I have seen with others through my early career as a pastor have convinced me that a quick lifting of the weight of grief is not a real solution and also cheats the life lost.
 
The life lived with another creates feelings, purpose, and securities. These loses through the death of the one we have invested so much in, needs time to be redeemed. The at times crushing weight of loss on our soul, memories, and often practical needs, can be lightened with the trust that time will give us strength and perspective to eventually lift away much of the burden. Grief has its own gravity that needs strength and time to break out of its hold.
 
Grief forces us to live without someone we counted on. Intentionally grateful for them or taking them for granted while they were alive. Either way, we now must live life in their absence. A quote by Abraham Lincoln about the necessity of finding a new way has been helpful for me. He wrote, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must think anew, and act anew.”
 
I knew enough with loss to know that it would be two steps forward and three steps backward journey. There would be good days and bad days, days of happiness that were quickly stopped by the sting of remembering that Miles was gone. Uncertain days ahead beg for some certainty as a ballast.  I found that what I would need to lighten the burden and not exacerbate it was rest, community, diet, concentration, and exercise. Unfortunately, I knew the best I could do was to have some control over community, diet, and exercise. Good diet and exercise helped me be better able to rest and concentrate (we get in more accidents while grieving), while I was fortunate to already be in wonderful communities with friends, family, and work. Our grief is an individual journey, but the support of community is essential.
 
This trust that right practices would eventually lead to right results helped me accept the daily tears and the eventual arrival of better days. I never had the goal of “getting over it”, knowing that the gravity of grief would never be fully lifted. Grief is a type of toll to be paid for the decision to love and cherish. Embracing life and those we love, who love us, who help give our lives worth, makes grief a will cost we pay.
 
For me, and maybe you, grief and its aftermath can be different based on the people we have lost. My parents both died when I was in my 30’s. Their loss has been tempered with time as I see much of the in my siblings and me. I know they would feel good about how hey raised the four of us, particularly my oldest brother born with several disabilities. They would be happy to see the robust life he has lived despite the contrary prognosis in his childhood. They poured their passions and skills into helping him squeeze the most out of his potential. In my brother Robert, I especially see their greatness and their mark in life. It has always been a great source of comfort and confidence in this second half of life without them.
 
The loss of Miles is different in the void it leaves for me. The memories of time with him were ones I imagined he and his brother would have of time with me when I was gone. These times are now Tanner’s and mine to hold onto in a vastly different treasure box. More than this, I miss the life he would have lived, the joys of life he would have experienced, seeing how he would deal with trials, and the mark he would have made. I miss this life that will never be. I know that his loss has added greater purpose to my life and goals, but these feel like awful consolation prizes for his life.
 
If you are reading this and have lost someone close in the last year, trust that time will help you lighten the burden of today. Be honest with what is in your power to control today, what you need, what small steps can lighten your burden, trust the healing power of the future, and how honoring the life lost can be integrated into your future. 

​​“My son Miles is dead.” This is the saddest sentence I can ever say or write. It defines my life as much as saying that I am a father. 11 years have not changed this sentiment. His death happened suddenly and unexpectedly much like the deaths of so many during the past four months from a disease they were only beginning to hear about in the new year 2020. These deaths leave an uncounted number of family and friends numbed and shocked. They must repeat their own terribly sad sentence spoken in loss.
 
My son would have turned 30 this April 17. To commemorate this day of his birth, I have written a letter on grief, loss, my life before and life after his death with the hope that these letters can be a comfort for those who have also experienced loss.
 
As a former pastor, a student of history and someone who has spent the past 62 years experiencing life, I have known that death never comes at a good time. Whether suddenly, or anticipated at the end of a long illness, we want more time with the one who died. We want to hear their laugh again when it isn’t burdened by pain, we want them to hear our words of affection and admiration one more time, and we want to take back snipes and judgmental comments that never should have been spoken.
 
I believe that by avoiding the subject of death with those we love; we avoid a large dimension that helps us understand a fundamental key for unlocking life. Our goals define our actions and help sharpen our focus. While death is never a goal, it is an inevitable finish for all of us and will inevitably defy our efforts to postpone its day. Yet knowing that it is in front of us and all who we love, and knowing it can be cruelly capricious, we can defy it by living life to its full measure – engaging in it and engaging in our relationships in as real a way as we can with each day. To avoid our mortality is to avoid realizing our purpose in each day.
 
The death of my son, the death of someone you have held dear, will always be statistics but they will never be common. These deaths will never lose their impact because they may have been one of 10,000 traffic deaths in 2009; 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020; or one death in any prior pandemic or war. They were lives that didn’t want to end and lives whose ends created terrible voids in our worlds. More than 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt wrote, “Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one.” This is as true today as it was when he lost his mother and wife in separate events on the same night, and later his son to war.
 
As I write, I ask you to trust that there will be better days ahead. Better days with joy and happiness. Our future carries not only our dreams but the memories of our loved one. Their joys, sorrows, hopes and most importantly to us, their memory. A dear friend wrote something I will always remember. On the first anniversary of Miles’ death she wrote a message she had heard: we die twice; the first time at our death, then the second time when we are forgotten.
 
This I know to be true from the memory of my parents, the loss of friends and the people important in my life. When I was a young pastor in 1983, I was called out to the hospital. A young and expectant woman found out a week before her due date that there was no longer a heartbeat in the womb. Nine months of carrying her first child. So close only to find out she would now have to give birth to a stillborn baby. This loss of a child whom I did not know, by a mother I just met, and grieved over by a young father has stayed with me. Every now and then over the years I have thought of the child. How old he would have been, what type of life he would have had, would he have found love and purpose? I have also thought of the young couple and the turns in life they may have taken. Did they stay together, did they have a new child to hold, would they find joys in life? And always my hope that their lost child would be a source of strength and mercy in their adult lives.
 
Their terrible sentence has been just as awful as mine. Perhaps you have your own terrible sentence or sentences. Maybe your sentence is so fresh that it still cannot be uttered without tears. If so, then you know that death came too soon and was as welcome as a rock through a window. I was with my mother when she died, had just left the house before my father’s death, and wasn’t there at my son’s death. Most of us will die alone. This is an awful fact. The recent COVID-19 deaths sharpen our focus on the feeling of unfairness of this fact. I have seen enough deaths and the subsequent reactions of the living to know that a fixation on this last moment can often keep us in a state of anger or guilt that keeps us from beginning to grieve the life lost. Death happens quickly for most and refuses to fit a timeline. This is so hard to accept. (A violent death carries a weight that is hard to fathom. I know the difficulty of the court process following my son’s death. In this case, no malice was involved with the defendant. A violent death creates a double grief that almost always needs professional help in managing and I am not writing about this type of loss.)
 
For the rest of us, I would suggest focusing on the life lost more than the last moment. This untangling of the event of Miles’ death from his loss has been helpful for me and my grief. I knew that too often the last event can become a trip wire that keeps us from grieving the life lost and it dimensions. Too many die young, die too soon, and die alone. These are all horrible, but they are also something that can happen to anyone we love – including us. I needed to hold to the truth that my grief was because he was gone. There were no circumstances that could have made that loss easier to manage. Losing him was what made my heart feel like it was going to stop. There wasn’t a way he could have died at 19 that could have avoided that pain. The actual event of his death was a tragedy compounded by the second death in the accident. Knowing the minutiae of it didn’t help my grief.
 
What helped my grief over time was looking back at his life and our relationship. It took time to sort out and see beyond all the feelings of guilt, judgment and failure. And it took time for the good to start winning on the score card against the bad that I felt. I needed to accept that my daily actions to engage with my sons in key areas of life were good things, that the types of vacations we took were good and that trying to model a life he would be proud of was worthy.
 
My hope for you is that you will find a way to trust that time will help you come to a settled peace with your lost loved one and that the good from what you had will win out over the regrets. Find a small hope that better days are ahead and hold onto it. Your faith in that hope can pull you ahead.
 
Additionally, those nearest to you now can be a great source of strength and comfort. You will begin to know who to let in and who you can depend on, while also understanding who to keep at a distance. Your friends are not all in one camp. I couldn’t imagine going through grief without friends and was sometimes surprised at how important some casual friends became in their support. I knew they were essential in the beginning but didn’t realize how much so until later.
 
Find a way to be at peace in your current relationships. Live with a minimum of chances for regret with the ones you hold dear. If you err in these relationships, err by saying and acting out your affections and admirations too much instead of too little. Honor your loved one lost by working toward a better you in the relationships that count now.
 
That terrible sentence will never go away from your life. How you say it will change with time and its sting will change. Our grief is because we loved and were loved. Death takes a beautiful life from us, as our death will take something from those who love us. Our memories of those lost cannot be taken. They will stay with us and live as long as we live, cherished and secure in our love.

​Decent is as Decent does. I want to share a short story about my dad and how he handled a legitimate supply shortage in the 1970s that seems very relevant today. He owned gas stations for most of his adult life following WWII. In the 70s, his gas station was a Union 76 on the corner of Yorba Linda Blvd. and Rose Dr. in Placentia. It was in the newspaper for the long lines in 1973 and 1979 oil shortages. During this time, dealers received gas shipments based on their volume history. My dad was a high volume seller, so he was getting deliveries as frequently as any station in Orange County.
 
In 1979, I went by the station a few times on my way back from college to get gas – if it was available. He was getting shipments almost every day that would sell out within hours. One day I asked my dad if he was at the maximum price allowed under the imposed price controls. He said that he wasn’t and, without meaning to, taught me a lesson I have carried all my life. He said the shortage will be over some day, and when it was, he wanted to know that he had been decent to people.
 
Heraclitus wrote, “The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.” I had always respected my dad for the many choices he made throughout his life. I think this day’s example has had such staying power with me because it wasn’t just doing what was right when no one was looking but doing what was right when there was a tangible benefit to do otherwise.
 
I am so glad to know that I have friends who continue to practice community, sharing and rational purchasing during the crisis we are in today. The unknown is as frustrating as it is frightening without piling unfounded fears onto the heap. There were real shortages of gasoline in 1973 and 1979. One brought on by supply manipulation and the other by the overthrow of Iran’s government. I have clean water in our taps and there is still an unbroken supply chain for food. I have the choice to be sensible and trust in myself and community. As difficult as it can be, I must see that I will be the same person on the other side of this crisis that I believed I was before it began. Peace.

​Peter Daniels early life was a series of nightmares, any one of which would cause you to shudder and then be amazed that he overcame so much to live the life he has lived. Had his life ended tragically in his youth, or had he become a criminal, we would with some justification say, ‘we understand how his life took the wrong turn.’
 
This letter is focused on Peter’s remarkable triumph of gentleness over evil and what I believe is the incredible strength it took him to shape a rich life out of less than nothing. I write this on what would have been my son Miles’ 29th birthday. Seven years ago, I started writing a kind of birthday letter to a son-no-longer-here/letter-of-encouragement for those coping the aftermath of losing someone you love. My sister Karen has been friends with Peter’s wife Joan for more than 30 years and I’ve seen them socially over the years at my sister’s home. I had an opportunity to sit with Peter a few weeks ago to ask him some questions about his life beyond what has been documented as one of very few child survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. His transcendent attitude offers so much for many suffering from grief for both its simplicity and hard fought truth.
 
Imagine being born a young Jewish boy in Berlin, 1936. Add to this that you are born to an unwed mother and your father’s family has already fled the Nazi regime by moving to Shanghai, China. Your mother spent most of her youth as the unwanted step-daughter, experiencing the cruelties that went along with this fate. She brought this behavior into her raising of you in some mix of her own poor parenting skills, experiencing cruelty herself, living as an outsider in her own land and seeing you as a reminder of her now regretted liaison.
 
You’re beaten regularly and live in a very curtailed world due to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of racial purity that pushed Jews out of professional jobs, kept you out of public schools, playgrounds, theaters, museums, restaurants, buses and trains. Even as a child, you had to wear the yellow Star of David to point out your Jewishness to a society that insulted and cursed you.
 
In 1941 your grandfather dies. His wife and her two daughters are deported to Auschwitz where they are never heard from again. Your mother, Hilde, has papers showing that her mother was born a Christian, converting to Judaism when she married. She has papers showing that she is a “mischlinge” - someone having Christian blood in her. This provides a stay from the both of you being deported to the death camps. She gets a job as a seamstress making uniforms for German soldiers. Alone in Berlin, you need to stay in your apartment unattended and with the threat to not cause problems. Alone with your dreams, you see the park you can’t play in, the children you can’t be friends with, and the life you can’t live.
 
In 1943, you answer the door to two men dressed in Nazi uniforms. The freedom from camps for mischlinges was over. All Jews in Germany were to now go to camps. They wait with you until your mother arrives from work. You are packed into cattle cars and shipped off to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia where you will mark your seventh and eighth birthdays, leaving just before your ninth. Theresienstadt was a holding camp for some prisoners and also a type of clearing house used for sending most to the death camps. Your mother’s skill as a seamstress gets her a job mending German uniforms and you do menial labor along with other children. Hungry, you often take the risk of scrambling out at night to get fallen potatoes by the tracks.
 
The camp was the Nazi’s showcase of their “humane” treatment of their prisoners. You were lucky to not be one of the 30% of the population struck down by the opportunistic diseases endemic to filthy conditions. Typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and other killers missed you. Lice were everywhere. The clothes packed for the stay were taken on the first day. The only shoes you had during this time needed to have the front cut out so your feet could grow. Exposed as they were, wearing worn out clothing with feet partially uncovered, you didn’t succumb to the cold winters. You also were able to avoid being one of the “happy” children used in the Nazi propaganda film about the camp. They were all shipped to Auschwitz after the film was made.
 
Nearly 15,000 children lived in your camp. By some estimates, less than 150 were alive at the end of the war. Somehow, you were one of them when the Red Cross, then Soviet Army liberate the camp.
 
Your difficulties don’t end here. Migrating to a Displaced Persons Camp with your mother, you enter a school where German children beat you up, blaming you for the deaths of their fathers, uncles and brothers during the war. After three weeks, your mother pulls you out of school. She beats you in camp and sees you as a burden in her new marriage to another survivor.
 
In 1947, you move with your new family to America where all of you live in the lower east side of Manhattan. The beatings continue and you run away several times only to be returned by the police. At the age of 14 you run away for good and begin a series of dead-end jobs working in a dairy farm, as a ranch hand, truck driver, dishwasher, carnival hand and lifeguard. Sometimes sleeping in a Greyhound Station, sometimes on a park bench and sometimes in a bed. Never secure that comfortable times would last.
 
Who could blame you if you had taken to a life of crime? Nothing has been easy and the basis for a moral core many of us develop in our youth was robbed from you by the horrors of home and the war. Yet, as you told me, you always managed to stay on the straight and narrow during this time with the modest goal of, “having a place to lay my head, a loaf of bread under my arm, and a job.” You found entertainment in simple things and found adult role models in two men. The iconic Marlboro Man of the billboard ads around the country who was a loner content with the simple life, and the owner of a horse ranch in Texas where you worked for several months. The ranch owner convinced you to try and make it right with your mother. How was he to know that your mother’s first words to you were, “We don’t have room for you.” At 16, back in New York City, you said you never felt more alone. What could have been a new beginning turned out to be another tragedy.
 
Somehow you isolated these terrible periods that were combining as your life history into the “phases” that you would make it through. No big plans for a better life, or goals of conquering these trials, choosing simple endurance instead. “One day at a time” was as far as you wanted to see and it helped you get through these times. You always had where you came from in the back of your mind – Nazi Germany and the concentration camp. You explained it to very few people but carried it as a companion. This was something you knew you could never escape from yet something you could move beyond.
 
You began to see a future for yourself when you were in the Navy. From there you got a bachelor’s, then master’s degree. You began your career, got married, had a child, then divorced. Still going “one day at a time.” Forty years ago you married again and began your new phase that includes meeting again with your mother, telling your story to new generations at the Museum of Tolerance, sharing your American Dream on PBS, and gathering with your Break Fast group of men. Life continued to have its struggles and demons from the past but the good days were adding up to a better life with Joan.
 
You have bent the violence, hate, despair, fear and anger into a gentleness that everyone sees immediately. You somehow have stilled the war within you and have found a peace. You are Peter Daniels.
 
Paul Tillich, a theologian who left Nazi Germany because of his views, wrote, “suffering takes people beneath the business of life and reminds them that they are not who they thought they were.” Author David Brooks wrote that this suffering helps you discover that the, “basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew.”
 
Peter never had the luxury of building a happy artifice around his life that could have been destroyed by the violence, loneliness and chaos that were constantly in his early life. He was almost always in an unsafe, crumbling world where the most primary needs of food, shelter and belonging were never guaranteed. By looking only at getting through today, he managed to string together many days until he could trust himself to look farther ahead. Hope wasn’t in a distant future for him but in the hope that he could get through this day, multiplied by two decades. He constructed a new life with love, peace and security out of two decades of ashes I think would have suffocated many of us.
 
To me, Peter is a wonderful light of persistence in the world. He quietly moved ahead toward his future and away from what would have been the easier choice to be destructive. He remarkably found a better way forward from all he had known and experienced. Many of us are fortunate to find a path forward that leads to repair and a better life than what life’s tragedies would dictate. Peter’s story is one path that used immediate goals and an underlying drive to avoid troubles when loftier goals would not have been conceivable. Peter’s life found hope for the future when there wasn’t any reason to assume it would find hope’s reward. Peter’s is a remarkable life and lesson. His past is still his companion, but it doesn’t dictate his world.
 
I hope his story brings you courage in your life if hope seems lost to you. “Peter Daniels’ American Dream” you’ll see a short eight minute PBS video that will give you hope and a sense of the gentleness of his wonderful soul that runs deep and strong.

​
April 17, 2018
 
For several years I have written a letter on the anniversary of my son Miles’ birthday. The letters, mostly about managing tragedies, were posted on FB with my hope that they would be beneficial to others experiencing loss. This year I am writing about lessons on life and loss in 1918. Lessons I learned well before the loss of my son Miles but gained a great support from after his loss.
 
The photo at the top of this letter is one I took over 40 years ago of my adopted “Grandpa Drew”. He was a “Dough Boy” from World War I. I always thought it was amusing that someone I only knew as an older man could have ever been a “boy.” He was my initial link to study WWI that later led to a general study of that period. The world war he came of age in saw 18 million dead, 23 million wounded. The US was only in the war toward its end and still lost 100,000 lives.
 
The other global event that spanned 1918 and 1919 was the Spanish Influenza. 30 million died worldwide, surpassing any 12 month period of fatalities from the Black Plague. In the US, 195,000 died in one 31 day period. The young, the strong, the healthy were mowed down as quickly as the physically vulnerable.
 
1918 was the year of death. Most everyone was touched by loss and most everyone went on to find ways to move forward with strong lives. Some of the lessons I learned from this terrible year that helped me with my own grief are highlighted below.
 
1.  Terrible things can happen no matter how well we prepare. We can raise our children well, love them with all our hearts, pray for their wellbeing, yet awful things can still happen. No one wanted the Influenza bug, and very few wanted WWI. Still millions died because of them. Regardless of our preparation in life, awful things can happen. They can be vicious, capricious and unfair but they can be a portion of our life. Still, we prepare for a good future, never holding back because of fear, failure or uncertainty.
 
2. Draw on your community. The grief because of 1918 was very individual but also shared in the enormity of loss. Memorials, sermons, remembrances all acknowledged the tragedies. Grief is unique to each of us but the value of support from those around us cannot be emphasized enough. What I will always remember from the first year after Miles’ death are the many words of sympathy and arms of comfort from wonderful friends and family.
 
3. There are better and worse ways to cope with grief. I believe there isn’t one “best” way to manage traumatic experiences in our lives. We make our own course where some practices and thoughts can be better than others. Verbalizing thoughts and emotions with speech or pen, engaging in your community, tears, trust in the future, trust in your ability to overcome and honoring those you’ve lost were seen in the years following 1918. So was too much drinking, recklessness, isolation, lashing out at others, or giving up were all some of the more destructive coping methods seen in large scale following 1918. Find the good practices that help you forward and avoid the destructive ones that can exacerbate your grief.
 
4. Death of someone we love is always personal but never unique. Death is never common, even when it occurs on a mass scale. In a year when almost 50 million died, each one must have been felt with deep grief by a parent, a child, a sibling, a husband or wife. An older friend of my mother lost two children and husband to Influenza. Miles died in a car crash. He wasn’t the only death that day in Fullerton, not even on the street or the crash. Yet his death was felt in profoundly personal ways by all of us that knew him. Teddy Roosevelt pinpointed the reason death is so horribly felt when he said, “Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.” Joseph Stalin was wrong when he said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” The death of those we love may show up as a statistic, but they are always mourned as individuals. While life cannot stop for our grief, we need to find time for it.
 
5. Trust that hope will overcome despair. Days will be dark. Our bargain in loving is to have grief when death grabs those we’ve loved. I don’t know any way around this bargain. When in the darkness of despair, it is good to remember that there was love first and there will be love at the end.
 
6. Perspective and persistence. Anguish and tears are essential to grief. Ignoring them is ignoring the significance of the life lost. The perspective of 100 years since 1918 has taught me that this life needs a long perspective and that joy can return. The lives of 100 years ago also taught me that life doesn’t change overnight. Trusting in time to bring healing and hope is a trust that takes you through difficult times when your loss is all you feel. Persist in choosing to trust in time to bring healing. It often becomes a daily choice to trust.
 
7. Live each day with a fresh appreciation for the day and those who are important to you. 1918 taught me that life can be very short without guarantees. Find ways to express appreciation for those you love. We have the great gifts of today and those we love. My hope is your joy is repaired and your appreciation for life is renewed. All of us are here today because our ancestors from 100 years ago had faith that the future would continue despite the awfulness of 1918. Hope is alive!

Below is a memorial I delivered last week for my mother-in-law, Kim Bok Soon - Mrs. Kim. I have written a short meditation about life, grief and hope on the anniversary of my son Miles’ birthday the past few years. This one wasn’t planned as the meditation, but I can’t think of a more appropriate one on the anniversary of one I love than looking at the life of another I love.
 
​She was a joy to know! A person who was truly bigger than life. She had a charming smile, a great laugh, free affections – along with free opinions and a very stern stare that said much without uttering a word. She was always serving, always giving of her talents, and lived each day with a seemingly endless supply of energy. Giving freely and accepting freely. She was fully alive.
 
I enjoyed her coming over often the last few years on Saturday mornings. Penny and I were usually preparing breakfast. Mrs. Kim would say shyly that she wasn’t hungry, that she’d already eaten, take a little bite of something, declare it as good, then finish off a waffle, a couple of strips of bacon and an egg. Always with her cute smile and usually interrupted by a few phone calls with her girlfriends.
 
At family get togethers, she’d grab both of my hands and say how happy she was that I married Penny. It made me happy that I could bring joy to her. She had a very firm grip, so I was also happy that I never made her mad!
 
Mrs. Kim took much of life in stride and she expected you to take it in stride as well. About 8 years ago she decided to move in with Penny, Michelle and Matthew. The house became the hang out for Mrs. Kim’s friends that year. During her last move to Fullerton, she called Penny on moving day to say her bed was made of stone and would require special movers. No problem.
 
She was very persuasive too. She talked a judge into reducing two traffic tickets into one, and talked Toyota into giving her a new engine after she inadvertently put diesel fuel into the gas tank. Appointments were for other people. She’d show up at the Dentist without an appointment, smile and say she’d wait for an opening. Then start chatting on her phone in the lobby until an opening appeared.
 
Mrs. Kim was old school in her technology, relying on a flip phone as her preferred device. I don’t think she ever texted, she didn’t have a Facebook account, nor ever loaded a photo on Instagram. If you asked her to describe SnapChat, she’d probably have told you that was how she ended phone calls. She’d “snap” her phone shut when she was done talking to end the “chat”.
 
Yet she was the most socially connected person I know. About 9 years ago I had the chance to spend a couple of days with her while she made some window treatments for my home. I walked away thinking that I found the gravitational center of our universe in her. Friends were drawn toward her in frequent intervals during those two days. Someone needed slacks hemmed, another person called her on the land line, then another would call on her cell phone. Someone would bring over food, while another would walk away with food. Mrs. Kim took it all with such nonchalance that I assumed the 15 or so visitors each day was an everyday occurrence. She turned anyplace she lived into a small town with her service and friendships.
 
Her life had not always been fun and free. Born in 1930’s Japanese occupied Korea, she lost her mother by age 6, saw the effects of WWII and had the Korean War play out at in front her - all before she turned 20. Her husband Jung Sil was wounded by shrapnel during the war. I think this early time in her life helped to develop a strong inner strength – a fire that wouldn’t let circumstances ever stand in her way.
 
This world of turmoil barely slowed down after the war but she found the hope and confidence to start a family. 5 children were born, one daughter died at a young age. Still there was hope and now dreams of a better future. Applications were made, sponsorships fixed and the wait for the chance to come to America.
 
The opportunity arrived in 1971, so with more hope in their hearts than money in their pockets, more determination than job prospects and 4 children in tow Mr. and Mrs. Kim left for America.
 
My favorite photo of Mrs. Kim is from this time. She was in her late 30’s. The photo, first used when she came over, was placed on her citizenship certificate 8 years later. It was a plain passport type photo created for accuracy instead of flattery, but it shows two important things. The first was her beauty. You could have guessed she was beautiful by looking at her daughters and granddaughters, but it catches your attention in this unadorned photo.
 
The second thing that stands out is the look in her eyes. I was a history major and have always been interested in photography, so early photographs have been a natural interest. Particularly old photos of immigrants coming over from Europe a century ago, 19th century pioneers risking everything for a chance to make their life in the West, and my own grandparents who had to flee Mexico during the Revolution. There was a look of determination in the eyes of many of them; an intense, unblinking stare at the camera that seemed to say they were up to the challenges of this new life.
 
Mrs. Kim had that look in her eyes. It was a look created by experiences and telling of her character. Her eyes said there wasn’t a problem she couldn’t take on.
 
This intense look in her eyes was with her a few weeks ago after surgery. She was in a fight to get out of the hospital and get well on her own terms. Never mind that she had major surgery the day before, or that moving would have put her life in jeopardy. She wanted to handle this problem like she knew how to do from the past – directly. She told several people to get their car and get her out of there.
 
It was only after she revived from several days of sedation that she changed. She came back with a serenity. Her last week was a gift for her and everyone who saw her. She received the love of her family and friends, prayed and had time to reflect on her well lived life. She said to her children that she was ready, that she wasn’t afraid to die.
 
I think she shifted her view of the illness when she came out of sedation. It was no longer a fight to win, but God telling her, “Well done, good and faithful servant”. It was time to go home. She became a Christian early on in America and lived a life of incredibly strong faith and service. She spent hours praying, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting the sick and singing songs to her Savior. She was ready to see her Lord.
 
Mrs. Kim lived with hope to overcome trials, an intensity to persevere and dreams of a brighter future for her children. She loved freely and with joy. I don’t know if she was always like this, if it happened with her conversion or with time but it is rare to see someone with so iron a will also have such a tender and free heart.
 
For her grandchildren, know that when she held you in her hands, prayed for you with her soul and loved you with her heart she was seeing her dream come true. Your successes in life were a joy to her, your children were her legacy. You were held for, prayed for and loved by a rare breed and she is in you.
 
Years from now when your children are older and, as happens, their memory of your grandmother fades, tell them her story. Tell them how Jung Sil and her hold a unique place in their family history as they bravely packed up all for their new life in America. Tell them of her unwavering hope to overcome any failure, the fire in her belly to fight any fight, and the dreams she had of this new and better life for all of you.
 
Help your children, her great grandchildren, to find their reason for hope that perseveres through failure, stoke their passion for a life of purpose and encourage them to find dreams worth living for. They had the rare opportunity to be held and loved by the author of the first chapter in their volume of the American Dream.
 
Death is as inevitable as it is unwelcome. Teddy Roosevelt once said this truth, “Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy. For if it were not, then it would mean that life was.” This is so true with Mrs. Kim’s death. We mourn her death but celebrate her marvelous life and her faith in the resurrection of the dead. Our faith testifies that death is not the final word in our lives. Our love testifies that Kim Bok Soon will not be forgotten.
 
I will miss this wonderful woman. Miss her prayers for my family and me, miss her appetite for my food, miss her smile, her love and laughter. But I trust that this is not her end and that we share what the Apostle Paul called, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

​After my son Miles died, I thought about the vague state of being normal. I would never feel normal again, never see the world as normal again. Normal was never an aspiration, but sometimes you just want to roll along without bumps. Many of us have read the book Good to Great that sets up the perspective that Good is the enemy of Great. I have come to believe that Normal can sometimes be the enemy of Life.
 
The man in the photograph above is a childhood friend, Brad Parks. We went to school together, Boy Scouts, threw oranges when there still was a grove in our neighborhood, and those sorts of things. Brad always had better athletic skills. I remember a church camp in Jr. High when he casually walked out to the end of a narrowing pole extended over the lake. The rest of us were lucky to pass the half way mark before falling in.
 
We all went in different directions to college. During our freshman year, Brad, a competitive skier, was in a ski accident that paralyzed him below the waist. The news was a terrible shock to all of us. We couldn’t imagine this happening to someone so well defined by his athleticism. How could he cope?! In the mid-70’s, this usually meant an end to sports, let alone the dramatic adjustments he would now have to make in his life.
 
I thought often about Brad after Miles’ death. His loss of something so vital and our misperception that a big part of his life was over with the accident. Instead, Brad had quickly taken hold of his life again through determination, help and refusal to accept the tamped down expectations for paraplegics in the 1970’s. His living example became one of the bright lights at the end of my tunnel of grief, giving me the trust that a life robbed of hope can be made new again with a stronger sense of purpose. His example helped me to trust that the most horrible loss in my life would define much of my future. It was up to me to decide how that definition would be written.
 
It turned out that Brad was broken but not defeated. He got involved with some of the early wheelchair sports. He started hitting a tennis ball around with his dad. While in rehabilitation, one of his paraplegic therapists had designed a lighter, sturdier and more mobile wheelchair. He taught Brad how to make the same chair. A company was founded to produce the new chairs. A chair that was half the weight of the “normal” chair, without the push handles for the aid of another, and an axle and seat designed for the person in it to control movement. The shift in design seemed as dramatic psychologically as it did visually. Now the person in the chair was in control and self-driven. No longer a “patient” or a “weak” person needing assistance.
 
Hitting the tennis ball around with his dad led to a small group creating the National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis. He became the president of the new International Wheelchair Tennis Foundation in 1988. The sport grew from virtually no one in the 1970’s to 1,500 in ’85 to a sport played in 100 countries today. Brad’s skill in tennis competition and development of the sport was recognized with his induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and with the premier wheelchair tennis award named after him.
 
More than this, so much more than this, the new chair design and wheelchair tennis are responsible for getting thousands of people out of hidden lives. Sadness, lack of hope, shame or that terrible sense that their lives were now just an existence without the use of their legs contributed to many young paraplegics staying indoors. Brad, and others, showed that athleticism and dreams didn’t die with the loss of mobile legs – they just needed new tools and the desire to keep passions alive. I can’t overstate how much Brad’s example meant to me and to many. For paraplegics, it is now assumed that many will be able to live active, competitive lives. That wasn’t the assumption for them in the 1970’s. Without living in that time, it is hard to imagine how different the expectations were and how far they have moved. Now the “normal” chair is centered on the one seated and the question asked isn’t, “Will he be able to get around without help?”, but, “What sport will he play?” Brad and his peers forever changed lives!
 
“There will never come an end to the good that he has done,” is on a plaque in all National Parks to pay tribute to Stephan Mather, the Parks’ first Director. It is a powerful tribute to how a dream can benefit not only the dreamer, or those around him but also people in the future who may have little idea who changed things generations before. I believe it can also be said about my friend Brad. Lives have been changed in profound ways because of him. Lives in our generation and for generations to come because Brad and others refused to change their goals, refused to lie down or live the expected stereotype of what a paraplegic was supposed to be in the 1970’s.
 
I have not had a lunch with Brad since maybe a year before Miles had died. Part of it was laziness on my part but part of it was my freezing Brad as an arc type or hero for my own needs. I didn’t want to run things past him or ask for insights after loss. Maybe it is my problem, but it is how I work. As a result, I learned several things that helped me.
 
The first lesson I learned from Brad was to never think that you have to fall into line and exist the way everyone did before you with the same type of loss. “Your place” has more to do with your vision than with surrender to existence. The world before me has a huge void now – but it is still my world to live – my world to create. Existence has its struggles in acceptance of complacency. Life has its struggles in carving your own path. Life is so much more rewarding than existence. It gives you passion for your goals, determination to overcome failures, belief that your new path is worth all of its struggles, and that this life – even with its terrible loss, its shattered expectation of calm - is a life more worth living.
 
The second lesson is that great things can come from great loss. That’s what I’ve learned from Brad and it has been important in knowing that there would be some level of redemption in my loss. That was what I had to look at in my journey – not the absence of my son that would always be present. Brad is a living model of how we can bring greatness out of our tragedies. This doesn’t develop into a rainbow for me and I’ve never asked Brad how he sees his change. Miles is never coming back and neither is my choice to have my old self back. But I have learned that loss demands a better me than I ever would have been without loss. Someone who can bring more good into the world than I may have been content with in the past. Brad is an inspiration to me and an influence on how I have come to see the scholarship established in Miles memory. I want it to live on beyond the days Miles could have lived and be a blessing for the young men who receive it. Drawing out the greatness that is in you never seemed more urgent or necessary. Normal never seemed more like an enemy.
 
Miles would have been 26 years old April 17. I’ve written a letter on his birthday the last four years as a help to me and a hope that it provides encouragement to others. My thanks to Brad for letting me write about your amazing life. Thanks to all of you for reading this letter. 

​I think the most common statement people said to me following the death of my son Miles and on occasions such as today (he would have turned 25) is, “I don’t know how you get through this.” That is an interesting statement and one that I always assume comes from a sympathetic heart. Like the last two birthdays for Miles, I’ve decided to write a bit about my own journey in grief with the hope that it will help someone else.  This letter is my answer to the common statement noted above: I have learned to walk on water!
 
This sounds like an audacious claim but it has become the best metaphor for me this past year in understanding how I managed the incredible wound to my soul following the loss of Miles. There isn’t anything that really prepares you for the loss of a child. I knew from early in life that it isn’t about fairness winning out in the end. Good people can die too early, and bad people can live long lives of prosperity. Some are born in pain, live in suffering, then die in tragedy. No fault of their own. No rational thinking or moral calculus can ever become the justification for the suffering of the innocent or the success of the bad. My brother was born with multiple disabilities. He is a wonderful human, born from wonderful parents. And I worked enough as a pastor to see suffering that didn’t make sense. So I knew going into adulthood and parenting that all of the goodness I could live, all of the prayers I could muster, and all of the teachings I could instill wouldn’t be a guarantee of safety or success for my children.
 
This still didn’t prepare me for the loss of Miles. We live with so much hope for our children and I had such a strong vision of Miles’ future life. To have these shattered with his death was horrible. It was a death of my own future and hope.
 
I wrote in the last two letters about how running was instrumental in moving through grief. The theme of movement seems to be important to me and this time it is about walking on water. In Matthew, the disciple Peter is in a boat with rough seas. He sees Jesus walking on water. Jesus tells Peter to come to him by walking on water. Peter steps out of the boat onto the choppy water, sees that he’s walking on water, starts to sink, looks to Jesus, and is able to continue walking on water. Whether you believe this story to be real, or symbolic, we know what Peter did in the future. He hid out when Jesus was killed, then became the leader of the early church – a move that took great courage and skill which he hadn’t shown in the past. His walking on water mirrors his future in the fear (hiding out) and courage of faith (preaching and facing persecution).
 
1800 years later, Abraham Lincoln framed the abolition of slavery in much the same way in his address to Congress a month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
 
Great, great events that never would have begun in safety. Peter and Lincoln were both killed. Maybe they would have lived longer if they’d played it safe. Our world would be a place of greater inequality had they done so. They stepped out knowing that the choppy waters were dangerous, necessary to travel, and entirely built on faith.
 
In my own small way; in the way of others who have lost greatly through death, divorce, abandonment or financially you know that the hurt can be so bad that, like the other disciples, staying in the boat can feel like the only thing you can do. Cling onto the rails and hope for the storm to subside. But you realize that recovery of hope, or redemption of your purpose cannot happen in the boat, the bed or in isolation. You know the old ways don’t work and you have to find a new way of seeing the future.
 
My encouragement to you is to take a step out of the boat on faith that the future is where purpose can be found and hope can be resurrected. Eyes on the future, not on each step you take. The old ways don’t always work after a crisis. Peter focused on Jesus and Lincoln saw a more perfect union for all. I have my faith as a focus. Not only as a Christian, but faith that my days would find a new purpose and voice to keep the memory of Miles alive for the benefit of others. Our family has given $12,000 so far in scholarships to six graduating seniors at his alma mater. We started at $1,000 and are now at a $4,000 award. Additionally, we started a series of dinners to raise funds, talk about Miles and the scholarship
 
This new purpose never replaces my loss, remove the scar on my soul, or keep me from crying about my loss. It does help me know joy again, have confidence in hope and trust in my purpose. If you’re experiencing loss now, I hope you can find your focus and take a step out on faith. The boring term for this is to ‘trust that right practices lead to right results.’ I like to say that ‘we can walk on water.’ I’m Eric Christensen and I’ve walked on water.

​Men have been known to hold onto things much longer than is practical or rational. Old t-shirts, an old car we may hope to restore at some vague point in the future, or an old baseball glove we can never fit into again. Things that we won’t use, but things that hold memories of our past. Things that become totems of times we aren’t ready to let go of just yet.  In my case, it’s an old pair of running shoes. I wore them for every work out and race for two years following the death of my son. Five half marathons, smaller races and miles of alone time when they were my support in more ways than protecting my feet. This letter is my good bye to them. A silly good bye to things.
 
My son Miles was born on this day, April 17, 1990. He would be 24 today had he not died in a car crash almost five years ago. I ran before he died. After he died, running seemed like a good way to force me out of bed when I didn’t want to get up. The friends I ran with, and the races, helped me to move through that terrible grief to a better focus on how I could live the rest of my life without my firstborn. I didn’t think about it until looking back, but the Asics running shoes in the picture were one of the few constants in my world that was marked regularly by turmoil.
 
Running with these shoes gave me a chance to be alone with my thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and emotions that almost always circled back to the primary feelings of loss, sadness, anger, fantasies of vengeance, failure and judgment. Without the running and time it provided, I don’t know how I could have moved beyond these destructive drivers to more aspirational feelings of forgiveness and redemption.
 
I believe few things are as central to my life than forgiveness and redemption. But I also know my trust in them being true in this circumstance was axiomatic to their ever being true in any other area of life. This was where the shoe hit the road. It would take miles of running and lots of time to begin to understand if I was capable of embracing these better truths. The shoes provided a literal support for me to find the grace to move forward and understand that forgiveness and redemption needed to be at the center of my loss.
 
Harder to let go of than any fantasies of vengeance against the driver that killed my son, the anger with him, the frustrations with the circumstances, or the sadness of never seeing Miles live his life was letting go of the anger, judgments and failures I felt as a parent. We all hope that our children will go in certain successful directions with their lives. We try to guide them, attract them, or coerce them to say ‘yes’ to the right things and ‘no’ to the wrong things. Parenting with goals in mind, means we’ll see advances and retreats in both their life as well as our relationship with them. What is left unsettled one day often gets smoothed out the next. The loss of your child takes away that next day. It takes away forever that chance to see everything work out. Whatever back steps in your parenting, whatever failures – however small – become all you think about as you are forced to measure your parenting against the death of your child. These feelings of failure weighed so heavily on the loss as to make getting up in the morning seem like a herculean effort.
 
One of my first acts on these mornings was to lace up the shoes. I wore them as I moved on the path from anger to mercy, judgment to forgiveness and irreparable condemnation to some level of redemption. Going to jail to visit the young man who killed my son helped me in letting go of those feelings toward him. Running helped me feel the grip of judgment loosen its hold on me. The eclipse that hid anything I did right as a parent eventually began to move, and I could see the better things I did with Miles. The goals I had as a parent, time with him, travels, laughter, prayers, discussions, and activities began to be seen again. Our last words together were always our last words together, “I love you,” and “I love you too.” This was always sealed with a hug that I hoped he always appreciated.
 
Perhaps my hesitancy in throwing out the shoes (the right shoe is clearly blown out after being worn while I walked around on crutches for six weeks this year) stems from the fear that when these symbols of a time gone by are removed, my memory of this time will begin to fade. They have served their purpose and I’ve memorialized them through this letter and photo. The photo will go into a collection where it will continue to be a memory jogger of my journey from a crushing grief to a purpose filled grief that can benefit not only my memory of Miles but also the students at Sunny Hills that get a scholarship in his name. The picture will be a reminder that sometimes we are lucky enough to feel some form of forgiveness and redemption in this life.
 
The shoes carried me through a terrible time. One I know I don’t want to forget but one I hope to never relive. These Asics became old friends in a way no thing have ever come close to before. With the shoes, I found the path of running from despair to running toward hope. So it is a significant passing for me to discard them. A silly good bye to a thing that helped me get through the loss of a son.