What I would Tell the Mom I was Six Years Ago Today

Six years ago today, my world broke into pieces.

September 13, 2020.

There are dates on a calendar that simply mark the passing of time. And then there are dates that divide your life into before and after.

September 13 will always be that date for me.

Six years ago today, our son Ryan died by suicide.

I think about the woman I was that day. The mom curled into a fetal position, her face buried in a tear-stained pillow, trying to remember how to breathe.

She couldn't imagine getting through the next hour, let alone the next six years.

Today, I wish I could somehow go back and sit beside her. I wouldn't try to explain what had just happened. I wouldn't offer easy answers or tell her that someday everything would be okay.

Because everything wasn't going to be okay.

Some things would never be okay again.

But there are so many things I wish I could whisper to her.

With God's help, you will get through this.

I know you don't believe that right now.

You can't imagine a day when getting out of bed won't feel impossible. You can't imagine waking up without that split second of forgetting, followed by the crushing realization that it wasn't a nightmare.

Ryan is really gone.

But you will not always be lying in a fetal position with your face buried in a tear-stained pillow, trying to remember how to breathe.

You will breathe again.

You will get out of bed. You will put one foot in front of the other. And eventually, you will begin to live again.

Not because you are stronger than you think you are. There will be plenty of days when you aren't strong at all.

You will make it because God will carry you when you cannot carry yourself.

You and your husband are going to make it.

You are going to hear statistics about what the death of a child can do to a marriage. And there will be times when the two of you grieve very differently.

Give each other grace.

You are both grieving the same son, but you won't always grieve him in the same way.

Six years from now, you will still be married.

And something else will happen that you cannot possibly imagine today.

Through this terrible thing that had every potential to tear you apart, God will allow you to discover a closeness in your marriage that you didn't know was possible.

You will learn how to sit together in the pain when there are no words. You will learn when the other needs to talk and when they need silence.

Sometimes one of you will carry the other. Sometimes you will simply hold on together.

And somehow, through something neither of you would ever have chosen, God will knit you closer together.

You are going to be surprised by who walks this road with you.

Some of the people you are certain will be there won't be.

That will hurt.

There will be people who don't know what to say, so they say nothing. People who are uncomfortable with your grief. People who slowly step away.

You will learn that not everyone is able or willing to walk a long road of grief with someone.

But you will also be surprised by the people who step closer.

God will bring people into your life who aren't afraid of your tears. People who will sit in uncomfortable places with you. People who will say Ryan's name. People who will remember important dates when you assumed everyone else had forgotten.

Some people will walk beside you for a season. Others will still be walking beside you six years later.

Be grateful for them.

And give yourself permission to release those who walk away.

You will laugh again. And you will experience joy again.

I know that sounds impossible right now.

Maybe it even feels wrong.

How could you possibly laugh again when Ryan is dead?

But you will.

There is so much life ahead that you cannot see from where you are lying today.

There will be five grandchildren born into your family in the years after Ryan dies.

Five precious new lives.

You will hold new babies. You will watch your children become parents. You will experience the incredible joy of watching your family continue to grow.

There will be graduations and birthdays. Vacations and holidays. Celebrations and ordinary family dinners. There will be pictures where everyone is smiling and moments when you laugh so hard your stomach hurts.

Life will keep happening.

And eventually, you will discover something you can't understand today:

Happiness and an empty chair will somehow exist together.

There will be family pictures where you are genuinely happy while also knowing exactly who is missing.

There will be grandchildren you adore while wishing they could know their Uncle Ryan here on earth.

There will be graduations when you are bursting with pride and simultaneously thinking, Ryan should be here.

There will be birthdays and vacations and Christmas mornings and family dinners when the room is full of people you love—and somehow you will still notice the one who isn't there.

You will learn that joy does not erase grief.

And grief does not prevent joy.

Joy is not a betrayal of Ryan.

Laughing doesn't mean you've forgotten him. Enjoying the life God has given you doesn't mean you love the son who isn't here any less.

You will learn how to be deeply grateful for what is while still grieving what should have been.

Your joy will feel different than it did before. Perhaps it will never feel quite as complete.

But it will be there.

And in some ways, it will become more precious because you will understand just how fragile this life is.

And when your heart quietly whispers, Ryan should be here, let both things be true:

This is beautiful...And I wish he were here.

You are going to learn something about suffering that you can't understand yet.

I wish there were another way to learn some of the things God is going to teach you.

But for me, there wasn't.

You will begin to understand that some of the hardest and most painful things we experience in this world can become the very places where God does some of His greatest work.

Please don't misunderstand me.

Losing Ryan was not a blessing.

I would undo September 13, 2020, in a heartbeat if I could.

But six years later, I can also say that God has brought blessings through something that was unimaginably painful.

There are things I know about God's heart and character today that I didn't understand six years ago.

Suffering will strip away things you thought mattered. It will expose things in your own heart. It will soften you. It will make you see hurting people differently.

It will make eternity more real.

It will make Jesus more precious.

And God will use even the thing you would never have chosen to continue shaping and molding you more into the image of Christ.

You will discover that sometimes God's mercy looks like taking the suffering away.

And sometimes His mercy looks like meeting you in it.

You will wrestle with God.

You will ask questions you never imagined asking.

Why didn't You stop this?

Why didn't I see it?

Could I have done something differently?

Where were You?

And you will learn something important:

God is not bothered by your wrestling.

He isn't intimidated by your questions. He isn't disappointed when you come to Him confused, angry, frightened or broken.

In fact, over time you will begin to see something beautiful in the wrestling.

You are wrestling with God.

That means you are still in His presence.

You are bringing the questions to Him instead of running away from Him.

There will be times when holding onto God feels more like wrestling than resting.

And that's okay.

He would rather have you wrestling with Him than living apart from Him.

You are going to be afraid for your other children.

I wish I could tell you that after losing one child, your family will somehow be protected from ever facing struggles like this again.

I can't.

Mental health will continue to be part of your family's story.

Six years from now, you will find yourself walking alongside another one of your children through struggles of their own.

The details of that story belong to them, not to me.

But I can share what it does to the heart of a mother who has already buried a child.

It awakens fears I wish I didn't understand.

Before September 13, 2020, you knew intellectually that terrible things could happen to your children.

Now you know something different.

You know the unimaginable can actually happen.

And once you know that, it is very difficult to unknow it.

You will watch more closely. You will question whether you are doing enough. You will wonder whether you are missing something.

You will pray, advocate, ask questions and do everything you know to do.

And fear will sometimes try to convince you that because you know one terrible ending, you already know how another story will end.

You don't.

But there will be another fear mixed into all of this.

You will watch a child you love seem to be walking away from God.

And if I am truthful, that may frighten you even more than the mental-health struggles do.

Because you know now, more than ever, that this life is temporary.

You will want desperately to make your child believe. You will want to say the right thing, pray the right prayer, have the right conversation—anything that might turn their heart back toward God.

And you will discover another painful limitation of being a mother:

You cannot make your child's faith decisions for them.

You can love them.

You can pray for them.

You can speak truth when God gives you the opportunity.

You can live out your faith in front of them.

But you cannot control their heart.

That belongs to God.

And once again, you will have to entrust someone you desperately love to Him.

This will be especially difficult because of Ryan.

You know what it is like to lose a child and then wrestle with questions about his faith and eternity. You know the anguish of desperately wanting reassurance about where your child is.

So when you see another child struggling not only with mental health but also seemingly moving farther from God, the fear reaches a place in your heart that few people can understand.

And yet, six years later, God will still be asking you to trust Him.

Not because you know how this child's story will end.

You don't.

Not because God has promised you the outcome you desperately want.

But because God loves your child even more than you do.

Some days you will surrender your children to Him in the morning and take them right back by afternoon.

You will pray and worry.

Trust and fear.

Believe and cry.

And you will keep bringing them back to Jesus.

Six years ago, you thought trusting God after losing Ryan might be the hardest act of faith you would ever face.

You don't yet know that another difficult act of faith will be trusting Him with the people you are terrified of losing—not only physically, but spiritually.

And maybe this is where the four words you are about to discover will become an anchor all over again.

God will give you four words to hold onto.

In the days following Ryan's death, one question will torment you perhaps more than any other:

Where is my son?

You know what you believe about Jesus and salvation.

But grief will make you question everything.

You will replay Ryan's life. His faith. His struggles. His choices. The way his life ended.

You will desperately want reassurance about where your son is.

And in the middle of that anguish, God will give you what I now see as one of the great mercies of my grief journey.

Your children will open Ryan's Marine field journal.

And there, on the very first page, in your son's own handwriting, you will find four words:

God Above All Else.

Those four words will become an anchor.

They won't answer every question.

They won't make Ryan's life or his faith journey neat and tidy.

They won't erase the reality of how he died.

But when your mind is being tossed around by fear and questions and grief, God will use those words to give you something solid to hold onto.

They aren't proof that Ryan lived a perfect Christian life.

He didn't.

They aren't proof that he never struggled.

He did.

But they will give you a glimpse into something that had been on your son's heart.

God Above All Else.

There will be times when you wonder whether God allowed you to find those words because He knew exactly how desperately a grieving mother's heart would need them.

I can't know that with certainty.

But I do know this:

God used them.

He used them when fear whispered things I didn't want to hear.

He used them when I questioned.

He used them when I wrestled with what I believed about Ryan, salvation, suicide and eternity.

Those four words became something I could return to when everything else felt uncertain.

Eventually, God Above All Else would become the name of a ministry. God would use Ryan's words and our family's story to open conversations about mental health, suicide, grief, hope and Jesus.

But before God Above All Else was ever a ministry, it was something much more personal.

It was God's mercy to a grieving mother.

It was an anchor.

And six years later, it still is.

If I could reach back through these six years and put my arms around the mom lying on that bed on September 13, 2020, I think she would want to ask me one thing:

Do we make it?

Yes.

With God's help, we do.

But I would want her to know that making it doesn't mean everything gets fixed.

I still miss Ryan.

I still wish desperately that his story had ended differently.

I still have questions.

I still wrestle with God.

I still worry about my children.

Our family still faces things that scare me.

And there are still days when God Above All Else is much easier to write than it is to live.

Six years later, I wish I could tell her that all the hardest days are behind us.

They aren't.

I am not writing this from the other side of suffering.

I am writing from the middle of still learning to trust God.

And maybe that is what those four words have ultimately come to mean to me.

God Above All Else doesn't mean I understand everything God allows.

It doesn't mean I never question Him.

It doesn't mean I'm no longer afraid.

And it certainly doesn't mean that if I have enough faith, nothing painful will ever happen to our family again.

It means that when I don't understand what God is doing, when I cannot control what happens next, when my mother's heart is terrified, and when fear tells me I could never survive another heartbreak, I still know where to turn.

To Jesus.

The same four words God gave me to cling to during those first unbearable days are the words I am still clinging to today.

They were an anchor when I desperately wondered where my son was.

They are an anchor today when fear for the people I love threatens to pull me under again.

Six years later, the grief is still real.

The fear is still real.

The questions are still real.

But so is the joy.

So is the love.

So is God's mercy.

And so is the hope.

Above all else, God is still God.

God Above All Else.

In loving memory of Ryan James NelsonSeptember 7, 2000 – September 13, 2020 ❤️