Remembering Carmon

My niece posted this picture of a double rainbow near her home in Utah. I thought it was an amazing photo and wanted to share it with you. It is monsoon season here in Arizona and it rains almost every afternoon.  Consequently, I've been admiring many beautiful rainbows. They are meaningful to me.  Like thorns among the roses, they are a reminder of the blessing we receive in this life amidst our sorrows.

As you know, if you've been visiting the Couch lately, next month marks the 30th anniversary of my husband, Carmon's, death. As a tribute to him, I've been posting chapters of his biography, A Pig in the Kitchen. As a consequence of that, he has been on my mind a lot. I miss him.

My three youngest children were still young and at home when he died. 3 years after his death, they each wrote a short chapter about their personal grieving process. These essays on grief were published in another book which I wrote entitled: When a Loved One Dies.*

My daughter wrote a poem about her grief which she called "Roses and Rainbows." In one stanza she says:

     There's a rainbow over the garden,
     And it's beautiful, all the same,
     But we can't have beautiful rainbows
     Unless we first experience rain.*

She learned, as we all did, that the pain is a natural part of life.  Like a rose’s thorns or a thunderstorm’s wind and lightning, pain is part of the process of growing as a human being. An ancient prophet once said: " For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.  If not so, . . . righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.  Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one . . . And to bring about his [God's] eternal purpose in the end of man, after he [God] had created our first parents . . . and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter." (1 Nephi 2: 11, 15)

Sometimes in this life, we all have to partake of a bitter fruit.  Two suggestions:  first, don't try to avoid it with drugs, sex, thrill-seeking, entertainment, video games, or other people's problems.  The psychiatrist, Carl Jung, once taught that all neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering.  Sometimes life hurts, but the only way out of the pain is through it.  During this month of Pig blogs, I will be adding posts like this one discussing the stages of grief, for we all experience them.  It helps to know you are not alone.

My second is this: remember there is One who drank of a bitter cup for our sakes.  He has perfect empathy.  We must bear the burden of grief, but He can make that burden light.  Speaking to a latter-day prophet, Jesus said: "If thou art called to pass through tribulation . . . if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.  The Son of Man hath descended below them all.  Art thou greater than he?" (Doctrine and Covenants 122: 5, 7-8)

* When a Loved One Dies © 1988 Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, UT
This book is out of print, but can sometimes be found online at such sites as Amazon.com.