CAUTIONARY NOTE: The second part of this reflection deals with a traumatic incident (suicide, death, parental loss) and the aftermath. It is emotionally charged and some people may find it potentially retraumatizing. Be sure to use good judgment.
When I was in graduate school I had the opportunity to have Bernard W. Anderson as my teacher. He was the best lecturer I ever heard. Anderson was a world-renowned biblical scholar whose expertise was the Hebrew scriptures. His Understanding the Old Testament is in its 5th edition and for nearly half a century one of the most widely used college and graduate school textbook introducing the Hebrew Scriptures. One of my favorite graduate courses was Dr. Anderson’s class on the Psalms. Our primary text was his book Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today.
I love the psalms. What drew me to the psalms and holds me still are how real and raw and wholehearted these prayers are. I 
like their lack of pretension, at times their lack of polish. I like that the full range of human experience and their concomitant emotions—from despair and anger and heartbreak and confusion and intense questioning to wonder and gratefulness and joy and trust—are kneaded into these prayers and are essential to a psalmic spirituality. These are not pretty prayers. Many are beautiful. All are honest, vulnerable, and authentic. They ring true to life that often is messy, at times unfair and excruciatingly painful as well as beautiful, enchanting, ridiculously gratuitous, and joyful.
The laments, in particular, with their unedited, no holds barred lack of caution intrigued me when first studying the psalms. It is worth noting that about 1/3 of the 150 psalms are laments—these earthy and earthly, grief-strickin’, heartbreaking, fist-shaking, snot-flying, exasperated how come, and how long, O Lord, and why me, why us prayers that come from “out of the depths.”
I remember Dr. Anderson commenting on how in contemporary times many people judge the faith of David and the others who penned these prayers, questioning their bad manners, their brazenness and crudeness saying “I wouldn’t say these things to other people let alone out loud to God.” Anderson saw it differently. He said, These prayers actually reveal a faith that is deep and a trust that is exceptional. That they hold nothing back, dare to question God, rant and rage, he said, are not signs of a lack of faith but a testament to a profound faith, to great faith. They knew what would offend the ears of others would never offend God since, in the grand and godly scheme of things, when it comes to praying candor and sincerity trump politeness and subterfuge.
Over the years, I have been interested in contemporary lamentations found especially in music that is not overtly religious, but I think none the less sacred. I’m thinking of songs like James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Randy Newman’s “Baltimore,” REM’s “Everybody Hurts,” the McGarrigle’s “Heart Like a Wheel,” Johnny Cash’s cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” or even Charlie Haden’s melancholic yet hopeful rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” (SEE below), to name just some.
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Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice!
~ Ps. 130:1
A few days ago, I happened upon a 36-minute video on YouTube. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It was an anguished, half-hour lament of devastating proportion. A young woman in her late twenties or early thirties, Rachel Rose, sitting it appears on a bed, stares into the camera and says, “This is the story of how my daughter and her father died.” The preface includes her saying that this video is being made exactly one year to the day of their deaths on Father’s Day 2023 in the UK. It happened at the end of a weekend on which her two-year-old daughter was staying overnight with her father from whom Rachel had been separated for six months. Divorce was imminent.
Speaking for stretches at a time, often through her tears, visibly in excruciating pain, she often pauses to catch her breath and compose herself so she can continue the tragic telling of her horror story. And as she unfurls the story of the events from that day a year ago, I found myself—when she needed to pause because the grief was too great—narrating aloud where I feared and knew the story was headed. And at each point and turn along the way in the story, I was mad that I had predicted the next immediate, undesirable detail before she spoke them.
Knowing the devastating ending from the beginning made her winding story no less dramatic and disturbing. She recounted the seemingly endless hours from the Friday her husband picked up their daughter to Sunday afternoon when she first learned something was wrong and on into the early evening and then into the wee hours of the night. The unplanned emotional Trip-Tik included photos shared of her daughter having fun with her dad, phone messages left confirming her sister would be meeting them to pick up Rachel’s daughter, then word that they never showed up, then increasing anxiety turns to capital F Fear as the mind goes where it will—car accident? Kidnapping?—then phone calls that are not picked up and messages left on her husband’s phone, then more phone calls to family and friends and hospitals and police departments—unknowing and fearing, unknowing and fearing. And as I listened, I hated that I knew where the next part of the story was going but could not STOP it from happening.
Then a call came from her sister for her to drive to their mother’s house immediately offering no information. Just come. Now! And all the way—in a drive no one should ever have to make under those circumstances, let alone by oneself—she feels certain inside that her daughter “is gone.” And then lamentation that would rival any in the prayer book of the Bible: “I felt so much pain in my stomach. I felt like I’d been stabbed. . . “And I was praying, and just pleading, Please No. Please God, No.”
When she arrived at her mother’s house, the police were there—a male and a female officer. Then led inside and to the sofa, the police—checked off the painstaking procedural steps—verifying if she had a daughter, asking if she knew where she was, and more questions until finally the officers turned into messengers—not the angelic kind, the doom delivering kind—who notified her that both her daughter and estranged husband died in a car accident. That word notified seems so unsuitable for a sentence like that.
“And it was at that point,” Rachel said, “I don’t exactly know what happened to me. Because it’s like I shut down. All of me shut down.” Her sister screamed. Her mother wept. She immediately “went completely numb.” When her mother went to hold her she felt like she couldn’t breathe, like she was being suffocated. When you get the air knocked out of you, the same life force that her daughter and husband no longer had, it’s nearly mpossible to breathe.
As she tells what happened next, she stops frequently. During the extended pauses between sentences when she tightly closes her eyes as her face contorts and becomes misshapen by agony, there is a tangible, loud silence that holds me perfectly still. It’s as if the whole world is listening in and holding their breath until she can pick up where she left off before the sobs stop her again. This becomes the pattern.
Lamentation. She says, “I remember thinking this is like a movie. How is this happening? Why, why is this happening? How am I going to survive? I didn’t want to survive.”
She explains to her community of invisible listeners that a year on she still doesn’t have the words to describe what she felt that night and what she feels today. For the first two weeks after the accident, she felt like she was dreaming, like none of it was real, like she was going to wake up any minute. Waiting for that minute was like waiting for Godot—it never came.
The hardest part was that after all these limbo hours of waiting, but not long after officially hearing from the officer what she already knew, she had to go with her mother to the hospital two hours away to meet the coroner and identify her daughter’s body. What possibly could prepare one for that?
Once at the hospital, it took her twenty minutes before she could muster up the courage to go into the room to view her dead daughter. As the coroner opened the door she noticed that, unlike the doors to other rooms, there was a stork symbol on this one. She didn’t know what that meant—but she remembers it now as she’s telling the story.
When they went in, there was a woman police officer who had been assigned to stay in the room with the deceased child. Later in the story Rachel steps away from her agony long enough to express how sorry she felt for the officer who had to stand there all that time. No one should have to do that, be in a room with a dead child, she said.
At this point in the story, it was almost too difficult to watch the video. It was so gut-wrenchingly emotional, and raw, and tragic. More than once I almost shut it off, but it was so up close and personal that I found myself looking at the red dot that slides to tell the remaining time on the video and telling myself you need to be here til the end. You need to receive her story. It’s the least you can do for her—honor her story. It was as if I were 26 years young again, working as a Chaplain Intern for a summer in an inner-city hospital in Philadelphia. In addition to a “regular” ward, I was responsible for the Emergency Room and the Intensive Care Unit. And feeling—how shall I say it?—as UNQUALIFIED and UNPREPARED as any ol’ Joe strolling by outside the hospital minding his own business, I sat with people who like this young mother were absolutely devastated. I learned a lot that summer about lamentation.
The toddler’s face was covered until the coroner slowly removed the sheet covering her face. She still had a breathing tube in her. Rachel fleetingly caught a glimpse of her daughter’s face, then had to looked away. She didn’t recognize her little girl because her head was so swollen. She asked that her daughter’s face be covered. She says to the camera, “It was really upsetting and traumatic.”. . . “I wanted to be with [my daughter], but I didn’t want to be in that room. I wanted to escape. I just wanted to run away. And I remember saying a prayer, and holding her hand and feeling so broken.”
As she further shared her psalm, the more gripping was her lament. “I saw her lying there with a blanket covering her. And I felt like my whole world had just collapsed.”
She said, “I feel like my whole world, life, my whole entire world has been ripped apart and I’m left with not only my soul fractured, but my life.”
In the end, her mother had to identify her granddaughter. Rachel couldn’t do it. All she could do was stroke her daughter’s beautiful curly hair, hold her hand, as she and her mother wept for the child.
Almost as soon as she entered the room to identify her daughter’s body, before she had stood at the bedside, the story took another turn. I wish I could say I didn’t see it coming. But any attentive listener was not surprised when she told how twice she said, “This wasn’t an accident.” Over the next 24 hours, the final details—verified by a note left on the computer in her estranged husband’s apartment, eye witness accounts, and footage from a highway camera—confirmed what listener’s suspected. Her husband purposely crossed over to the other side of the road driving against oncoming traffic and crashing head on into a lorry killing himself and his daughter instantly.
Later, around 3 a.m. Rachel and her mother drove home where her father, sister, and a few others were waiting for them. Totally spent, they sat together, huddled in unspeakable grief. They didn’t talk. They sobbed instead.
Laments often end with a shift from woe to an expression of hope or trust or even the prospect of joy. One of the most powerful parts of Rachel Rose’s account one year after the traumatic event, is when she describes her inner movement over the year from being “furious” and saying angrily “he’s killed my daughter. He’s a murderer” to being at peace with her deeply wounded husband, extending extraordinary compassion to him, saying, “I pray that he is at peace now and he gets the healing that he needs, he gets the love he so rightly deserves.”
30 minutes in, Rachel Leader says, “If you’ve made it this far, thank you for watching and listening. There aren’t any words to describe the pain of losing a child. But to lose a child in that way”—she pauses before she finishes her thought saying—“it’s immeasurable. And it’s not only the child-loss, it’s all the milestones as well that have been taken.”
“So, the last twelve months have been the hardest, the darkest,” she says, “the most challenging to navigate. I’ve not been working. I’ve been trying to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to heal. I’ve been doing everything I can to heal.” And she prays. Out of the depths, she prays.
She shares that she had to leave the UK because it was too painful and that she has made her daughter a promise that she will not be defeated.
She closes with “Now I don’t know what my life looks like. . . So, I’m rebuilding my life and that’s scary. . . I have drive. I have determination. And I have a passion to do good in this world. And to make sure that I am making a positive difference, and to bring light because there is too much darkness. My purpose is to bring my light and to keep spreading . . . the light and the love even though I am hurting everyday.”
WOODCUTS by Kathe Kollwitz
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If you’ve made it this far, consider listening to Charlie Haden’s version of “Wayfaring Stranger.” It might be a bit of balm after such an emotional read. Like the most powerful laments set to music, Haden’s rendition of this well-known song is onomatopoeic. That is, the arrangement of the music, as well as how Haden sings the lyrics, sound like the emotional content of the experience of hardship the lament describes. I think it also sounds like the heartbreak Rachel Rose is naming in her video. It can be our collective lament, our brief moment of compassionate solidarity with Ms. Leader and her daughter, as well as our prayer for healing for those who have lost a child or a loved one, as well as for those who have betrayed their humanity by knowingly causing the suffering of others.
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