When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

My worst fear was coming true. It’d been my greatest fear since I’d lost Mom—losing Dad.

Brain cancer was a slow, debilitating death that stripped every part of his former self. It had been awful to watch, and as hard as my sons prayed for James’s healing, in the end they prayed just as hard for his death.

“Matthew twenty-five, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, sums up our entire philosophy. Jesus said, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.’ That’s how we live our lives, and it’s the closest thing we have to a creed.”

“It’s just the small-town mentality of people not liking change and being resistant to anything that doesn’t fall within their traditional ideologies.”

But I wanted him to grow and change, experience new things too. His contentment with sameness was more maddening the older I got. How could we live our lives based on decisions we’d made when we were seventeen?

The problem with having a fairy-tale relationship story was how much other people were invested in keeping the fairy tale alive. It wasn’t just our story—it was everyone’s.

“You are tied to the life you created when you were a teenage girl to survive, but that life no longer serves you. Yet you can’t let go of it. Am I getting close?”

“I don’t know who I am without him. I’ve always wondered who I might be on my own. But I feel like the world’s most terrible person for even having the thoughts.”

One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliché, because the intensity of the loss was too big. I’d heard it all after James died. Sometimes it was better to say nothing.

I couldn’t help but think of my best friend, Lois, and all the secrets of mine she carried with her. There were things you told your best friend that you didn’t tell anyone else.

Traumatic grief was groundless, a free fall into space. Unless you’d been there before, you couldn’t understand what it felt like.

It usually takes about two years to deprogram a person who’s been indoctrinated into a cult,