Sisters on the Shore by Veronica Maria Jarski

I stand on the edge of our front yard, which stretches before me like a dark sea during a sudden storm. Sorrow has seeped into my bones, and grief rides in gusts. My sweater is winded around me as if it can protect me from the wreckage as if it can stop everything that follows a storm.

 Among the flotsam and jetsam, the brand-new volleyball that my husband received for his birthday seventeen days ago has rolled into the roses. Rose-gold glitter from my daughter’s twenty-first birthday four days ago forms a fringe where the grass meets concrete. Wine barrels packed with seashells, sand, and succulents from my husband’s makeshift garden and now batten down the hatches.

Jesus feels so far away. Deeply asleep and unperturbed on the boat as the storm rages.

Women–some friends, some acquaintances–arrive, slowly pulling up to where I am staring out into the unknown. They’ve come to attend to the survivors of the shipwreck. But they cannot patch us up. They cannot retrieve our sunken treasure.

They can, however, keep us fed and afloat. 

These women heard the sounding of the alarm and come bearing hefty supplies of pulled pork, Vietnamese rolls, enchiladas, roasted chicken, and seemingly endless cakes and pies. Comfort cannot be given in words, so food must suffice. 

Some of the women who pull up to my house are exceptionally quiet. Others weep. 

In a blink, I've become a warning to all married women of what inevitably will come for them or their spouses. Death–for all we discuss it as Christians, for all the memento mori comments we casually spout, for all the worship songs in which we flippantly sing "O, death, where is your sting?"–is no longer a mysterious figure. 

Death snuck into our home and stole the light in my husband's pale blue gaze and the breath of his soft, comforting laugh. Just a few days past his fifty-first birthday, Graham slipped into seizures without warning. Four days later, he was carried by bright angels to a distant shore.

For the first time in years, I stand without my Graham. 

He appeared in my life unexpectedly like a bright bit of sea glass on the sand. Everything had felt ordinary until he arrived and made it extraordinary. He was the first person to show me kind and abiding love. Wounded, lost yet seeking, Graham taught me how to pursue God. And in his sweetness and warmth, Graham showed me how God was always with us. When I met the young, blue-eyed man, God impressed upon my heart that this was my companion. And it would be so until the end of his days.

In our twenty-six years of marriage, Graham and I were captain and first mate, focused together, struggling together, holding each other aloft, loving together.

Now, the captain is gone. And I, the first mate whose very being was entangled with Graham, feel lost at sea. Our four children and I have been clinging to one another in disbelief, shock, panic, sorrow, in all the emotions that have no words.

Our neighbors also pour forth from their houses like a rushing wave of comfort.

“I’m so very sorry for your loss,” a neighbor says. “You two seemed like soul mates. I’d see you walk through the neighborhood together, and I knew, I just knew in my heart, that you two had something so very special. Everyone wants something like that.”

“Yes,” his wife says. “You two just radiated something special. We could all just tell there was something so beautiful and different about your marriage.”

The words make me wonder. 

When Graham and I walked through our neighborhood, we’d first pray for everyone in it. The prayer lap, we called it. First, God, and then us. Sometimes, we’d have brief conversations with neighbors, known and unknown, and pray together. But I never thought that they’d see us, too. That they’d be somehow part of our story.

“I cannot believe Graham is gone,” another neighbor says. “He was always the fun dad, the cool dad. I wanted to be like him. I still want to be like him. He’d be out there with the kids. You’d all be out there playing on the front yard and laughing and enjoying time together. You could tell you got along.”

These words expand my outlook on the horizon.

“So many people loved Papa,” my children say to me. They, like me, have heard stories coming from all parts of our lives. Everyone tells us about Graham’s wide smile and the comfort and warmth within it. Sweet. Kind. Friendly. Everyone and everyone tells us how much they love Graham. 

The women continue coming to the shore every day.

The ones who know of loss know how the early days vacillate from disbelief and crushing sorrow and numbness. They take me out for walks along the wetlands, they pray in our living room, and make promises to continue them. The women reach out in kindness to play games with my younger children, to give them relief from reality. Friends of friends send gift cards, flowers, recipe boxes, and comfort packages. Long-lost relatives and acquaintances stuff our GoFundMe to help pay for everything involved in rebuilding after the storm.

“So many people love us,” my children say to me in surprise. 

“Why are you surprised?” my best friend says when I tell her that I cannot believe how many people have shown up. “Did you think you didn’t have a family?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “But it’s always just been Graham and me. And then, the kids. But it’s always been just us, the Jarski family of six.”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s all of us. It’s church. You can’t just do things at church and think it stays there. It’s beyond it. We’re the church. We’re family.”

And I am left in a different sort of shock.

Amid this tragedy, bearing the most unimaginable sorrow, I am being shown moments of grace and given such an outpouring of love by God. In this dark, horrific period of my life, I see these bright shining moments that can only come from God.

Miracles abound. Prayers have been fierce. 

Somehow, despite the loss of income from Graham’s work, we are staying afloat. A week after Graham’s passing, we are kicked out of our rental house of ten years because the landlord wants it for his son. But we miraculously find a place within a week—despite it being a saturated market, despite the near-impossibility of a four-bedroom place. When we have to move in mere days, these sisters in faith send their husbands and sons to hoist furniture and boxes from the old home to the new one, and the women stay to help unpack and clean and feed us, lest we forget. When we feel grief growing too dark, we get texts and phone calls and cards from our faith family. When we cannot physically get out of bed due to heartbreak and grief, we have friends who peel us out of it and remind us that we are loved.

We are loved.

We are loved in joy but also in sorrow.

Though I don’t ask God why my husband died, though I have not felt the anger that the grief books said would come, I have felt a sorrow in my marrow so deep that I thought it would be my end. And perhaps it would have been if not for the faith given as a gift so gently from God, if not for the witness of so many sisters and brothers in faith.

What I have learned could fill books. But what I will share is this: We are never alone. God will never abandon us, not even in our darkest days. Just keep yourself in His sight.

My late husband would have considered his life to be ordinary. Nothing for the news. Nothing to write a book about. Nothing that would fill up stadiums. Graham was a good Christian who loved his wife and his children. Sometimes, he’d feel a little too ordinary. Like all of us, sometimes, he wondered about what impact his life made.

The man who thought he was ordinary didn’t know that his quick, sweet smile and friendly, listening manner reached so far. In the days following his passing, I had to tell people in his every day that Graham had died. The bank teller wept so hard and hugged me. “Just seeing him once a week made me happy because there was a guy who really loved his wife and kids.” Strangers in our neighborhood. Grocery clerks. Cashiers. His boss. People in the furthermost circle of our social sphere were touched by the ripples of this very ordinary man’s sweetness.

Graham’s smile is still mentioned often to me. “Oh, I felt so awkward at that party, but then I saw Graham and he just smiled, and I instantly felt better.” And “He was quiet and waved hello, and I just felt like I could talk to him. And I did, and he listened and I just felt better after.” And “I’d see him, and he’d give that smile, and I just felt so much warmth.” 

Now, when I stand on the shore and Graham has gone beyond it, I have learned about how God, in His abundant love for us, lavishes that love on His children … and in doing so, He lets His children share that love with others, even in ways unseen.

For so long, I only saw God’s love in my husband’s gaze or in that of my closest friends. But God’s love reaches forever and beyond.

The sisters on the shore who came with their supplies of food, drink, and sweets, who gave fierce hugs, who cried with us, who prayed with us, undoubtedly must have forgotten what they did during that time. As months stretch forward and years unfurl from a tragedy, they would probably consider what they did to be something that one just does. “It’s what family does,” one of them told me. “It’s what a loving family does.”

As I stand on the shoreline of a new place, a year later, I can see shadows of those early days of loss and yet also love and kindness gleaming through them. 

No, it's not easy. No, one isn’t cured of grief. No, my life is no longer the same. 

But I know now, without a doubt, that I am not alone. Even though everything around me—the storm, the sorrow, the whispers of the evil one–may make it seem so. In this rougher second year of widowhood, I know that, even in the bleakest storm, I’m loved by God, backed by angels, and supported by a sisterhood of faith. 

In time, in long passages of time, we will eventually be all right. 

Jesus feels so close to me. Wide awake and clasping me close to calm me during stormy weather.

We will not drown.

Veronica Maria Jarski is a first-generation American, the daughter of Argentine immigrants who primarily spoke Spanish at home. She learned English through immersion and copious viewings of “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” episodes. Years later, she has a career saturated in wordsmithing: newspaper reporter, proofreader, editorial assistant, editor, content writer, senior content writer, freelance writer, editorial project manager, and managing editor. Veronica's written work has spanned all types of content, including long-form articles, ebooks, how-to guides, opinion pieces, poems, and scripts.