When Things Cannot Be Fixed
Holy Saturday and Making a Life in the Midst of Loss
In spring of 2018, my fiancé shared something that felt like it could break apart the sweet family we had created with our three children in our cozy blue house on the corner. One week later, I got a positive pregnancy test after years of infertility. Eight weeks later, the little baby whose perfect flickering heart I had seen only days earlier slipped from my body onto our bathroom floor. Nine days later my (ex-)fiancé moved out, taking with him his two biological children whom I loved as my own.
In a matter of a few months, the life I had painstakingly stitched together with effort, obsessive research, endurance, fertility treatments, love, and credit cards crumbled. I was deeply suicidal, saved only by my commitment not to ruin my children’s lives by killing myself.
Ever the hard worker, resigned to having to continue in this life that felt unbearable, I threw myself into therapy, trying to understand how I could possibly have gotten myself here… and how to get out. How had my years of diligent research on religion, psychology, and healthy parenting and partnerships failed me so? Could this life be made livable?
I wish I could neatly tie up my struggles with a life lesson about how I pulled through and you can too, but the reality is that seven years, one global pandemic, and another lost pregnancy later, I am still searching. I have seen the best practitioners, both traditional and non-traditional. I have expanded my personal library of books on Christianity, Buddhism, depression, healing, growth, trauma, and grief. And as I inch along in my forty-fifth year, I am relaxing into the reality that my grief and longing are like the waves: they come and they recede. But they do not stop.
I think of this truth as I have watched the war in Ukraine and then Israel and Gaza unfold before our eyes, like a slow-motion horror movie. I think of this grief as we watch neighbors deported, mass shootings, and floods. I think of these waves as we watched millions die from Covid. As people are strangled on the street, grabbed up and sent to prison with no charges, or killed sleeping in their bedrooms. Politicians say the things that they must say. Our social media feeds fill up with heartbreak and outrage and righteousness. And yet. War remains with us. Death and loss are our constant companions. We grieve. And we long for a livable life.
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This is not the dream that has been so successfully peddled to many of us. The refrain we know is that things can be fixed; life can be curated. If you do, buy, or try enough, life will be a little more like an Ikea magazine or Instagram post.
In the churches of my childhood, this message was driven home: do enough, try enough, and it will be better. Give and you will get back more that you could imagine.
I know now that I was drawn to religion and church because I loved the promises: There is something holy about this life. You are loved by God. If you do enough good, you can be good enough. God will bless you if you do what you are supposed to do.
It was like a siren calling to me from the deep.
My childhood home was built with the best intentions but was laced with anger, addiction, depression, anxiety, and confusion. I was the family canary in our proverbial coal mine, ever-sensitive to the slightest whiff of discord or problems. I can still feel the nervousness and stomach aches when there was too much drinking, when there was so much yelling, and when the silence was scary and confusing. As a little girl, I wanted so badly to make it all okay: to make my parents okay, my sister okay, my self okay, our home okay. The church provided me the perfect environment to swoop in to heal the sick and wounded, a grand and thrilling expansion of my ill-fated project to make everything “okay.”
In church, this is what we were supposed to do. My family resisted my peacemaking and healing efforts, but at church, they told us the world was broken by sin. We were broken by sin. And it was our job to be the hands and feet of Jesus to heal the world and love our neighbor. We could be redeemed.
I volunteered for everything I could, shockingly sincere in my commitment to take up my own cross. Even writing about it, I can feel the high it gave me: things are broken, we are supposed to fix them. If we fix things, God will reward us and we will be good. It seemed that if I did it well enough, if I did it right, everything could finally be okay.
As it turns out, this is not an effective or sustainable way to go about one’s life. To my great disappointment, I have found that there are many broken things that cannot be fixed by effort, prayer, or determination.
I thought I would be saved by Jesus, by working hard, and by the people that I would love into healing and wholeness. Yet, as it stands now, I have been saved paradoxically only by the surrender to the world as it is: impossible, beautiful, horrible, holy.
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I am an ordained pastor, although my understanding of God and Jesus has changed so much since my early days of enthusiasm that I qualify as a heretic in many circles. Yet, still, somehow though I cannot leave the faith that tells me year after year: from dust you have come and to dust you shall return.
In my faith, we hope, knowing that there is only resurrection with death; knowing that there is only some form of salvation with surrender. This works for some of us, but I get why it does not work for everyone.
The high is mostly gone. I have given up on fixing others, although I begrudge none of the fixers out there who continue to try to knit our world back together. Yet because I can live no other place, I live in a perpetual Holy Saturday – the day before the resurrection when Jesus was dead and his followers mourned.
It is this place – between trauma and a tomorrow that Jesus’s followers did not know was to come - that I have set up shop.
It is here that we can say, “It is horrible and I am sorry. I do not know what will come. I am with you.”
It is here that we say, “This should not have happened and it is unjust. I understand why your heart and spirit are broken.”
It is here we say, “There is nothing to say when a country is decimated before our eyes. There is nothing to say when children are gunned down in schools. It is all horrible.”
And yet, in this, we somehow manage to eek out some measure of the holy.
We live in a world that often wants to drag the grieving too quickly forward into the world of the living and hopeful.
When your baby has died inside your body, you want to remember your child and for someone to say, “This should not have happened. You are so sad. I am here. I am sorry.”
When your beloved changes his mind, you want someone to say: your entire life has come apart. I am so sorry. It may be that this life cannot be put back together like you wanted it to be.
It may be that this world cannot be put back together like we wanted it to be. And so we go from here.
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After my life fell apart, I joined a women’s support group. Every Tuesday night for seven years, I have gathered with this group of women. We check in with each other, share our successes and our struggles, talk about our children, jobs, and heartache. Then, one after the other, we respond to each other:
That sounds so hard.
I am amazed by your strength.
I struggle with the same things. You are not alone.
I feel angry on your behalf because you were treated like that.
We attend to each other not to overcome the grief of our lives, but to love each other in the grief. We see each other, not as a means to an end or a savior or fixer, but as our authentic selves, complicated and bruised as we may be.
It is not that I am sad all the time or have given up, but rather, in paying attention to the grief, and this broken world, I am able to attend to the wounds: mine and others.
There is healing in the honesty that everything broken cannot be fixed.
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In the Book of Job, after his children are killed and he sits in the ashes, Job cries out:
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet. I have no rest and trouble comes.
We live in a culture that creates little space for mourning and lament. Grief is in the air we breathe, yet to sit too long in the ashes of our loss is seen as indulgent or even weak. And so our disallowed grief ferments and ricochets around inside us, unnamed and unprocessed, driving not only our individual but also our cultural dysfunction.
Perhaps you too have sought balm for your soul, that, in the end, betrayed you: partners, drugs, religion, righteousness, work. The list is long.
Maybe you too are a canary, sensitive to the pain that swirls around us in this world that is burning both figuratively and literally.
There can be a peace in rejecting the narrative that it will always get better. That you can always be better.
Grief and longing are like the waves: they come and they recede. But they do not stop.
In these times, when we are not sure what to do, where we can barely save ourselves, much less the world around us, I am learning to pause. To pay attention. To the waves, the fires, the canaries, all of it. Sometimes we are saved by surrender to the world as it is: impossible, beautiful, horrible, holy.
For all of those living in Holy Saturday – the time in between the loss and the rising – you are not alone.
That is so very hard. We are amazed by your strength. You are good and loved. You are holy. We are with you.
Holy Saturday. April 19, 2025. Vol. 2, Issue 4.
Wow, that is both really sad, and uplifting at the same time. I like how not trying to find the solution to make things better, and supporting one another through shared experiences can help us manage life. Thanks for the great article.
So insightful and truthful and uplifting and heartbreaking!!! Thank you for sharing your incredible grief and personal trauma. My heart goes out to you! I am at an age that I understand fully what you are saying about being unable to “fix” things and finally realize it’s not about blaming myself because life didn’t go the way I expected or hoped. Thank you!