From The Heart Of Ken Shiplet

It’s been two weeks since I lost my sweet wife Carol. I’ve waited from writing anything specific because I wanted to have time to walk through some of my thoughts before I expressed them publicly.

For those of you who wish, I want to take you on my journey through the grief of the greatest loss I’ve ever known. I will share openly and honestly my grief struggles, not for your sympathy, but so that others might learn better how to and how not to handle grief.

I’ve studied the matter of grief much in my ministry. Two of the best resources I can offer are small, easy to read, books called “Silver Lining” and “Grieve Well, Live Well” by Dr. T. David Willets. I will refer to them several times during my journey.

Dr. Willets takes a little different approach to the stages of grief than what I have traditionally been taught. He writes, “I believe there are four general stages of the grieving process: trauma, disorientation, adjustment and rebuilding. The emotions of anger, denial, guilt, and bargaining are part of each of the four stages.”

I will use his model to express what I am gong through. Understand, these stages do not flow smoothly for one to the next. While there is a general flow from one to the next, we will bounce back and forth through all four stages.

THE DEPTH OF GRIEF IS DETERMINED BY THE VALUE OF THE LOSS.

I have never grieved over the loss of penny. Why? Because it has no value to me. There was a day you could put a penny in a gum machine and out would come a round little ball of gum. Not even that value for a penny exist anymore.

The depth of our grief is directly determined by the value of our loss. In recent years I have grieved the loss of my fellow pastor friend, Burl Mackey. He was like a brother to me. My kids thought of him and his wife as uncle and aunt. I thought I understood grief, but not until the loss of Carol have I ever known how deep the depths of grief can be.

David Anderson offers this insight: “The depth of the grief that we feel is a direct indicator of the greatness of the blessing that God had given.” Since Carol’s stroke nearly twenty years ago, I promised her that I would never see her as a burden, but only as a blessing. While caring for her was, at times, burdensome, Carol was not a burden. She was and is always a blessing to my life. And because of the blessing, my grief is very deep.