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My pastor, Debra Brady, is doing a sermon series entitled The Leading Causes of Life. The first sermon was on “connections” and the importance of being connected to others in life. Last Sunday’s topic was Coherency. She explained how strokes are now being referred to as “brain attacks” so the general public has a better idea of what happens when the blood flow to the brain is impeded as it is to the heart when one has a “heart attack”. When we have either a brain attack or a heart attack, we are rendered incoherent, at least temporarily. Then she talked about ‘life attacks” and how most all of us suffer one at some point in our lives. It might be a job loss or a divorce or the sudden death of a loved one.

The sermon resonated with me because we suffered a life attack of the greatest magnitude and we were indeed incoherent for such a long time.

I received an email today from a friend on the East Coast who asked if I had read Don Piper’s book 90 Minutes in Heaven. Of course I did. I read practically every book written in the last 50 years on grief, loss, losing a child, heaven, near death experiences, after death communication, etc. I read that particular book within the first three months after Ryan’s death but I realized today that I remember very little about that book. I remember very little about anything I did, read, saw, or ate in that first year or so. I was going through the motions of life but I was truly incoherent.

As I have written about before, we had just moved to Sacramento when our “life attack” happened. In fact, we had been in our new home only 10 days. At the time, I thought that was more bad luck. Not only did our world shatter but it shattered when we were living 90 miles from our support base in a rather isolated setting. We lived rather anonymously in Sacramento for the next 2 ½ years. I now see that as somewhat of a blessing. I now realize that isolation and anonymity were probably balm for our battered souls. We were able to be incoherent without being noticed. No one we met at the grocery store or the post office knew us or what had happened to us. Nothing was asked of us. There were no committees to serve on; no fundraisers to attend; no social gatherings. We stumbled through life in an incoherent manner until we eventually found our footing in the world again.