In the early months and years, I foun
d myself spinning around in a whirlpool of anxiety, fear, sorrow, and depression. In a word, grief.
Some days I felt okay, like “I’ve finally got this.” I enjoyed time with friends and even found myself laughing. It felt superficial though. Nothing could mend the razor-sharp crack in my heart. I felt pain in places I can’t even describe. Places so deep inside that they couldn’t be reached. Places beyond my body. Like part of my very soul had been torn from me.
At times the suffering became unbearable. Just breathing took effort. I didn’t know how I could go on day-after-day without him in my life. It’s in those moments that I felt trapped on an out-of-control roller coaster set on unstable swampy ground. Other times I felt tossed about on stormy and endless waves in a sea where land no longer exists. Sometimes I rode the waves and other times they washed over me plunging me into an abyss of sorrow–a sorrow that attached itself to my heart and soul.
I asked God, even cried out to him, to change this constant fog of sorrow into a sense of peace instead. In times when I felt as if I was suffocating in a tsunami of anxiety, I prayed for a lifeline to save me from drowning in tears. God tells us that His joy is our strength in time of need (Neh 8: 10). But how could I find that joy and hold on to it when my whole world turned upside down?
My husband had it…that joy. He endured excruciating pain for many months as he battled pancreatic cancer. He let out wails of suffering that he could no longer stifle many times throughout the days and endless nights for more than nine months. But he never lost hope. He tried to focus his mind on little things that made him smile and all he was grateful for.
He chose to surround himself with family and friends; to share stories with them and me; to play games, to find humor and to laugh like a little kid again. He sang along to songs that praised God. He listened to music that made him feel like dancing even if only in his imagination. He chose to listen to and absorb positive messages and words whether they be from internet videos, from family and friends, or from hospital staff and doctors.
With a smile on his face, “I
‘m Livin!” became his daily motto. My husband’s unexplainable joy seemed to increase the closer he came to the end of his life on this earth. In his final days his face revealed he’d come to peace with his passing.
He became my inspiration within months after he died. If he could make it through his suffering with a smile on his face and laughter in his heart, then I knew I could make it through my own suffering of missing him more than words can say. Hard as it can be, even years later, when those grief waves hit me I reach for my lifeline of joy through prayer, happy memories, and trying to “live” life in the moment.
About Carmen Myrtis-Garcia
Carmen Myrtis-Garcia has faced her fears head-on while snorkeling the Great Blue Hole of Belize despite her phobia of the ocean, ziplining above a jungle canopy even though she is afraid of heights, walking barefoot across red-hot coals at a firewalking event, or moving alone to a foreign country. She does not consider herself brave, just curious.
The hardest challenge she faced was the suffering and death of her husband, Michael, to pancreatic cancer. Faith, prayer, and community got them through three stays in the hospital in a Third World country 3000 miles from family. Michael died in 2015 following an emergency trip back to Colorado just 3 years after they began living their long-planned for Dream on a little Caribbean Island.
Carmen is a published fiction and non-fiction writer. She is a contributor to Chicken Soup for the Soul and author of Land of Grief; Hope for the Widow’s Journey (devotional; release spring 2025). She is founder of Hope for the Widow’s Journey (private FB group) and Faith-Filled Widows (public FB), and her blog Thoughts-in-Grief. Her mission is to assist over one million widows to live life forward with hope, faith, and healing through her writings, podcasts, workshops, and grief mentoring.
She is the proud mother of two sons and a daughter-in-law and “neena” to two adorable grandchildren. She resides in Colorado and Belize and wanders at times when her gypsy spirit tugs at her.