Last week I attended the annual conference, in Dallas, of The Compassionate Friends, the national organization for parents who have lost a child. About a thousand parents attended. It was surely the saddest place in the world. I met several parents whose loss occurred in the past year or two, and for whom grief is a daily, debilitating burden.
Yet the conference was also a place of strength and hope, and no one better articulated how hope can coexist with, if not conquer, crushing bereavement than the conference’s keynote speaker, Kay Warren. Kay is the wife of the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of the famous Saddleback Church in California, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, and a famous preacher. Rev. Warren and Kay lost their son , in his mid-twenties, to suicide, in 2014. Their son had suffered throughout his life from mental illness.
Kay Warren’s message was brilliant in its simplicity. She said that the purpose of organizations like The Compassionate Friends, and events like its annual conference, is to allow parents to be in a place where it is safe again to be a parent, at least for a while — to hold up the memory of the child who has passed away for others to see. Then, as she talked, she placed two items on the podium. The first was her “Hope Box,” into which she regularly places quotes that give her strength to carry on. The second was a piece of dark orange cookware, a small pot in which one might heat soup. She called this her “Mystery Box,” and explained that this piece of cookware was appropriate to its function because it had been “fired at very high temperature,” and as a result was now able to protect whatever might be placed inside. Eventually, she wove the presence of these two boxes on the podium into her advice to the attendees: As parents of children who have died, we must try to find and keep close by sources of hope, but also recognize that hope must exist, side by side, with mysteries that we will never be able to explain.
It was a privilege for me to listen to this eloquent, moving summary of how parents can and should live their lives while honoring the memories of their late children. On Reid’s 26th birthday, today, I am as always burdened by the aspects of his crash and his passing that I will never be able to explain or understand, yet I am propelled forward each day by the hope that his life and memory have generated, not the least of which is his legacy as one of the faces of safer teen driving in the United States.
