May 16, 2024, would have been my son Thomas’s twenty-second birthday. But instead of candles on a chocolate cake that my wife Elin has baked – Thomas’s favorite – we have candles like the one pictured above scattered throughout our home. I have one on the nightstand next to my bed. I light it each night before I surrender to the place from which God provides leadership for my life (Psalm 23).
I’ve switched roles with Thomas. Normally, children are the legacy of their parents. But I feel a sense of duty to carry my son’s legacy forward so that every time Thomas’s name is mentioned, and someone is moved or positively impacted, my son lives on. This unwanted, yet embraced, calling in life has created an essential tension between the loss that I feel about his passing, and a new vision for positively impacting the world with memories of his life.
The Loss is Deep
On the one hand, the loss is captured by John Greenleaf Whittier’s line, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.” Thomas was accepted, and planned to attend, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Like his friends in Colorado and California, he would have graduated last week, and then gone on for an MA in anthropology and ancient religions.
But on the other hand, my vision for keeping his memory alive was shaped by the nineteenth-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who helped me see the historical then and the existential now, as a platform upon which a future could be built, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” We follow the path forward, calibrated by past insight, anchored to present realities, and then we become what we do.
Today, I’m experiencing this essential tension along the Outer Labyrinth of the destiny that I’m creating with my choices in day-to-day life, as the candles are a memory-presence symbol of the loss of Thomas’s actual physical-presence.
But at the same time along the Inner Labyrinth of the destiny that I have in God as revealed in my dreams, those same candles were, are, and remain an archetypal symbol of a vision of how God is leading me in this special life calling. Looking back, I see the evidence of His pedagogic leading most profoundly in a dream that I had three years ago on July 2, 2021, just eight weeks and five days after Thomas died (see below).
The Dream
My wife and I were supposed to build a house and she and I were going to work together on this project – she had blonde hair and blue eyes but did not look like my actual wife Elin – her face was not in focus, and I only had a deep intuitive-emotional sense of what she looked like. We needed a book to show us how to build that house, and we were going to a store-type place to buy this book.
All this happened in a previous part of the dream, or in another dream, and as this dream opens, Elin and I arrive at the store where we’re supposed to buy the book, but it’s some other type of business that was in a building that seemed like a house. As we entered the store, there was a tall, bald guy there behind the counter, and the store was really cluttered and full of “stuff” that was everywhere. We didn’t say what we wanted to the guy in the dream, because it was like he already knew what we were looking for, and he left and quickly returned with a hard-bound book that had a light blue cover that he handed us. I wanted to see if there were other books there for us to get, but my wife only wanted this book – and no others.
The Scene Changes
The scene changes and I’m sitting in a chair in another part of the store looking through the book. Elin knelt on her knees right in front of me on the floor and she was pleading with me with deep emotions and intensity, that we should only get this book. She said, “I want something we build with our own hands, not something corporate…” I was thinking, even if we got other books, we could still build the house with our own hands, but then what seemed like a Bible verse came into my mind about “a house built with hands…”
Elin felt very, very deeply about only getting this light blue hardcover book, and these feelings went down to a deep profound foundation and anchor in her inner sense of purpose, and the meaning of life itself. I was thinking and feeling she’s being a little too “philosophical” or “emotional” about this, but she and I were partners in this house-building project, and I wanted us to be aligned and united in the purpose, meaning, and the actual work that had to be done.
We got up and walked over to the guy to check-out and buy the book. He had a bright green cutting from a plant in his hand that was extremely prominent in the dream; like it had a spotlight on it. The dream ends with Elin and I standing there with the light blue hardcover book – eager to get about the business of building the house project. [I woke up feeling incredibly sad and in pain like I am about the death of my son Thomas and how Thomas only exists in my memory. I edited Thomas out of the goals in my annual plan last weekend and replaced them with a goal of preserving his memory through his Forever Missed memorial site and in other ways that I’ve yet to identify.]
Dream Spurred my Writing Life
At the time I had this dream, my vision for writing my forthcoming memoir, Finding New Life after the Death of My Son had not emerged, and I was reading through the grief literature – stories written by parents who had lost children. One book was, Seasons of Loss: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God by Tim Challies.
It’s the story of how Challies began the hard work of processing his grief after losing his twenty-year-old son, Nick, by writing. “I have often said that I don’t know what I think or what I believe until I write about it. Writing is how I reflect, how I meditate, how I chart life’s every journey . . . I began to writehad to write because I had to know what to think and what to believe, what to feel and what to do . . . I put fingers to keyboard and pen to paper to find out.”
In a similar way, my own writing journey began when I composed Thomas’s obituary and posted it on his memorial site just ten days after his death. In the weeks and months that followed, I continued to upload stories to the site about special moments from Thomas’s life and from our life together as a family. Over time, a vision for the memoir came to life. I believed that if I captured all my moment-by-moment experiences at the bleeding edge of grief and pain in those online posts, and then stepped back and view them as a set of pericopes strung together like pearls on a necklace, the essence of an inner healing and transformation process would naturally emerge.
Long Journey Through Grief
Just as the frenetic, minute-by-minute fluctuations of the stock market tend to flatten out when plotted over a longer duration of time, so too the process of surviving Thomas’s death, finding new life, and beginning the journey home would emerge in the form of my book. While most chapters in the memoir would be anchored to a point in time—a post from Thomas’s memorial site—the book would chronicle the overall process of finding new life after his death along both the Inner and Outer Labyrinth.
I finished writing the final draft on December 21, 2023, at 2:36 pm after two years and thirty-two weeks. On January 15, 2024, I sent two pictures to my book designer – one for the front cover, and one for the back with specific instructions that I wanted a hardback book of high quality. The front cover was a picture of McIntosh Lake and Long’s Peak in Longmont, Colorado, a shot taken just across the street from our house. It’s the view Elin and I see from the back deck of our home. On February 6th. I got the first draft of the cover to review from the designer. We loved it – made a few changes and had a final cover design two days later. Two months later my publisher-consultant convinced me to create a softcover, Kindle version, and audio book.
Synchronicity
But it was not until last week that I recognized that the front cover of the book that’s along the Outer Labyrinth connected back to the light blue hardback book along the Inner Labyrinth of the above dream – a dream that I had three years ago. Carl Jung calls this a synchronicity where circumstances along the Outer Labyrinth of day-to-day historical time (chronos) are connected to timeless Inner Labyrinth images and symbols (kairos) by an “acausal connecting principle” that doesn’t have a cause-and-effect relationship, yet both are happening together at the same time.
The empirical reality of synchronicity is how God accomplishes His sovereign will through the conscious and unconscious (intended and unintended) beliefs, mindsets, and actions of people in all times, places, and sociocultural settings. But most people don’t recognize that God uses their lives, their decisions, and their stories to achieve His ends, purpose, and will, that cannot be thwarted (Job 42:2).
There are myriad images and symbols in the above dream, but the three that strike me most deeply today on the anniversary of what would have been Thomas’s twenty-second birthday are the house, the book, and the plant.
What the Dream Means
Houses that appear in our dreams tend to be time stamps that are symbols of our identity – who we were, who we are, and who we are meant to be. The symbolic image of a “house” in a dream is the “place” where our past, present, and future selves come together to reveal where we were, where we are, and where we’re headed on our journey along the Inner and Outer Labyrinth.
More specifically, over time, the spaces that we create and live in along the Outer Labyrinth of day-to-day life, become woven into the fabric of our conscious memories, identity, and reality. They become a key element of the destiny that we create with our choices. But the spaces we shape and define also reveal archetypal symbols that shape and define our identity and inner reality along the Inner Labyrinth of our dream world, that is, the destiny that we have in God from the foundation of the world. That’s why dreams that we have about our current house, or one we used to live in as a child, or a house we’ve yet to occupy are so important.
Houses that appear in dreams are composite inner images that symbolize our outer identity and reality because our house is where they keep our “stuff” – where we live our lives. But they also symbolize our inner identity and reality in the deepest parts of our hearts and minds. They often have both a diagnostic and prognostic function that describes where we were, where we are (at the time of having the dream), and where we’re headed on the path of individuation. The shaping function of houses in our dreams was captured by Sir Winston Churchill’s statement, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Catharsis Helped
The dream above revealed that the new life and transformed psychological “space” that Elin and I are living in today as I post this article on the Open to Hope website was already taking shape more than three years ago. The instructions and mechanism for “building” that new house in the dream, were contained in the hardback book with the light blue cover. And so it is that the process of writing of my memoir – of puking it up one sentence at a time – was the cathartic experience that helped to shape and define a new identity, mission, and reality for Elin and me.
The image of the green plant in the dream is a symbol of the new life that would emerge in our lives post-Thomas’s death. I picked the candle in the picture above eighteen months ago on January 11, 2022, precisely because the bright green leaves captured the essence of the green symbol of new life in the dream. So, the candles in various rooms of the new house that we bought after Thomas died are a silent witness to his on-going memory-presence in a home that he never lived in.
Telling Son’s Story
I’ve come to see the importance of processing the pain and grief of Thomas’s loss in writing the hardback book with the light blue cover as part of the ongoing, lifelong flow of individuation rather than as a separate, stand-alone thing called a grieving process that comes and goes in times of tragedy and loss. I’ve also recognized that the other element of the essential-tension – the vision to keep his memory alive – is part of the journey of discovering my calling and destiny in life, the person I was meant to be in God.
Don’t get me wrong. Thomas’s death has been the single most traumatic and devastating loss I’ve ever experienced on my fifty-nine-year journey of individuation and faith. But as I describe in the memoir, for more than forty years, God has been preparing me to survive Thomas’s death, and making me strong enough to tell this story.
The book that describes it all, Finding New Life after the Death of My Son, is available for pre-order worldwide on sites like Amazon, with the launch scheduled for October 15, 2024.
