Judi Merriam > Quotes

“with it, regularly, not wanting deception to claim victory. I’m convinced the only healthy way to deal with the factuality of a suicide is to meet it face to face from the heart-wrenching moment it happens and not redefine it into something more acceptable. We also need to personally dictate how we’ll deal with it so as to avoid any delusion that would capture our thoughts and change it into something it isn’t. It’s impossible to dress up a suicide death and be truthful about it at the same time! Some try, but I don’t believe them.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Even though I don’t believe the bad things in life come from the hand of God, I do believe He’s the One who redeems those bad things. We make the messes, and He cleans them up. He takes our brokenness and turns it into something that can be used to point us and others to Jesus.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“The legacy of a suicide is the list of never-ending, mind-numbing “what ifs” playing on a continuous loop in the deliberations of survivors.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“his book Understanding Your Suicide Grief, Alan D. Wolfelt tells us grief and mourning are not the same things. He defines grief as “the compilation of thoughts and feelings that welled up within you when you first encountered this painful loss and that remain inside you as you cope with changes that this loss has brought in your life.”15 However, he goes on to say that mourning is actively and purposefully moving grief from the inside to the outside and expressing it externally.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Although I felt like I was sinking, I still wrote the following in my journal: “I don’t mind the pain. I want to go as far into it as I need to so I can heal all the way to the depth of my wounded brokenness.” I just somehow knew if I was going to live through the grief, I was going to have to go as deep into my emotional and spiritual darkness as needed to get to the light on the other side of that horrible pain.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“This is part of the residual parental guilt of our child’s suicide: “Why didn’t we . . . ?” We ask it over and over and over again, especially during the rawness of the first few years after death.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“the “Heaven Sent” season-nine episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor tells us that the day we lose a loved one isn’t the worst because at least we have something to do that day. However, he then continues with this thought: “It’s all the days they stay dead.”12”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Grief never ends . . . But it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness nor a lack of faith . . . It is the price of love.”47”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Shock is always the grace that allows people to survive through early days of devastation and desperation.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“intends for evil, God redeems for good. ‘You meant it for evil; God rewrote it.’”40 I stopped my desperate search for motives and began resting in how God would rewrite the evil that robbed me of my son!”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Suicide changes the playing field of the anguish of a death, so of course I’m not the same person I was before Jenson’s suicide. I’m not even the same person I was a year or two after he left. Tragic death has not only changed me but continues to do so as my life moves forward. Jerry Sittser describes it this way: “Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same.”37”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that [He] meets us where we are and does not leave us where [He] found us.”5 How exquisite is the truth that God does not leave us where He finds us! What grace is this? What love is this? What mercy is this? Thank you, Lord.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“I’ve worked hard to impel my grief from the inside to the outside, and I will most likely have to keep working at it for the rest of my life, for grief, as it progresses, is like the ever changeable weather, where one day it’s dark and rainy and the very next moment the sky can open up clear and beautiful.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“As I stated earlier, we live in a fallen, broken world that doesn’t work right much of the time. When I stare into the face of Jenson’s suicide death, I have a greater understanding of what evil and Satan look like. Satan came to kill and destroy. Satan came to steal and maim. Satan is the antithesis of Jesus, who will one day cast that evil wretch into oblivion. Until then, however, Satan works his evil here, and I think his lies took Jenson out. Suicide looks like Satan; it doesn’t look like Jesus.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“But now I understood what Jill Kelly so aptly describes with her words: “a relentless, hollow ache echoes through every part of my broken life, and it will until heaven . . . a gaping hole once filled with joy is now empty.”9 I now know that emptiness doesn’t end.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“I want to be known as a woman who has both grieved and mourned well, for without both, there can be no rescue and recovery from the abyss of despair.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“Grief changes people; how can it not? We need to allow grief to make the necessary changes for the survival of those whom we know and love. It doesn’t really matter if we like the “before person” better than the “after person.” We can’t go back; we can’t even stay where we are; we can only move forward. It’s the same for the person who suffers loss—going back or staying the same really aren’t options.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“of any benefit to the brokenhearted.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“However, the benefits to our grieving hearts weren’t worth the loss of our precious son. Jerry Sittser, who lost his wife, mother, and only daughter in a single car accident, describes our sentiments with these words in his A Grace Disguised: “The good that may come out of the loss does not erase its badness . . .”13”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“In our humanness, we’re often incredibly ignorant in our responses to the hurting people in our lives, especially if we haven’t experienced that same hurt ourselves.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“However, in spite of a decision to end a life, in spite of the death of one most precious, in spite of the ever-present empty heart-hole absence of one loved beyond imagining, there is hope. And it’s hope that promises a future Heavenly reunion with our loved one whose physical body no longer walks in corporeal companionship with us here on this earth.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“No parent or sibling should ever have to see their child or brother dead by his own hand, or anyone else’s for that matter, but that’s the vision Brian, Tyler, and Kalina have to live with for the rest of their lives. In their mind’s eye, they will always have that picture of Jenson dead on the floor. That will be their last visual memory of him.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“In his book Understanding Your Suicide Grief, Alan D. Wolfelt tells us grief and mourning are not the same things. He defines grief as “the compilation of thoughts and feelings that welled up within you when you first encountered this painful loss and that remain inside you as you cope with changes that this loss has brought in your life.”15 However, he goes on to say that mourning is actively and purposefully moving grief from the inside to the outside and expressing it externally.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir

“It’s amazing to me how sometimes we can miss something that might be there, while other times we’re certain we’ve noticed something that really isn’t what we think it is. There is so much fallibility in being human, and yet we expect perfection from ourselves and practically everyone else in our lives. There’s no grace in that.”
― Judi Merriam, Empty Shoes by the Door: Living After My Son’s Suicide, a Memoir