Season 1, Episode 29: Part Two of our conversation with Theresa Melendez, Dealing with Grief and Loss

PART TWO 

Danielle asks Theresa to share about a major event that in her life this last year, one that disrupted and changed her life: the death of her father. 

Theresa is still processing the death of her father last year—he tried to kill himself, survived but then died on an operating table.

She knows she needs to see a therapist but culturally Filipinos doesn’t go to see therapists. 

Theresa wrestles with him taking his own life and what the church of her youth (the Catholic Church) believes about suicide, that it leads to hell. Is this where he is now? Theresa heard God say to her, “He tried to take his life, but he didn’t, I did.” And this brought her an answer that brought her comfort. 

He didn’t leave a note or say why he wanted to kill himself...

God showed Theresa that He reached out and grabbed ahold her father, and wept with him. And that image felt like God had given her that mercy in knowing where he is.

Her dad had shot himself in the head, survived it, then got up and walked to the bathroom and said "I don’t want to go to the hospital, I want to go home.”

There is still a physical part of her grief, she feels it, and how she and her mom deal with it. She's tried to find things she can control.

There was a lot of paperwork to bring him back to the states.

She felt there was this constant narrative, “We got to keep moving.”

It was when it was all done that someone said, “That must have been hard” that she broke down grieving. It was like a release that she didn’t have to carry any more weight. GRIEVING is to deal with all the tragedies she was experiencing, not just the death. It was permission to feel it all. 

When they did find out why he killed himself, there was this overwhelming sense of betrayal and abandonment. He was her rock, her source of wisdom and he was gone. She stepped down from the ministry she was leading and stopped  leading worship. 

Then she got angry. She felt she was doing all these thing for him and now he was gone. “Fine! I’m going to get more tattoos.” She laughs at this. 

Theresa finally got to a place where she declared,  “Alright I’m going to start living!

She said she has never felt the strength of prayer more in her life than in the season after her dad’s death.

Danielle said, “we don’t grieve well.” And Theresa in a culture where things are fragmented. Even in the way she quarantines—she quarantines with her family—“thank God, I wish I was doing that!”

“It's no wonder that trauma resurfaces in COVID-19, where we’re fragmented and isolated.” And Danielle speculates that perhaps that is why she felt she could share it right now during this season of so much loss and grief happening around us and in us.

Theresa says there isn’t a day that goes by where she isn’t thinking about her dad. She thinks that the isolation of quarantine and the uncertainty, the stress of her working at home…the anxiety and trauma from her dad’s death … It all parallels each other. She finds that little things are magnified. She remembers how out of control she felt after her dad’s death and how God brought her through that, and she thinks it will be the same with COVID even though it feels like  “the end times” because of the global nature.

Maggie acknowledge there’s a new and different level of connectedness as we experience collective global trauma together. We are grieving together, for each other and for ourselves. We’re all separated physically and so in order to heal and engage the grieving processes it’s doing what we're doing now: it’s sharing our stories, sharing our loss and sharing our grief... So we can say “me too” as a way to be connected even while we’re apart.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.