When There Are No Words
“I’m upset with God and with others, but I don’t know how to put it into words.”
A mother of a patient in the Pediatric ICU shared these words with me in our first meeting. Her child had been admitted for a sudden injury when the medical team found an underlying tumor. It seemed there was no foothold for her in the overwhelming sea of emotions, including her helplessness, confusion, fear, and anger. This hospitalization also evoked her memories from past trauma due to a car accident. She had few words to name the complex emotions she carried.
The questions this mother raised are not uncommon for families I meet in the PICU. It is not challenging to imagine the trauma for any parent of a child in that room, full of terrifying sights and sounds. The experience itself can be quite surreal, full of shock and uncertainty due to the injury or illness that led to their child’s hospitalization. Parents often express emotions of shock, fear, unfairness, guilt, and anger. They carry worries that things could get worse. In this disorienting space, it is challenging to even name these feelings.
In this space, I invited this mother to open the Bible with me and read Psalm 22. Some of the phrases in this Psalm carry images and questions that feel shocking: “I cry out by day, but you do not answer”; “I am... scorned by everyone”; “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The images offered also include testimony that “you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you.” Finally, it ends with the plea, “Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.”
On hearing these words, this mother turned and said, “This is how I feel.” The words of this psalm helped offer some language for the rawness of all she was feeling. It offered a sense of orientation, validating her anger towards God and towards others in a moment that seemed so monumentally unfair. Instead of seeking to minimize these emotions, it invited her to engage with them. It offered an image of a God who is with each of us in the depths of all that we might carry, even when we wonder if God is hearing us at all.
I often am reminded of laments throughout scripture when I am with parents experiencing the trauma of hospitalization. These poems begin in a place where life is not right, which seems true for nearly any child who experiences trauma. The words and expressions feel shocking, which also meets the shock of the moment a family is experiencing. Instead of minimizing or dismissing the emotions one carries in a moment of trauma, lament offers a space to directly name the hurt of the painful moment. Notably, these passages also often do not stay in that space but remind us of God’s past actions and usher us towards a plea for God’s deliverance. Underneath this cry is an image of God who is with each of us, welcoming our cries of pain and pleas for healing.
In a follow up visit with this mother a week later, she opened her Bible and began sharing numerous psalms that she had read and highlighted, naming the ways she found meaning through them. She shared how they offered a frame for her current experience. She shared ways it helped her offer a sense of God’s presence. Amid all her emotions, these passages provided words to speak the unspeakable.
