Losing Mom and Dad

by Charlie Woods

The glass and steel canyons of the Dallas skyline stood against the azure fall sky. My wife, Kim, and I were just returning from church to our small seminary apartment. which stood in the shadows of the beautiful downtown architecture. As an artist, downtown Dallas seemed to me like some fantastic mountainous sculpture. I loved to watch the buildings change shape, form and texture with changes in proximity, season and daylight. It was small consolation for the lose of my beloved ocean back home in Florida.

Church had been, it seemed, as beautiful as this day was becoming. Kim and I had started a new college ministry and were excited about the future. I would begin my final semester of seminary in about one week.

As we climbed the back stairs to our apartment I suddenly heard someone cry out to me, "Mr. Woods?" Looking out over the fence below I could see a uniformed police officer. He motioned toward the street, "Could you meet us out front please."

My mind began to race with uneasy anguish as I approached the squad car. I could hear the noisy squelch of the radio inside. The officer spoke to me in a very calm but forceful voice, "Mr. Woods we have a message for you to call the Leon County Sheriff's Department in Tallahassee, Florida." Quickly heading back upstairs, my bewilderment rapidly turning to panic and anxiety. I could only think of my mother.

Mother was one of the most wonderful Christians I knew. She lived her faith in such a powerful but simple way that it effected everyone she knew. As a child she had given me a cherished love for God's word by reading to us every night. I am convinced that I owe my artistic and biblical abilities at least in some part to mother's efforts. I still remember the vividness of those stories and the colorful illustrations that opened up glorious worlds of imagination. She was also diligent in taking us to church. I had at one point received a Baptist pin for attending six years without missing a Sunday. At eight I trusted Christ and by the age of ten I had decided I wanted to be a missionary. The fact that I was in seminary now, was to me the testimony of God's grace carried out on the wings of mother's prayers.

Her prayers about my father however, seemed to go unanswered. Dad was a lifelong alcoholic. While mother took pains to raise and nurture us as Christians, she suffered, as we all did, the violent abusive behavior of my father. At the age of fourteen I was taken from my parents custody along with my younger brother by state child protective agencies. But Mother stayed on. She saw it as her Christian duty to stay by dad's side. Married at age fifteen and raising three children at age eighteen, she believed that God's love could conquer any sin. It would be easy to criticize her hopeful blindness.

Mom and Dad, St. Augustine, Florida 1955

As I opened our apartment door upstairs Kim could see the panic on my face. I rushed to the phone with little explanation. I had talked to my mother just the night before. Years of turmoil punctuated by periods of uneasy rest with father once again come to a violent halt when my father had attacked mother and thrown her from the house. When she returned home with two Sheriff's deputies for her belongings, dad assaulted them. After being arrested, dad was placed in an alcoholic rehabilitation program. Mother tried to sort out the pieces of her life. Dad's verbal threats continued in spite of a court ordered injunction. That night as I spoke with mom on the phone about her fears, we prayed together. She and I both felt the assurance that Christ was able to give us peace in the midst of this uncertainty and I urged her not to give up hope for dad.

The detective finally came on the line. His voice calm and matter of fact he asked, "Mr. Woods, do you have any medical problems?"

"No sir," I said as my heart began to race and my hands trembled. After a short pause the detective explained, "Mr. Woods, you're mother and father are both dead."

All of life and reality as I had known it seem to move away. I mouthed the words in numbness. Kim began to scream and cry uncontrollably. Dad had broken into the house sometime during the night and with an illegally acquired handgun, had murdered my mother and then shot himself.

This day would begin a long dark journey for me. At times I would despair of life. Grief is a fire that can ravage our souls. It can melt us into a formless mass. Like gold poured from the melting pot we are for ever reshaped into either a bitter anvil forged in anger or a newborn heart softened with forgiveness.

That week as I stood over my parents graves and preached, hundreds would share with me how deeply my mother had touched their lives. Her grave stone bears her favorite words from Paul's epistle to the Phillipians, "Now as always Christ will be exalted in my body whether by life or by death. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." While I understood the truth of God's redemption and love, I felt abandoned. Within the year I would spiral into a deep depression and have to be hospitalized.

The following year Kim and I moved to Holland where I taught at an international school. It was a chance for us to reform our shattered lives and make some new memories. In August while staying at L'Abri, I sat on a mountainside in the Swiss alps painting a watercolor picture. A young man sat nearby watching. As we talked I learned that his young wife of twenty four had died six months earlier of cancer. This day, he told me, was their anniversary. In that moment I experienced a strange sense of overflowing. My senseless grief had been transformed into healing knowledge. I knew precisely what to say.

I turned to Jim and said,"Tell me about Melissa, what was she like?" Jim's lon neglected anguish broke into astonishment as he bathed in the comfort of those words. No one, he said, had asked him that. He began to weep while pulling a small tattered photo from his wallet. He poured out his heart about his beloved.

I did not say I knew what he felt. I did not tell him about my pain. I did not give him answers. I listened. I wept.

As I shared in Jim's grieve I began to realize the beauty of the fellowship of Christ's suffering. God took something as hideous and brutal as the cruxifiction and transformed it into the most beautiful and powerful event in history. He could take my darkest pain and turn it into joyous resurrection. I had through my painful loss, been given a greater gift of understanding and compassion. I realized that without my loss, I would not have been able to understand what Jim was going through.

I believe that the paradox of Christian joy is that it involves suffering. The more intimate we become with God, the greater our awareness of our humanity and fallenness. The greater our pain, the greater our joy can become. This is why the Apostle Peter says we are to count it for joy when we experience various trials.

Like the nail scars on our Savior’s hands, modern life is full of tragic wounds. The love of Christ is able to transform these wounds into symbols of courage and redemption.

I will always miss my mother and father. I will always carry the scars of their painful loss. But for me heaven was never so real as it became when someone that I loved moved there.

In the years that have followed the lose of my mother and father, I have struggled with a way to turn the loss into something greater than the compassion that comes with the pain of such a loss.

A few years ago God provided just such an opportunity. In 1998 I had seen an article on the internet regarding researcher Dr. Donna Cohen and the work that she had been do in the area of homicide-suicide in Florida. I immediately contacted Dr. Cohen and was invited to appear with her on a local television show to discuss the issues involved with homicide-suicide. It was only weeks before the tenth anniversary of mom and dad’s deaths. In the years since Dr. Cohen has become a valued friend and I have been priviledged to become more involved in the valuable work that she is doing in this area.

Utilizing my skills as an artist and multimedia designer I have helped to develop a new website which will be home to Dr. Cohen’s organization the ‘Violence Injury Prevention’ progam VIP. I am excited by the possibilties of using modern technologies to provide families and law-enforcement with tools and resources that may help to understand and prevent homicide-suicide as well as giving family survivors places to go for help and assistance.

God has not only turned my wounds into compassion but he has brought life and awesome potential for a greater good by giving me a heart for this work and the friendship of people like Dr. Cohen who are committed to understanding homicide-suicide and bringing the results of that work into place that can help those who are in its shadow.

Charlie & Kim Woods