Did you miss Part 1 with the Guthries?

About David & Nancy Guthrie

David & Nancy Guthrie have a twenty-something son, Matt, and have had two children, a daughter, Hope, and a son, Gabriel, who were born with a rare genetic disorder called Zellweger Syndrome and each lived six months.
They host weekend “Respite Retreats” for married couples to spend unhurried time with other couples who understand the devastation of losing a child, to learn from each other, encourage each other, and experience together renewed hope for the future.

Nancy has written a number of books, including Holding On to Hope: A Pathway of Suffering to the Heart of God in 2002, where she offered many of the lessons she learned from this sorrowful experience. Since then, she has continued to write books that reflect her compassion for hurting people and her passion for applying God’s Word to real life.
After more than 20 years with Word Music, David Guthrie launched the very first “church musical publisher just for kids,” Little Big Stuff Music. He works alongside Rob Howard in writing and recording kids’ musical projects that serve the church and proclaim the gospel.

The Painful Experience of Burying Your Child

“Well we had a graveside service first, a burial, and had dear friends gathered around and our pastor there. There’s nothing that feels right about putting your child’s body in the ground. That was probably my lowest experience, to put her body in the ground and walk away. Plus, we’d spent six months caring for her body and now we’re putting the body in the ground. I mean we had a sense because of the difficult few weeks leading up to her death, that it is time and there is a mercy, and now it is over.

As we had the burial service and we walked away from the grave, I remember having this strong sense and then saying to Nancy, “I really thought that our faith and the way we’d been walking through this up until now would make this hurt less; that it would mitigate the pain of this moment, of walking away from the grave.” Maybe it did, but you couldn’t tell by me. It didn’t feel that way; it felt like the full brunt of sorrow at that time. So that threw me a little bit because I thought, “Ok, we’ve been working on this six months of her life, so certainly there’ll be a hard day or two, but it’ll be ok.” Until you experience that and people who are hearing this, know this to be true, you don’t really know to anticipate that.”

The Aftermath For Nancy Guthrie

“It was the day after the funeral that, that really came home to me. It was a Sunday morning and we went to church and all the family begins to leave and the funerals over. I remember saying to David, “I think I understand for the first time in my life why people take drugs.” I’ve never felt a pain that I’ve felt willing to do whatever it takes not to feel it before. That day, my way of dealing with it was going to bed. I just wanted to try to sleep it away and I figured out that I couldn’t do that.

You just have to feel this load of sorrow, that for me mostly came out in tears. I just felt like I had this huge reservoir of tears inside that had to come out in some senses. They’re still coming out; it’s not like they did then, of course. Faith doesn’t eliminate sorrow. I think a lot of times we have the sense that tears somehow reflect a lack of faith and it simply isn’t so. We’re human and when you lose something or someone you love, it hurts.

The Aftermath For David Guthrie

Everybody going through grief, we’re individuals; we bring our personalities; our temperament to it; there are some real commonalities, but we had to learn a little bit how to do this, together and individually.

Where in the past it would have taken a pretty identifiable event to cause tears to flow, they could come at anytime. That was hard because there were a lot of adjustments for me; as a guy we want to make it right; we want to fix things; when Nancy’s sad I want to make her happy. I had to realize that really wasn’t what was needed here and even if it were I wasn’t capable of changing her and she explained to me, “Those tears need to come out. Don’t stop them.”

The Impact Loss of on David and Nancy Guthrie

“There’s no doubt that this kind of sorrow, this kind of loss, and for many people there’s added trauma that may have caused the death. So many factors and no doubt it puts a new stress and strain on a marriage. No marriage is perfect anyway and when this tidal wave hits you, it exposes where the foundation may have been shaky before, so definitely it throws off your equilibrium. One way I like to say it is, if you’ve been married for any amount of time as a couple, you’ve kind of worked out some communication methods and some shortcuts and you kind of fill in the gaps for each other; it kind of all works. You think we’ve got a great marriage.

We communicate really well. What I found happens is this throws off the whole axis of your communication, so it takes a new kind of commitment and the difficult thing is you’re doing it when you’re the weakest, individually. It may sound as you hear those kinds of descriptions, “Wow, how does anybody make it through grief?” However, what we have found is that this kind of experience as a couple really gives you an opportunity to grow closer believe it or not. I think of it like the stories you hear of soldiers who’ve gone through a war together.

They may have not known each other beforehand and they spent a short of time, but it’s so intense, and it’s a shared intensity and they’re lifetime friends. They grow very close or there’s also sports teams, and that same kind of thing can happen. Nancy and I realized we needed to lean on each other through this so it was a blessing. When I felt tapped out, she was a little stronger, and vice versa.”

Why Couples Struggle With Grief

“I think one of the reasons couples struggle under a load of grief, is that we don’t understand that the essence of grief is a deep loneliness. The whole reason we got married is so that we wouldn’t be lonely, right?  So we can tend to think if I’m this lonely, he or she must not be being there for me in the way I need them most and so we can start in the midst of grief saying, “You know he won’t cry with me,” or “He won’t talk to me about it,” and “that’s what I need,” or “She’s crying all the time; doesn’t she know I want to have some fun?”

But mostly heightening the expectations of each other and what I would say is an inappropriate expectation that our spouse by their very presence and their response to our grief should eliminate the deep loneliness of grief. Once we recognize, even if my spouse is perfectly responding to me, whatever that is, responding to me in the way that is perfect for me, I’m still going to feel desperately lonely in the midst of grief. That helps to lessen or make more appropriate our expectations.

Well we realized for one thing, that we were still expecting each other to read each others mind, to know what we needed and David was talking about being pushed into new territory so like never before we realized we just needed to be willing to state, “Here’s what would be helpful. Here’s what I need.”

How David and Nancy Guthrie Communicate

“So for example, it was an issue for us at times when I was crying. Often times it was at the end of the day, I’d get in bed and we’d watch something on TV, or maybe turn the TV off, maybe I’d felt like I’d held in tears all day that needed to come out and I’d start to cry.

David sometimes would kind of ignore that;other times I felt like he would move in to comfort me in a way that I felt the pressure to stop crying. Then I’d realize, “Okay, I’m feeling annoyed by how he’s responding,” but not only have I not communicated to him what would be helpful, I don’t think I’ve ever thought through it clearly, so that’s not fair. I told him at one point, “You know when I’m crying like that, it would help me if you would just reach over and put your hand on me and that lets me know that you recognize I’m sad, but you’re not also trying to get me to stop. You know, Michael, that began to help then, and here sixteen years later it’s still working.”

How Matthew Guthrie Experienced Hope’s Life and Death

“He took her up to his second grade class to show her off shortly after she was born. He was overhearing all the conversations that we were having with friends and a lot of them were challenging. It’s hard to even describe what those days were like because they were charged with a new awareness of our own mortality. We were looking to God asking, “What are you doing and what do you want from us? There was a sense that people were leaning in watching, curious, fascinated, horrified.

We were trying to still give Matt the life of a eight or nine year old and all the things that entails. We were also continually asking God to give us energy and the wisdom to glorify Him in this process. One of the most significant experiences I had with Matt, was in second grade. He goes to a Christian school and everyday at the end of the day they prayed. His whole class was praying that God would heal Hope. I‘ll never forget him coming out to the carpool one day and saying, “Mom, should I expect God to heal Hope or not?”

I knew why he was asking that. I said, “Matt, I don’t know. We know that God can do anything. He spoke the world into being. But I also know that no child has ever lived past infancy with this syndrome. We do know that Hope is in God’s hands, whether she’s here with us or there with Him, we can trust Him with her.” That was part of the struggle of this. People of faith have a very limited prayer vocabulary in regard to suffering; we really only know how to pray for God to take the suffering away.”

A New Perspective on God From Grief

“We see over and over again the good purposes that God presents in the Scriptures in regard to suffering. I mean, in fact I love it because as we go through the Scriptures, so many times it will talk about an experience of suffering and it will actually use the words, “This happened so that.” So think of Paul when he says, “To keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in the flesh.” So he saw a purpose.

What living by faith is saying is, “I may not understand His purposes, but I welcome you to accomplish them because I believe they’re good.” That Philip Yancey book says, “I think it’s more helpful many times for us to ask “to what end?” So we do look to God and say, “We want to understand; we want to be aware; we want to be able to respond to your purposes, sometimes that causes people to think there must be one hidden purpose out there for which God has allowed or caused suffering in my life.

It’s almost like we go on a treasure hunt, a scavenger hunt to find what is that one thing and I believe that God has a multitude of purposes in all that He’s doing, so what gives us peace ultimately can’t be our certainty that we’ve figured out exactly what God’s specific purpose was.

Our peace comes from the belief and the trust that God is God and He is sovereign over all, and that He is love. We thought our faith would prepare us for loss, but it’s really important to follow that and say, “What it does do, is that it confirms our hope.” Faith is something that we need when we don’t have sight.”

The Decision About Having More Children For David and Nancy Guthrie

“Once we had Hope and we knew she had Zellweger’s Syndrome because evidently David and I are carriers of the recessive gene trait for that syndrome; we also knew that meant whenever we have a child, that child will have a twenty-five percent chance of having the fatal syndrome. So we had our healthy son, Matt and we had Hope, who had hit these twenty-five percent odds of having the fatal syndrome.

It wasn’t a simple decision. Some people might immediately say, “Oh gosh, I would never want to take that chance.” But I realize when they hear our story, and perhaps imagine the pain of it, it’s harder to imagine the joy of it and that her life did bring us a lot of joy. So we didn’t immediately say, “No, it would be the worst thing in the world to have another child who lived with us a short time, like Hope did.” Also our lives aren’t just us and there was our son, Matt, who lived in a house for six months waiting for a sibling to die and then a lot longer in a house with a really sad mom, which could not have been fun.

There was also our parents to think about, and as hard as it is to lose a child, I think it’s doubly difficult to watch your child lose a child. We had nothing in our bag to pull out to fix it and so we decided to take surgical steps to prevent another pregnancy, so you could imagine our surprise to put it mildly, to learn about a year and a half after Hope died that I was pregnant. We weren’t just surprised; we were afraid.”

Listen to Part 3 with the Guthries.