Category: Blog

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3)

I was worn out from teaching all day and trying to take care of all of Ron’s needs, so in January of 2019 I began the lengthy process of enrolling Ron in the County Agency for Seniors and Aging (COSA). Eventually, Ron qualified for 77 hours a week of nursing care and we moved him and a hospital bed into the dining room since he could no longer walk up the stairs. While the aides were not always reliable, their presence did allow me some breaks away from spousal caregiving. One Friday  night in July, I kissed Ron good-bye, told him I loved him, and drove to Rehoboth Beach with my daughter Bonnie to visit my 91 year old father.

We walked the boardwalk, listening to the roar of the ocean, enjoying this too-rare respite, when I made a confession to my daughter.

“I don’t know how long I can go on doing this for your father,” I told her. “I’m exhausted. This could go on for another twenty years. I don’t know if I can do it.”

Always the voice of compassion, Bonnie put her arms around me and said, “God knows how tired you are. You will do it as long as you have to do it because you have always counted on God for your strength.”

We left Rehoboth around 7PM and arrived at my house about 9:15. While she usually said good-bye to me at the car, this time Bonnie came in to say good-night to her father. 

And we found that God had called Ron home to heaven. 

Dennis, Bonnie, Allen, and I were unprepared for Ron’s sudden death, but we knew that his suffering and pain was at an end. My heart had a giant hole in it that God needed to fill.

The years of serving in the mission field of hospitals had come to an end. God opened up a brand new chapter in my life, and set me on another journey I had never expected to take. My youngest son Allen, an adult on the autism spectrum, could not grasp the finality of his father’s death. The week after Ron died, Allen informed me that the trees  in the park were whispering Ron’s name and saying that Ron was still alive. 

Allen was convinced we needed to find his father.

There is very little research about how adults with autism react to death. Lacking information and aware that Allen needed to prove to himself that his father was now in Heaven, we began a search for Ron that led us to parks, and beaches, and rivers, and railroad stations. One night we even set up a telescope in the front yard so Allen could try and find the location of Heaven. 

This journey took eight months and while Allen looked for places where his father might be, I began to remember Ron as a young man, long before he became so ill. Eventually, Allen came to understand that while his father was now in Heaven, both God, his heavenly Father, and Ron, his earthly dad, still loved him. And I was able to say a proper good-bye not just to the sick man Ron had become, but to the funny, loving, and wonderful man he had been. I chronicled our grief journey in my blog, and recently completed a book called Finding Father: A Journey of Faith on the Autism Spectrum. My hope is that any who read this book will know that there are many ways to grieve. God accepts them all. 

I am on a new journey now in my walk as a widow and as the mother of an adult on the autism spectrum. Part of that journey led Allen and I to the Church of the Atonement in Claymont, Delaware, and to share our story of grief and healing with others. Along with writing the weekly blog for Atonement and sharing our lives on my blog on Substack.com, I long to help others tell their own God stories. 

The journey I shared with Allen was unique, but God hears the echoes of our hearts.

All of them.

“Write all the words that I have spoken to you in a book” Jeremiah 30:2

I met Ron when I was 20 and continued to endure the painful cornea treatments. We married a year later, postponing my return to education yet again.  By our 19th year of marriage, I’d borne three children, had two cornea transplants, and earned my BA in education. The last feat was accomplished only because my husband went to my college classes for the first two weeks and recorded the lectures since I was recovering from my second transplant. For better or worse, right?

 I was happily teaching at a small Christian school and I thought I had found my mission field. I’d even started working on a graduate degree. But my usually cheerful husband, Ron, began to have problems with depression and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That began a round of mental hospitals–very foreign places to be–and  led to a long stay in Friends Hospital in Philadelphia the summer of 1999. We’d been studying the Prayer of Jabez in Sunday School, so I counted on God to enlarge my territory (I Chronicles 4:10). I was led to a Quaker school in West Chester with the offer of a salary that would support my family.

It had been a long road, but Ron was recovering from his battle with depression when on his way home from work on March 1, 2000, his car was broadsided by a truck driver running a red light. The damage to Ron was immense: his chest was crushed, his lung was punctured, his liver was damaged, his spleen was ruptured, and his left arm was almost severed. He also suffered a traumatic brain injury.

 Ron was in the hospital at Crozer-Chester Medical Center  for 10 months and there were many times during those ten months that I wondered if I would have the strength to go on. There is a long corridor at Crozer between the parking pavilion and the hospital. Every afternoon after school, I would lean against the wall and feel as if I could just melt into a puddle. I would pray for the strength to just make it to my husband’s room. I would recite Isaiah 41:10 and ask God to uphold me. I’d  feel a surge of energy that kept me moving ahead. The hospital became my new mission field. Ron’s room was always decorated with cards from my students and as much cheer as the kids and I would provide, even a small Christmas tree. Again and again, plans for Ron to come home were thwarted by another emergency surgery or a mysterious infection.

I feared he might never come home.

But he did. We were even able to celebrate our 25th anniversary by renewing our vows in a beautiful service. Ron tried to return to work, but his energy was depleted and physical problems still existed. He developed chronic regional pain syndrome, which spiraled him back into depression. Over the next 20 years, Ron was hospitalized 46 times for both physical and mental problems and had 36 major surgeries as we tried to repair the damage done by a careless driver. 

No matter what hospital Ron was  in, we found a way to witness to others. My daughter and I would bring our knitting projects to wait out the many surgeries, and always someone would come over to talk to us and we could share our belief in Jesus. During one long stay at Eagleville, a doctor asked me this question: How have you continued to stay with your husband through all of this? And I told him, “I made a vow to both Ron and God. I do not take it lightly.” The doctor told me, “You must serve a big God.” 

Yes. I do. And He is good. All the time.

Even when the worst happens.

 “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7, NIV)

I was raised in a Christian family, although we did not always attend the same church. My mother was Catholic and my brother and I went to mass with her on Sundays and attended catechism classes on Wednesdays. My paternal grandmother was Methodist, so when we visited her on weekends,  she took us to Sunday School. My father hardly ever attended church unless there was a wedding or when my brother and I made our First Communion.  I always felt there should be something more than the prayers I learned and recited from my little white missile.  Through most of my early school years, I wanted more than the same rote prayers. I needed something to believe in.

In high school, I found some friends who were Baptist  and I started attending Sunday evening services with them. The Baptist church was much different than the Catholic Church! I could just talk to God without an intercessor or a specific prayer.  At an after-school Bible study, I accepted Jesus as my personal savior and desired to follow Him. My favorite verse at the time was I Corinthians 12:22, “ For as in Adam all died, so will all in Christ be made alive.” Christ had made me alive!

Like many of my high school friends, I thought God might call me to the mission field. I went on my first mission trip when I was fourteen, ministering to children on the beaches of New England with the Children’s Sand and Surf Mission. I liked teaching and I was good at it. I could become a missionary teacher! The mission field God ultimately called me to was not in another country, but was just as foreign.

After high school, I went to Millersville State Teachers College, preparing for where God would send me.  I found myself walking into walls, tripping over sidewalks, and dealing with constant headaches. At Christmas break, I came home and drove my dad’s car into a telephone pole I just did not see. My concerned  parents took me to Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia where we were told I had a rare and painful genetic disorder called keratoconus that was slowly destroying the corneas–the clear coverings–of my eyes. The corneas of the eyes should be curved, but mine were forming points and flaking away.  Without proper treatment and eventual surgery, I could lose my vision. 

I was nineteen then and books had always been important to me;  the threat that I might become blind meant I would lose the ability to read and never be able to teach. I needed to leave Millersville and return home so I could be at Wills Eye Hospital every week while a series of hard contact lenses were inserted into my eyes to hold my corneas together. 

The hard contacts were over-sized and painful to wear. They severely limited my vision, but they did seem to be helping my corneas to conform to a cylindrical shape. After a year, I was able to go back to college part-time at West Chester Unversity. My vision remained distorted, but I told myself that spiritual sight was more important than physical vision. I took heart from the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “Seeing is not always believing.” 

I still desperately wanted God to use me as a teacher , even if I needed to use a magnifying glass to read my books, even if I needed to learn Braille, even if it took longer for me to attain my degree.

I had no idea just how long that would be.

By Linda Waltersdorf Cobourn, EdD

“To them I will give a new name within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters, I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.”  Isiah 56:5

I am wrung out with emotion. Today, eighteen months after my husband’s death, I have moved our queen-size bed back into the spot beneath the double windows where it had been until the day he died. On that awful night, I’d shoved his side of the bed against the wall, piling pillows around it to fill the empty space. I slept on my side, facing away from the void. 

I am stronger now, I think. Ready to move the bed back. I have found a new life for myself and my autistic son; I have written sixteen chapters of a book I hope will impact the way people view autism and grief; I have dared to envision a life without Ron.

But after I move the bed back and rearrange the pillows, I collapse onto the bed and cry. I have moved into a life without my husband. The knowledge holds both joy and sorrow. When my tears are spent, I get up and look at the room we have shared for 44 years. It is my room now.

Maybe I’ll paint it.

Evening comes. Allen and I eat and play a board game, a new routine in our life of two. We watch an Avengers movie while I knit. We talk easily of Ron, how he cheated at Monopoly and loved Iron Man, how his smile was slightly crooked and he yelled at the television set.  Allen’s acceptance of Ron’s death took time and patience. Ron is not forgotten. I think of the Egyptian proverb: You are not dead as long as someone remembers your name.

We remember.

I have said goodnight to my son; he gives me the rare hug he saves for bedtime and follows me into my room where he plops down on Ron’s side of the bed.

“You moved it back.”

“It was time,” I say and he nods. He grabs a pillow from Ron’s side and holds it to his face.

“It still smells a little like Dad.”

“A little,” I agree. I have washed the pillow and enveloped it in a new case, but sometimes I think I still detect Ron’s lingering scent.

“Can I sleep with it tonight?”

I shrug. “I guess. Something wrong with your pillow?”

“No,” he says. “I just sort of want to be close to Poppa tonight. I thought it would be nice to sleep with his pillow.”

“Alright.”

Happily, he gathers the pillow in his arm and squeezes it, then rises from the bed and walks towards the door.

“Allen,” I say, “you’ve never called Dad ‘Poppa’ before. Why now?

He turns back to me, this man child who only knew an ill father. “Well, Mom,” he says, “Dad has a new life now. He’s not old and sick anymore because God gave him a new body and took him to Heaven.” He grins. “And I thought Dad’s new life deserved a new name.”

An everlasting name.

“When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, “Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.” (Luke 14:15 NIV)

I nudge my son and whisper, “What do you think?” He looks around at the wooden pews, the stained glass windows, and the wooden cross up at the altar. 

“I like it,” he says. “It’s calm here. I can think.”

I give a sigh of relief. God had led me to a church where my needs as a recent widow and my son’s needs as an adult on the autism spectrum could be met. Here there are no flashing screens with neon letters, no loud bands on the stage, none of the sensory explosions that trigger Allen’s meltdowns.

Here we can worship.

It is a sorrow to me to realize that in the Jewish customs of the Bible days, Allen would have been excluded from the Temple. The poor, the sick, the maimed, the disabled–including those with neurodiversity–would not be welcome. In “Disabilities in the Bible ”, (Bible Odyssey, 2022), Henning explains the standard of “bodily normativity” and its relationship to religion. The blind and the lame could not enter the Temple (Samuel 5:8) and a woman without children was considered “barren” and likewise excluded (Deuteronomy 23:1). Even King David’s desire to honor the family of King Saul could not under the law give a royal title to Mephibosheth, who was crippled in his feet (2 Samuel 9:3).

As an adult on the autism spectrum, Allen does not easily connect with things he cannot see or feel. While he and his siblings were raised to go to church and Sunday School, Allen attended more out of parental expectation than belief. According to a 2018 study done at Boston University, individuals on the spectrum were 20% less likely to identify with a church or religion. The reasons cited are not just a lack of intellectual understanding of the concept of God, but the social demands of church. Often, religious environments do not accommodate the sensory and learning needs of children and adults with diverse needs. Allen has, in fact, been known to walk out of a service if the sensory overload becomes too much.

In his book, Disability and the Church, Pastor Lamar Hardwick, an adult on the autism spectrum, speaks about the minority community of the disabled, a group anyone can join if they are differently-abled in any way. It is the way the church should seek to greet everyone, says Hardwick, being observant and considerate to those with diverse needs. Some people, Hardwick states, do not need fanfare to welcome them to the church; they just need quiet acceptance.

That’s exactly what my son found on his first visit to the Church of the Atonement in Claymont. Those who offered to shake his hand did not look askance when he simply said “Hello” or nodded, disliking physical touch. No one commented that his hair was uncombed or that he was wearing his favorite sweatpants. No one ever has. And in that quiet acceptance, Allen has been able to grow both socially and spiritually. He serves as a greeter at services, does clean-up on the hospitality committee, and has joined the Young Adult Group. He’s even started returning handshakes.

We’ve been at Atonement a little more than a year now. Allen and I have both found a home here. He has now included Pastor Amy as one of the few people he will hug. One day, I asked him why she had joined the select group.

He thought a moment, cocked his head to one side, and said, “Well, Pastor Amy’s sort of like you. She understands me.”

Isn’t that what we all need?