Grieving Brooklyn

She was just sixteen years old.

Mike and I met Brooklyn Faith Rivera in October of 2024. She bounced through our doors with a mile-wide smile, simultaneously wrapping us in a bear hug and around her little finger.

“I’ve been so excited to meet you,” she exclaimed.

We were smitten.

Her eyes sparkled like the rhinestone “B” hanging on a chain around her neck. She exuded joy and love. Her grin lit up the room.

One night, while Mike and I were watching TV, we paused the show and looked at each other, puzzled. What was that sound? It was Brooklyn, laughing a laughter that seemed to start in her toes, gaining strength until it burst out of her lungs. We laughed along with the kids, pausing the television at every outburst.

Another time, she joined us at Wednesday night church. She switched spots with someone so she could sit next to me. When the pastor asked us to bow our heads and pray, she clutched my hand in hers and squeezed.

In the months following, she and I texted frequently. She wanted to study the Bible and wasn’t sure where to start. Sometimes she just wanted to chat. Other times, she asked me to pray. She ended every conversation—whether by text or by phone—with an expression of love.

My goodness, I loved her. I still love her.

She sent her last text to me on Easter Sunday. She had led her best friend to Christ, and they had baptized her that day at Bridgeway Church. Brooklyn couldn’t wait to tell me her good news. We rejoiced together, and I told her that I loved her.

Two days later, my phone buzzed at 1:46 pm.

It was our son, forwarding a snapshot of a social media post from Brooklyn’s father. Brooklyn had passed away overnight.

No. It couldn’t be. Someone was playing a cruel joke. A horrible, awful, not funny joke.

God, please let this be a terrible prank!

I called Brooklyn’s phone. A cold computer-generated voice told me that 9. 4. 0…. could not come to the phone. Please leave a message for 9. 4. 0….

I called her mother.

Brooklyn’s father picked it up on the first ring.

A shaky voice whispered, “Hello?”

By the sound of his voice, I knew it was true.

 And the ground crumbled beneath my feet.

Remembering Brooklyn

The next day, we sat together in the pastor’s office.

“Brooklyn was our miracle baby,” said Vic. “Neither one of us was supposed to be able to have a child. And the doctor warned us if, somehow, Clair got pregnant, she would never carry the baby to term.”

Wiping away a tear, he smiled. “But God had other plans.”

Clair and Vic were determined to grow their family. Someone they knew was pregnant with a boy, and they joyfully agreed to adopt him. Shortly after, a positive pregnancy test contradicted the doctor’s proclamation.

Ryan and Brooklyn were born four months and six minutes apart. Their parents called them the Wonder Twins. They shared toys and friends, loving and fighting as siblings do.

We spent the rest of the time discussing music, programs, and flowers. Because I knew Brooklyn better than the church’s pastors, her parents gave me the inestimable honor of sharing at the funeral.

I have spoken at memorial services before. At fifty years old, I’ve lost both sets of grandparents and buried several friends. I’ve sat at hospice bedsides holding dying hands and comforted crying children. But this is a new level of grief that simply shouldn’t exist.

How do you bring hope to a situation like this? Where is the silver lining? What words can you offer to bring healing? This wasn’t a car accident or illness. This was a beautiful girl who was bullied ruthlessly, who went to bed and, for reasons yet unknown, never woke up.

I processed my pain in my journal. What am I supposed to say, Lord? What am I supposed to do?

A still, small voice said, “Grieve.”

The Gift of Grief

While twenty-first-century Westerners shy away from grief (you get two weeks and a casserole), the biblical authors embraced it. Over two-thirds of the psalms are psalms of lament—grief poems. The prophet Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations as he watched the city of Jerusalem succumb to the Babylonians, thus ending biblical Israel’s existence as a sovereign monarchy.

Jesus, in his most well-known sermon, opened with a set of poetic statements scholars call the beatitudes, which include the words, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt 5:4). Two gospel authors recorded Jesus weeping (Luke 19:41; John 11:35).

Grief, I realized, is a gift.

While other mammals have been observed to show signs of sorrow, only people shed tears. And grief tears have a different chemical makeup than joy tears or onion tears.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology recognizes three categories of tears: basal (lubricating your eyes), reflex (onion), and emotional. All consist of “enzymes, lipids, metabolites and electrolytes,” but grief tears also contain “higher levels of prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, Leu-enkephalin, potassium and manganese.”

In layman’s terms, stress hormones. When you cry, you purge harmful neurochemicals that, over time, tax your body and rewire your brain.

But that’s not all.

Harvard researchers show that crying also produces “oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins.” So after a good, long, snotty, ugly cry, your brain works to comfort you. Crying also bonds us to each other, prompting one another to offer compassion and consolation.

How good is God? And there’s still more.

Theologically speaking, grief brings us closer to God. David wrote, “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and he saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Our gracious God, who describes himself first as “compassionate” (Ex 34:6), rushes upon those who weep.

When we grieve, we agree with the Holy Spirit over the broken condition of the world—a world God created good. When we say things like, “Death is a part of life” or “Death is natural,” we bear false witness to God’s original intent.

God didn’t create us to die; he made us to live in his presence, worshipping his goodness and spreading his glory over the face of the earth. God is the originator of life. It’s the enemy who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). Satan ushered death into the garden. Satan, the father of lies, who twists and perverts every good thing, is the prince of the air who promulgates death.

When we weep for Brooklyn (or any of our lost loved ones), our spirit agrees with the Holy Spirit over the immense worth of her life. She was kind, compassionate, loving—full of laughter and joy. She represented everything good in a broken world. God himself knit her together in Clair’s womb, defying a body that doctors declared would never create or carry life.

Grief gives us something to do with our pain. In fact, what gift can we offer a lost loved one other than our tears? What says, “I love you” more powerfully than a sob? What greater testimony can we give about the profound impact of a life taken too soon?

And the Lord, who gave us tears as a gift, takes them back as they fall to the ground. The psalmist, no stranger to deep sorrow, wrote, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book” (Ps 56:8)?

Yes. Every tear we cry is collected and accounted for. Every sigh, every groan, every time we toss as sleep plays hard-to-get, is seen and noted by our Father.

Oh, Father. Comfort, comfort your people. Speak tenderly to those who wail over Brooklyn’s passing. Hold us and heal us, we pray. Bring justice to her cause.

Looking Ahead

As we sat in the pastor’s office, her mother remembered Brooklyn, beautiful and radiant in her Easter dress with her best friend by her side.

“She was worshipping her little heart out,” Clair said.

As the conversation replayed in my mind, I imagined her with eyes closed and hands raised. This thought occurred to me: She still is.

Jesus told a thief hanging on a cross, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The Apostle Paul told the Corinthian believers that to “be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8).

Today, Brooklyn is with Jesus, and the next time we see her, she will be more alive than she’s ever been. She has cried her last tear, endured her last insult, and felt her last stab of pain. The knee injury that caused her to quit the dance team she loved will be fully and forever healed. She is staring into the face of the object of her heart’s desire, with every longing fulfilled. I imagine her dancing for Jesus as you read these words.

I leave you—and myself—with this.

Grieve.

Grieve the brokenness of a world that buries babies.

Grieve the evil that targets our children through the words of other children.

Grieve the barren womb and the silent sonogram and the tiny casket and the dire diagnosis and the poor prognosis and the shattered dreams of a future that will never be. Grieve the parents who were taken before they could walk their daughter down the aisle and the grandparents who never got to hold their first grandbaby. Grieve for the lost, the lonely, and the broken.

But the Lamenter, Jeremiah, reminds us to grieve with hope.

The prophet sat, broken, amidst a broken city while broken bodies lay in the streets. The people had broken their covenant with God, and God, who had pleaded with his people through the mouths of the prophets, fulfilled his promise. By turning away from him and breaking his law, the people chose death and destruction over life and blessing (Deut 28:1–68). And God let them.

Jeremiah structured the book of Lamentations carefully, as Hebrew poets often did. Each chapter follows the acrostic formula, each verse beginning with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapters one and two have twenty-two verses each. Chapter three contains sixty-six verses. Chapters four and five parallel chapters one and two with twenty-two verses. Nestled in the exact center—the very heart of the lament—we read these words:

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness! I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him (Lam 3:21–25). 

The grief that bereaved parents experience feels all-consuming, like a tidal wave, relentless in its pounding. Just when you think you’ve caught your breath, a smell, a song, a picture reminds you of your loved one, and the waves pull you back under.

Grief threatens to consume us. To pull us down and hold us under and crush us beneath its weight. But those of us who find solace in the Lord are not consumed.

Devastated, yes.

But not consumed.

For his compassions never fail. They meet us each morning, as reliably as the sun.

And because we know where Brooklyn is, we remember this:

Broken hearts are not like cracked flowerpots draining their contents on the pavement around them.

Broken hearts still hold hope. So we grieve. But we grieve with hope.

Grief bears witness that we were meant for a better world, a world without bullies and broken hearts. And someday we will live there for all eternity. But until then, we’ve got work to do.

Brooklyn found comfort in Jesus.

So should we.

Brooklyn brought her best friend to Christ.

We should be seeking to introduce the lost and lonely to our Savior.

Brooklyn filled the world with light, laughter, and love.

We can do the same. We can choose kindness, compassion, and care. We can speak out against those who use words to tear down, and we can, like our Savior, bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted (Ps 147:3).

It’s what Brooklyn would want us to do.