Death, Grief, and Frodo's Incurable Wound
How the closing pages of Return of the King encouraged me on the second anniversary of my brother's death
Hello, friends. Thank you for reading. While I was working on this article, I learned that
, a pretty well known SubStacker, sadly also lost his brother in the same year that I lost mine. He wrote an article along the same lines that I’m doing here - reading Frodo’s incurable wound through the lens of grief. It’s an excellent piece. What I’ve written here is more theologically focused; his is more of a literary criticism piece. But because of the similarity in what I’m writing on, I felt it appropriate to give a nod to his work.Also, please forgive the blunt introduction. I spent the past two weeks trying to craft an eloquent beginning and have accepted that the nature of this essay simply will not allow me to create one. As always, your comments and thoughts are welcomed.
On March 30, 2023, my younger brother Jake - my only sibling - died in a car accident a few miles outside of my home town. That day, death ceased to be a concept for me. It became instead a concrete reality I lived in. As you can expect, March is a difficult month for me. This is only the second year I’m experiencing the slow journey of inevitably moving towards the date of the 30th. I don’t know what future years will feel like. I expect the grief will lessen as time goes on. Right now, I only have last year to compare it to, and March of last year ended up being unimaginably difficult. But there is no avoiding grief. If you attempt to hide from it, you’ll only postpone an inevitable meeting. Grief will eventually corner you and you will have to face it.
This is why I’m grateful to be a Christian. It means I get to learn, as Spurgeon said, to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages. I do not know how unbelievers with lost loved ones face the waves of grief apart from Christ.
Yet as painful as this month is, the Lord providentially worked a timely dose of encouragement into my life through the words of one J.R.R. Tolkien (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). Some of you are aware I began reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time at the end of last year. I finished The Fellowship of the Ring in December, The Two Towers in February, and within the past couple of weeks I came to the closing pages of The Return of the King.
Those final pages encouraged me, for in Frodo I found a man (or a hobbit, rather) facing the realization that some wounds, in the words of Gandalf, “cannot be wholly cured.”1
There is a scene in the final chapter of The Return of the King in which Sam sees Frodo caught in a moment of pain:
One evening Sam came into the study and found his master looking very strange. He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.
'What's the matter, Mr. Frodo?' said Sam.
'I am wounded,' he answered, 'wounded; it will never really heal.' But then he got up, and the turn seemed to pass, and he was quite himself the next day. It was not until afterwards that Sam recalled that the date was October the sixth. Two years before on that day it was dark in the dell under Weathertop.2
On Weathertop those two years prior, a Nazgul - a servant of Sauron and something of a symbol for death itself - stabbed Frodo with a Morgul blade; a blade so sinister and so poisonous it held the power to drag its victims down into Shadow, suffocating the wounded’s will until they eventually became like a Ringwraith themselves and completely subservient to Sauron. Fortunately, that was not Frodo’s fate. The healing powers of Elrond and the Elves rescued him within the sanctuary of Rivendell and gave Frodo the grace he needed to continue on his fated role as the Ringbearer.
Even so…that sting from the servant of Sauron left a wound. A wound that, Frodo knew, would “never really heal.”
Grief is a Morgul Wound
In many ways, this is what it is like to lose a loved one to the sting of death. It’s a pain you carry with you for the rest of your life. With this wound come deep and difficult questions: why would God allow this to happen? If God is sovereign, couldn’t he have orchestrated a different story for my loved one? Can I trust God with the rest of my future? Questions that might have once felt theoretical become real and now impress a kind of suffocating weight upon your shoulders. The sting of death means something it didn’t before. The sudden loss of a loved one is a Morgul wound.
As you carry this weight, there is a very real temptation to turn inward - to close yourself off from the world and to sink into a pit of despair. Grief can twist the way you see the world and taint the way you see other people. At its worst, it can convince you that your life no longer matters and there is no point to continuing on.
If you are a Christian battling grief, there are three realities I want you to cling to. And I write these as much to myself as to you.
Grief Does Not Diminish Your Identity
If you are regularly facing waves of grief, you might be facing a lost sense of your identity. I struggled with this immensely in my first year and what I needed to be reminded of over and over were the promises of the gospel. If you are in the throes of grief, the truth is…
Despite what you feel, you are still a fully adopted and cherished son or daughter of God (Romans 8:14–17).
Despite what you feel, you still belong to a King who promised he will not abandon you even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). That includes facing the grief you’re experiencing now and the grief that is still ahead of you.
Despite what you feel, your Savior still loved you so much he gave himself up for you (Galatians 2:20). His love still burns are brightly for you now as it did before you lost your loved one. His affection for you has not changed and he is still just as for you as he ever was (Romans 8:31).
Despite what you feel, you still belong to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son - not to the kingdom of the enemy (Colossians 1:13). Despair is the domain of Satan. Don’t let your feet tread alongside the enemy’s gates. That is not where you live.
Despite what you feel, you still belong to God’s people (1 Peter 2:9–10) and the Lord intends for them to be a means of grace in your life. They do not need to understand your grief in order to speak the truths of God’s word to you. Let them encourage you and love you as best they can.
Grief Cannot Steal Your Purpose
I’m grateful that Tolkien does not have Frodo sustain his awful wound at the end of the story. He faces it early. His journey has barely begun and already he suffers one of the greatest blows the enemy could possibly have dealt him. And yet it is after sustaining that wound that Frodo recognizes and embraces his full purpose: to carry the Ring from Rivendell all the way to the fires of Mount Doom.
Satan can use grief to steal our sense of purpose. After my brother died, I struggled with all of the unresolved plot threads of our life together - hopes and dreams for our brotherhood that would now never come to fruition. The finality of death is a horrible pill to swallow. The hour glass is empty. The time is up. And the weight of this finality can feel so significant that we can wrongly allow it to extend to every dimension of our lives, leaving us paralyzed and asking, “What’s the point? Nothing matters anymore.”
If that’s how you feel - that your life has no meaning or purpose - I want you to know: that is a lie from the enemy. It’s not true.
When you became a Christian, God graciously bestowed upon you the most glorious purpose any man or woman could ever be gifted: to glorify the Triune God. We can lose sight of this so easily and forget that, though our loved one’s time on this earth is done, our time is not. As long as the Lord continues to give you breath, your life has a purpose. You are here to glorify God. To make much of God. To enjoy and delight in him, even in the midst of great suffering. Indeed, the Lord in his wisdom has given us a unique opportunity to demonstrate to a watching world that our loved one was not our greatest treasure - Christ is.
This, of course, does not mean we diminish the very real pain of loss or seek to stiff-arm grief. Don’t hear me saying that all grief is bad or should be suppressed. Not at all. In his book Remember Death, Matthew McCullough helpfully frames what godly grief looks like:
Grief over death and all its many faces is the only honest, truthful response to a world that was not made to be this way. Grief tells the truth about the goodness of what God has given us. It's how we agree with Jesus about the offensiveness of death's challenge to everything that is good and right and beautiful. Grief is not unbelief in what God will do. It isn't ingratitude for what God has done. Grief is simply honest, even Christlike.3
Grief is good. The purpose God gave you is not to pretend that because you have Christ your loved one’s death does not matter. He’s called you to mourn and to grieve as one who is filled with hope (1 Thess. 4:13).
Which leads to my final point…
Grief Cannot Steal Your Future
In the final chapter of The Return of the King, Frodo’s time on Middle-earth comes to an end. Bidding farewell to his companions, he joins the Elves and sails to the Gray Havens:
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, words from that final sentence should be familiar. The writers, beautifully so, chose to place those words into the mouth of Gandalf, who comforts Pippin as they face the end together:
In the Gray Havens, Frodo finally finds healing for his incurable wound. As Christians carrying the burden of grief, we look ahead to the promise of the New Heavens and the New Earth - which is where Jesus himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes. The passage I’m referring to is too wonderful not to quote:
'And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” - Revelation 21:3–4 (ESV)
As Frodo came to the realization that true healing would not be found back in the Shire, but rather on the shores of the Gray Havens, so my brother’s death is a wound that will only find its full healing in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
But let’s be clear. As much as I am hoping that I will one day see my brother again, my tears will not be wiped away by seeing him again - as wonderful as that would be. My heart will finally find healing because Jesus himself will be there. The New Heavens and the New Earth are where the “dwelling place of God is with man.” And it is God’s presence, and his presence alone, that can make the darkest wrongs right. The moment we are with Jesus is the moment when the sting of death will be finally removed, the pain of grief will end, and our tears will be washed away.
If your loved one was a believer, that doesn’t mean you should not look forward to seeing them. You should, and you should not feel bad for those moments where you are fully caught up in anticipating that sweet reunion. But after imagining that moment, remember that as good as it will be to see your parent, child, or sibling again, it will not match the heights of meeting your Savior face to face.
Take Heart
One last thought. There is a chance that you are reading this essay in the midst of heavy grief - a grief where embracing these realities feels impossible. Perhaps you are wrestling with severe depression or bitterness or anger and do not know how you will get out of it. You know you should trust the Lord; you know you should be more hopeful; yet your heart feels like an immovable stone. You feel trapped in the darkness and don’t even know how to begin searching for the light.
If that’s where you are, take heart. This is where the good news of the gospel reaches us. For there is no state of your heart that is too dark, too despairing, or too bitter which the grace of your Savior cannot cover. Even in the moments when your heart rages against the Lord, his love for you does not fade. It remains steady - a warm fire in the night that cannot be put out. You are loved in this moment.
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Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company), 1994, pg. 967.
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, pg. 1002. Italics added.
Matthew McCullough, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), 2018: pg. 175.
Beautiful, Zak. I'm sorry for your loss, brother.
Also, McCullough's "Remember Death" was one of my favorite reads from last year.
Also also--how did you wait this long before reading LoTR??
Zak, I lost one of my three daughters on January 31 to blood cancer discovered during her pregnancy. My youngest grandchild will be two in May. I know and share your grief. I cam empathize with your grief, and my faith is strong because of Christ. Let us pray for each other. My son-in-law is learning to be a single dad. He has a wonderful church that has surrounded them with love and practical help. Please know I am here to pray or talk if you ever need it. Grace and Peace,
Richard