Danita Jenae is a Gold Star spouse, is an artist, an encourager, and author. Living through unimaginable heartache, everything she does is laced in the power of prayer, the intimacy of surrender, and the hope of redemption. Through her story, she hopes to illuminate the goodness of God in the face of the worst circumstances and invites others to journey with her through their own versions of grief and loss.
In a recent interview with Danita Jenae, I had the privilege of hearing her story first-hand and how she navigated loss with great courage.
In 2019, Dan and Danita, along with their two children, were stationed in Nebraska at Offutt Air Force Base. One of the great challenges they were up against at the time was Danita’s health. She was fighting for her life.
“I was so weak I couldn’t lift my laundry basket.”
With an existing autoimmune disorder and chronic illness, life leading up to the upcoming PSC season was stressful to say the least. After much prayer and fasting, Danita’s health returned. Her doctor said it truly was “a miracle.” Then their family received orders to Schriever AFB in Colorado Springs.
“This was going to be our season of rest, and we hoped our big dreams would finally start coming true.”
Just a couple weeks after they moved, and before the household goods hit the scene, she and her family embarked on a hike. This hike was a victory, a celebration of her recovery, and a picture of what they hoped their time in Colorado would be like- full of togetherness and quality time in the great outdoors.
Dan, a Lieutenant Colonel and experienced hiker, had already scaled over half of Colorado’s “14ers”- which are mountains over fourteen thousand feet in elevation.
Shortly after their family hike, Dan summited another 14er, but didn’t make it back home. What started as an adventure quickly turned to heartache. Missing for six days, he didn’t make it home alive.
“That was the day our mountains crumbled. Dan was the rock of our family, and his strength always carried us through hardship. As a military family, we would always say, ‘Home is wherever we are together.’ And now, without my husband in the middle of the PCS, we didn’t even have a ‘together’ anymore.”
Being in a new town, in a temporary apartment, without community, connections, or even a church home, Danita went into total shock and disbelief. She felt the isolation acutely.
“Grief is extremely isolating. Your friends and family don’t recognize you anymore, and you certainly don’t recognize yourself either. They say most widows lose 75% of their support community in the first few months. We didn’t even have a network in town to lose. But a couple people were brave enough to enter into our mess. Having them and my prayer team truly saved me.”
Danita is on a mission to change that statistic, by equipping and empowering friends, families, Key Spouses, and other leaders to know how to enter into someone’s loss with emotional intelligence and compassion.
In addition to changing the community around you, grief changes the landscape of your identity.
“You go from co-parent to solo parent, from married to single. Your ID card literally changes too, from dependent to primary. It is an excruciating realization. While I won’t minimize the gut-wrenching pain of those identity changes, one thing that anchored me was this—being a widow is a temporary identity, but being a child of God is an eternal identity. I had to hold on to that.”
We talked a lot about the disorienting nature of grief and loss. Things feel unfamiliar and foreign. Simple tasks become near impossible. Even processing the world around us, everything becomes foggy and hard to interpret.
“The experience of grief is so disorienting. I remember driving through stop-lights and wondering if the light was red or green. I think the fog, shock, and denial are a real grace to us in a season of grief and trauma. They help us keep taking one step at a time and they let the gravity of our loss unfold slower, more gently than if we understood all we lost at once.”
As a military missionary, I know the deep and abiding love Danita has for the Lord. And because she loves and trusts Him so fervently, the tragedy experienced does not get the final say. In turning this hard story, and the pain of experiencing it, over to the Lord, the result is positively stunning.
Danita writes about the refining transformative power that comes with healing after sorrow, saying that “grief is a gift of becoming. Loss breaks us and reshapes us.”
Out of the abundance of grace, and the healing nature of her voice, she faithfully guides others through a fresh understanding of their own grief experience. Ultimately, she created a beautiful book which was recently published and released by Moody Publishers this year called “When Mountains Crumble: Rebuilding Your Life After Losing Someone You Love.”
Grief leaves people with empty arms and fistfuls of questions. Danita’s book offers an interactive healing journey through the troubling questions and big emotions of grief.
“My own journey through grief was terribly isolating, and I couldn’t allow someone else to walk through loss feeling completely alone. Honestly, the isolation motivated the book.”
In my experience in ministry, we talk about being the “second wave” of people who stay by a person’s side for the long haul- long after the flurry of the first few weeks after a funeral. If you want to help a grieving friend, but feel helpless to do so, Danita has written a free guide called How to Help Your Grieving Friend. It’s packed with practical tips including what to say and what not to say. Grab a copy of her book for you and your friend and offer to walk through the thought-provoking questions together.
If you yourself are facing grief, and who in the military community isn’t on some level, then be sure to grab Danita’s free Grief Relief Guide, a quick guide to finding your footing and orientation when loss turns your world upside down. Both guides are available at www.whenmountainscrumble.com.
To learn more about Danita, the 2022 Armed Forces Insurance Schriever Air Force Base Spouse of the year, visit her website https://danitajenae.com/ or follow her on social @danitajenae.