I don’t know about you, but I think of every day as a blank canvas and it’s my responsibility to paint something useful or beautiful or helpful on it.
I’m a list maker so each night before I drift off, I usually jot down 3 or 300 things I would like to do the next day.
I get up, get started and then (more often than I’d like to confess!) hit a wall.
Read the rest here: Have A Day. It Doesn’t Have to Be a Good One.
I ask myself this question often: Do I want to keep writing in this space?
Sometimes the answer is a resounding, “no!”.
Because while I love to write, some days it’s hard to put together words in a way others can understand. Sometimes I’m tired, or rushed or just tired of thinking about how grief and loss impact my life.
And then I ask the follow up: Do I still have anything to say?
That’s the one that keeps me here.
Because as soon as I think the answer is “no” to that question, a conversation or a comment thread or a personal experience brings up something that I feel I need or want to write about.
So I sit down and begin again.
I made a commitment in the beginning to be as honest as possible and I’ve done that the best I know how while protecting identities of those who are part of my story but who have their own stories to tell (should they choose).
I also promised to be transparent about my thoughts on God, on faith, on life everlasting. I feel like I’ve done that. In fact, I’m pretty sure some of my rambling has shocked friends and family from time to time. But I’m not afraid of shocking God. He knows my frame, knows my heart and cannot be made small by my questions or doubts.
I try to do research when appropriate to bring together resources and ideas for bereaved parents in one place.
One of the most frustrating things to me in the early months of missing Dominic was how hard it was to find good resources. The Internet is not your friend if you are looking for local and accessible help for practical problems. It was over a year and a half before I found a closed group of like-minded bereaved parents. But once I did, oh, what a difference that made in my journey!
So if you are interested in finding a safe, closed group, ask me. I know of several.
And then there’s the sweet comments that (usually) mamas send my way-either through Facebook or here. When someone writes that looking for the blog post each morning helps them get out of bed-well, that’s both encouragement and a serious responsibility. I don’t want to not show up and disappoint a heart. Even when all I have to offer is only my words.
So for now, at least, I plan to stay.
When my life circumstances make it impossible to carry on or I run out of things to say (which my mother will swear won’t happen!) then I’ll quit.
I send each post into cyberspace with a prayer-even for my readers who don’t believe in prayer:
“Father God, help each heart hold onto hope. Send a ray of sunshine into every cloudy day. Bring someone along who will listen, who will care and who will offer a hand to the one who is too weary and broken to take another step. Help them believe that they are seen, they are loved and that they matter. Overwhelm them with Your love, grace and mercy.”
You DO matter.
I DO care.
If you need to talk, message me.
If you need a safe space, I’ll direct you to it.
I’m not going anywhere.
Attention spans are shorter than ever.
It’s easy to understand why. We live in a world full of sound bytes, memes, tweets and T-shirt slogans.
But life can’t be reduced to such little snippets, even if we wish it could.
Not every biography has the perfect “beginning, middle, end” arch that makes for a good and satisfying story.
Some of us can’t tie up our experiences in tidy boxes, with colorful bows and a lovely tag line that inspires thousands.
We are living unfinished, messy, hard stories that keep shifting, changing and require us to face mountain after mountain and valley after valley.
And we stumble.
A lot.
Read the rest here: Fix It Or Forget It: Why Unfinished Stories Make Others Uncomfortable
There are so many life circumstances that plunge a heart into darkness.
Child loss is certainly one of them, although not the only one.
And when you’re in the dark, stumbling around, trying to avoid the sharp corners and looking, looking, looking for a tiny sliver of light to guide you out, it is terrifying.
If you don’t have a pocket full of matches or a flashlight or a lantern, you are at the mercy of whoever cares enough to come back for you.
I am so thankful for the friends and family who never tire of my fearful cries when I find myself in dark places.
Read the rest here: Torches In The Dark
My youngest son was born on Valentine’s Day.
It wasn’t planned that way but escalating blood pressure meant that, ready or not, here he came!
It’s been a lot of fun to have this day so often focused on romantic love (which, let’s be real rarely lives up to the hype!) focused instead on him and family love.
My habit the past few years has been to expand that focus even further and explore the edges of God’s love, my love for others and what love in action looks like.
Too often I SAY I love someone but refuse to DO the loving thing.
Truth is, love is hard. It’s costly. It can be uncomfortable.
It almost always involves sacrifice.
And if I’m not careful, I can let valentines and candy and flowers be a paltry stand in for the real thing.
February is not the only month in the year that tempts me to give a token and walk away instead of giving myself and sticking around to help in meaningful ways.
So I try to keep Jesus’ words before my eyes:
For the greatest love of all is a love that sacrifices all. And this great love is demonstrated when a person sacrifices his life for his friends.
~John 15:13 TPT
I try to focus on love in action instead of only love in words.
Am I the Good Samaritan or am I one of those who toss a prayer from across the way and walk on, comfortable in my piety and clean clothes?
I want to be the Good Samaritan.
Truly I do.
❤
I firmly believe that our friends and extended family want to reach out, want to help, want to walk alongside as we grieve the death of our child
I am also convinced that many of them don’t because they don’t know how.
It may seem unfair that in addition to experiencing our loss, we also have to educate others on how to help us as we experience it, but that’s just how it is.
The alternative is to feel frustrated and abandoned or worse.
Read the rest here: Child Loss: Helpful Tips for Interacting With Bereaved Families
I’m no good at what feels like self promotion in an age of influencers and social media personalities chasing after likes and shares. I subscribe to the George Mueller philosophy of ministry which is to take your needs and heart’s desires directly to the Lord.
But I also know that if people aren’t aware of what the Lord may be doing in a particular area, they may be unaware of how to participate in that work.
So in the hopes of giving folks that opportunity, I wanted to share a bit about what’s been going on lately with Heartache and Hope (the ministry) and with the blog.
Soon it will be ten years since I began writing here.
Since that time, The Life I Didn’t Choose has been viewed over 4,250,000 times. There are more than 3,500 entries and some posts have been shared in the tens of thousands. According to WordPress it has been accessed in every country around the world except North Korea. There is no way to calculate the number of individuals and families impacted reflected by those statistics.
I founded heartacheandhope.org in September, 2024 to expand the ministry begun through the blog and to reach out in different and varied ways to bereaved parents, their families and those that love them.
Since then, we’ve hosted four in-person support group meetings including a special “Blue Christmas” memorial service in December.
I’ve hosted and facilitated two bereaved moms’ retreats (three more scheduled for this year) and traveled to Chattanooga to share with a group there.
Through those contacts and events over forty families have been encouraged to hold onto Hope and wait well, leaning into the promises of Jesus that their pain will be redeemed.
We will continue to host the monthly meetings and hope to add a monthly virtual meeting beginning in March. I will travel to Virginia to share at the Our Hearts are Home Spring Conference in April.
I’d LOVE the opportunity to meet with pastors, chaplains, social workers and those who tend to be with families at the point of hearing “the news”. I am available and willing to meet with others-just message me.
I’ve developed downloadable, printable resources that are available free on the website.
I host a private Facebook group for bereaved parents (https://www.facebook.com/groups/947404501987955 ) and a public Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/heartacheandhope) accessible to anyone offering helpful insights into walking this broken road and to walking beside those who must travel it.
I know everyone reading this is not a bereaved parent but I promise you KNOW a bereaved parent (even if you think you don’t). I also know that both the blog and the ministry have been helpful to other hearts who are living with intractable unsolvable-this-side-of-eternity pain.
I am so, so thankful to every single person who has prayed for me in the more than ten years since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven. Coming up on another anniversary is hard no matter how long it’s been.
I cannot say enough about those who have chosen to walk beside me and who have encouraged me to share my story in hopes of encouraging others. I couldn’t do it without you!
I appreciate the many tangible donations (monetary, time, materials) that have been made to facilitate this work.
You are making an eternal difference, friends!
Lighting a candle is never in vain.
And lighting the way to Hope always bears fruit.
If you want to know more about the ministry you can find that here:
If you want to subscribe to the blog you can do so here:
If you feel led to join me in this ministry to the brokenhearted, here’s the link:
If you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to DM me on Facebook.
In the last post I shared the difference between mourning and grief. While the outward ceremonies have long passed, the inward struggle to embrace and understand the pain and sorrow of losing my son continues.
If you love someone who has lost a child, perhaps these thoughts might help you understand a bit of their pain and how completely it changes the way bereaved parents encounter the world.
Please be patient. Please don’t try to “fix” us. Please be present and compassionate. And if you don’t know what to say, feel free to say nothing-a hug, a smile, an understanding look-they mean so very much.
❤ Melanie
A bereaved parent’s grief doesn’t fit an easy-to-understand narrative. And it flies in the face of the American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.
You can’t beat it–it’s not a football game-there is no winning team.
You can’t lose it–it’s not the extra 10 pounds you’ve been carrying since last Christmas.
You can’t get over it–it’s not a teenage love affair that will pale in comparison when the real thing comes along.
You can only survive it. You can heal from it, but it will take a lifetime and require very special care.
Read the rest here: Loving Well: Understanding the Grieving Heart
In all fairness, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had no idea her research would be taken out of context and plastered across professional literature and media outlets as a definitive explanation for the grief experience.
But she didn’t mind the notoriety.
And ever since, counselors, pastors, laypersons and the general public have come to expect folks to politely follow the five (sometimes described as six) stages of grief up and out of brokenness like a ladder to success.
It doesn’t work that way.
❤ Melanie
Sometimes those that walk alongside the bereaved are biding time, waiting for that “final” stage of grief: Acceptance.
And some therapists, counselors and armchair psychiatrists are certain that if the grieving mother can simply accept the death of her child, she can move on–that she can get back to a more “normal” life.
But this notion is as ridiculous as imagining that welcoming a new baby into a household doesn’t change everything.
And new parents have months to prepare.
Read the rest here: Loving well: Understanding “Acceptance”
A funeral or memorial service seems like a final chapter. We close the coffin, close the doors and everyone goes home.
But for bereaved parents and their surviving children, it’s not an end, it is a beginning.
Much like a wedding or birth serves as the threshold to a new way of life, a new commitment, a new understanding of who you are, burying a child does the same.
Read the rest here: Loving Well: Transitioning From “Good-bye” to Grief
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