A year ago I was in the same city under very different circumstances.
My first grandson had been born at just over 28 weeks because his mama developed HELLP syndrome and was in mortal danger. Both he and she were in the hospital while we held our collective breath, begging for them to be OK.
We were filled with quiet but uneasy joy knowing as we do how death can come to steal it away.
This Sunday, family and friends gathered to watch this little guy grab his first birthday cake with gusto and smear his mama and daddy with blue icing.
You’d never know he got such a tentative start in life just by looking at him.
Grateful is too small a word for how we feel.
Melanie ❤
THIS YEAR:
LAST year:
Last week was a roller coaster.
My first grandchild-a boy-was born prematurely on Saturday after several days of heart stopping, breath robbing drama as his mama went back and forth to the hospital three times in as many days.
My son, his father, is deployed overseas and paddling as fast as he can to get home.
It rolls around every four years in man’s attempt to keep the calendar in tune with the cosmos.
It’s really a rather rough alignment but it’s the best we can do.
Truth is that each year there’s about one-quarter of a day unaccounted for even though our minds and bodies don’t notice so we tack on a whole day every four years and act like we catch up.
We don’t.
Most of us plod along as if the Monday (or Saturday, this year) is just another day in a series. For some it’s a bonus work day (maybe a bit extra in the check this month?). For many it’s only a date.
But for the tiny portion of the population who were born or married on this date, it’s a celebration.
Once every four years they get to mark-on the very day-what most of us take for granted. Friends and families can gather and honor a life or a marriage without trying to figure out whether to do it the day before or the day after.
This is the second Leap Day that’s rolled around since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven and it got me thinking about that little extra time each year or each month or each day holds that I hardly notice.
What if I took those moments (or hours) and wove them into something more meaningful than playing a game on my phone, watching another show on Hulu or scrolling through social media?
What if I choose to redeem those scraps of time that I normally toss away like they don’t matter?
In five minutes I can write a card, text or message to a friend.
In ten minutes I can call and set up a lunch or coffee date.
In thirty minutes I can preheat the oven and toss a storebought pie inside to take to my elderly neighbor.
So many opportunities to let someone know they are not forgotten nor unimportant.
February twenty-ninth didn’t really feel all that “extra” to me since I mostly did what I do every Saturday.
But it did make me think about how I spend my time.
One of the commitments I made out loud and in my heart the day Dominic left us was this: I was not going to let his death tear my family apart.
I was not going to let him become the sainted brother that stood apart and above his siblings.
I was going to continue to give as much of my time, effort, love and presence to each of the three I had left as I had done when there were four on earth beside me.
I’ve been more or less successful in keeping this promise.
I can only live forward and there are no do-overs.
No amount of regret can roll back the clock and give me another chance to do it right, do it better or just do it at all.
I can’t undo or redo my past.
If I’ve made blunders, hurt hearts, missed opportunities or just plain screwed up, I have to live with that. And other people might have to live with the damage I’ve inflicted.
I need to own that.
But it is not helpful to let regret stop me working NOWto repair, restore and rebuild relationships.
Sometimes my best efforts may be rebuffed.
If I’ve hurt someone’s heart they have every single right to tell me, “No. I won’t let you back in.” I don’t get to establish a timeline for their healing. But if I don’t try to make amends I can be sure the rift won’t be mended.
If someone has hurt me I can choose to look beyond that pain, forgive the offense and commit to begin now, leaving the past in the past, and start fresh.
If so much time has passed that it feels awkward-so what? Embarrassment is a small price to pay for restoration.
So write a letter.
Send a card.
Make a phone call.
Offer peace.
There’s a proverb that’s been spoken by my family for years. It goes like this. A young man asks an old farmer, “When’s the best time to plant a tree?”
The old man answers, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. But the next best time is now.”
I can’t go back and sow seed or plant trees when I wish I had.
“Today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.” ~unknown
Do we treat each day as a gift from a loving God, a present wrapped up in His grace and goodness, to be opened with joy, used with care and set lovingly on the shelf of life when done?
Or do we bear it as a burden?
I’ll admit not all days are equal.
Some ARE burdens.
No one (I don’t think!) loves going to the dentist. Few of us are keen on doing taxes or taking tests or slogging through the rain to work or school.
Some of us have much heavier burdens as we wake to an empty bed, an empty heart or an empty bank account.
But even these awful days are a gift.
Why?
Because God’s mercies are new every morning. The rising sun brings fresh opportunity to rest in, rely on and relish God’s grace, goodness and promised strength.
And every new day means we have more time.
More time to love the people we love, more time to find new people to love, more time to do the good works which God in Christ has planned for us to do.
We wake each morning to the same 24 hours given every other soul on this planet. It’s ours to choose.
How will we spend it? Will we fill it with foolish things? With important things?
Here’s how I do it:
Put the significant and essential things in first. Time with the Lord, time with family, time with my own thoughts. (Orienting my heart and mind to what truly matters first thing makes the rest of the day so much better.)
Then the necessary. Work, school, chores, appointments, cooking and meals. (No way around having to do these things, but I can still choose to fit them in AFTER the most important and valuable ones.)
Finally, the incidental things. Facebook, television, window (internet) shopping, binge watching Netflix. (So hard to discipline my heart to focus on what will truly make a difference instead of distracting myself with the trivial.)
And surprisingly I manage most days to get it done(even checking social media).
Life is not an emergency, although I often live as if it is.
I careen around the corner of hour after hour like I’m driving a car out of control, begging someone to make it stop.
I can make it stop.
I can take my foot off the accelerator, park it and decide where and how fast I’m going to drive tomorrow.
Every single day is an opportunity to choose.
I can start fresh and make time for the things that are truly important.
I know that when I first stumbled onto a bereaved parent group, it was one of the things I was looking for: evidence that the overwhelming pain of child loss would not last forever.
Some days I was encouraged as those who had traveled farther down this path posted comments affirming that they could feel something other than sorrow.
Some days I was devastated to read comments from parents who buried a child decades ago asserting that “it never gets better”.
Who is right?
What’s the difference?
Do I have any control over whether or not this burden gets lighter?
I try to limit the time I spend perusing old photos and old social media posts of my missing son.
I’ve learned that while they remind me of sweet memories and happy times they also prick my heart in ways nothing else can.
I was looking for something specific the other day and had to scroll through Dominic’s Facebook page to find it. As I did, I began reading some of the back and forth comments under the posts and pictures.
This time it wasn’t what was said or where the photos were taken that hurt my heart.
Instead it was the tiny little time stamp underneath the words that took my breath away.
Nothing more recent than eight years ago was recorded.
Because that’s when his voice went silent.
That’s when whatever he was going to say was either said or never would be said. That’s when all the brilliant, not-so-brilliant, snarky, funny, sad, silly and sage thoughts Dominic ever had or ever would have were cut off.
I firmly believe that Dominic is safe in the arms of Jesus-more alive now than he ever was here. I know he’s got things to say and when I join him we will have eternity to chat together.
But right now, what I wouldn’t give for one more conversation in the here and now.
I’ve got things I want to ask him.
I’ve got things I want to tell him.
I’d love to hear his voice or read his comments or see a new picture.
The years of silence echo loud in my ears and louder in my heart.
My mother’s death has forced me to relive the early days after Dominic’s death.
While her leaving was not completely unexpected (she had many health issues and was not strong) it was still sudden.
And one of the things I’m reliving is that while this giant life-altering event has turned MY world upside down and inside out, it really hasn’t changed anything for those outside a very small inner circle of grievers.
The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
James Patterson
Life DOES go on.
I had someone ask me a question in church Sunday about a decision that was made a week or two before my mom went into the hospital for the last time. It took me at least a full minute to orient my brain to the question and longer to answer it because I could barely remember anything that happened in the past weeks before Mama died.
It was like that after Dominic left us.
I felt like I was living in a low-budget foreign feature film (think ancient Godzilla movies) where English was simply dubbed over the Asian actors original dialogue and everything was slightly “off”. Words were being said that I SHOULD understand but they didn’t match what my eyes were seeing. It took tremendous effort to comprehend what people said to me and an even greater effort to comprehend the context of what they were saying.
It is a weird, weird thing that time moves on regardless of my shattered world.
It is a weird, weird thing that people keep doing routine stuff like watching favorite TV shows, going to football games, celebrating birthdays, checking the value of their portfolio, chiming in on social media and buying groceries.
It is a weird, weird thing that I grow older while Dominic stays twenty-three-almost-twenty-four. It’s even weirder that his once younger brother is now twenty-seven.
Julian, Jame Michael, Dominic
I used to think I had a pretty good imagination. But now I’m not so sure.
I can’t scale Dominic up to what he might be doing now, who he might be dating or married to, where he might have chosen to pursue a career or if he might have done something entirely different than anything he’d done before.
A fellow bereaved mom commented on my recent holiday post with this question: How do you make joy, when your heart has no joy?
It was a good and honest query. One that stopped me in my tracks.
When your heart is so broken that all is dark inside AND outside, where does the word “joy” even fit into your vocabulary?
I’m not sure I would have described anything as joyful for months after Dominic ran ahead to Heaven even though those days included two graduations and a wedding.
I felt positive about those events and I longed to feel joyful, but I just could not muster the energy to do much more than smile for the camera.
So I think, for me, it was a matter (over time and with much effort) to choose to allow joy back into my broken heart.
There are moments of beauty even in the darkest and most difficult days.
At first I refused to recognize and acknowledge them because to embrace joy seemed like treason. It felt disrespectful to Dominic-making light of the horror of his untimely death.
But eventually I realized that embracing whatever good I might stumble upon in a day wasn’t denying the awful, it was admitting and affirming that death didn’t have the last word.
I am walking the Valley now, but this journey will not last forever.
One day it will end with more joy and love and laughter and glory than my finite mind can imagine.
So the bits of joy along the way are simply flickers of light guiding my heart Home. ❤
thelifeididntchoose 