thelifeididntchoose

For You, a Moment; For Me, a Lifetime

I used to look at tombstones in cemeteries and do the math between the dates.

I was most focused on how long this person or that person walked the earth.

I still do that sometimes. But now I do something else as well.

I look to the left and the right to see if the person who ran ahead left parents behind. My eye is drawn to the solitary stones with the same last name next to a double monument clearly honoring a married pair.

And then I do a different kind of math.

I count the years between the last breath of the child and the last breath of his or her mama.

Because while that first date marked an end for everyone else, for the mama, it marked the beginning of the rest of her life- a life she never imagined nor would have chosen.

I wonder how many lives have been cut short by the effects of grief. I know some folks have tried to research it, but it’s so hard. Because grief ends up doing things to bodies that look like aging or like other disease processes and it’s really difficult to tease it out.

But those of us who live this life know.

We know.

What’s a moment for everyone else, is a lifetime for us. What is a date on the calendar, a trip to a funeral home, a casserole delivered to a door in hopes of lifting spirits for everyone else, is so much more for us.

I don’t begrudge your ignorance.

I celebrate it!

My heart breaks every single time another name is added to the roles of “bereaved parent”.

I think a lot about the generations gone before. Before vaccinations, before penicillin, before so many modern blessings that lengthen life and give hope where there used to be none.

I think about the families involved in WWI and WWII. I understand the need to call the first war “The Great War” and assume such atrocities would stop mankind from falling headlong into them again.

But it didn’t.

So, so many families that made the highest sacrifice.

So, so many parents that hung that photo of their son or daughter on the wall and never moved it-because they were as frozen in time as their child.

I have a friend who does home-based physical therapy. She often goes to the homes of elderly patients and lovingly and gracefully listens to their stories. If it is part of their history, they almost always point out the child who never grew older and tell the tale of how much they miss him or her.

It’s so, so hard for others to understand how very different child loss and out-of-order death is from any other loss in this life.

But it is not a moment.

It is not even a week or month or years.

It’s a lifetime.

We miss them and mourn them for a lifetime.

Persistent Longing, Persistent Prayer

So often we think of prayer as words.

But prayer can be a heart cry too deep for words.

It can be a groaning soul, longing for release.

That has been the prayer I offer most often this side of child loss, “Please God, please, please, please! Send grace and have mercy! Help me hold on to hope and make it Home!”

As I’m caught in the current of the days leading up to the anniversary of Dominic’s running ahead, my mouth grows silent and my heart louder. My world circles smaller and eternity looms larger.

I don’t have to think about prayer.

I breathe it.

My heart beats it.

Unceasing, persistent, continuous prayer.

There is a different kind of prayer without ceasing; it is longing. Whatever you may be doing, if you long for the day of everlasting rest do not cease praying. If you do not wish to cease praying, then do not cease your longing. Your persistent longing is your persistent voice. But when love grows cold, the heart grows silent. Burning love is the outcry of the heart! If you are filled with longing all the time, you will keep crying out, and if your love perseveres, your cry will be heard without fail.

~St Augustine

Repost: Don’t Let It Fool You

Whether the burden is child loss, abuse, chronic illness or some other ongoing and unchangeable hard circumstance, it’s easy to get so good at acting “OK” you can almost fool yourself.

But all that stress and struggle exacts a cost.

Pretending that it doesn’t is not helpful at all.

Read the rest here: Don’t Let It Fool You

Spring Isn’t All Sunshine And Flowers For Me

Like most of us I am enjoying the change from cold and wet to warm and sunny.

Spring breezes and spring sunshine usher in fresh beauty and speak hope to a heart. It reminds me that the earth will not always be locked in darkness nor be a frozen wasteland.

But spring isn’t all sunshine and flowers for me.

It’s death and dying and tears and heart wrenching reminders that no matter how hard we try to hold onto life in THIS life, we can’t.

Right now I’m holding my dying cat. He’s been a faithful companion for thirteen years.

I’ve had many, many wonderful animals in my life but none have come close to being the constant shadow and empathetic friend that Roosevelt is. His warm body snuggled into my arms like an infant every morning has been a touchstone that kept me from floating away in grief’s inviting fog.

I will miss him.

Death is awful.

I do not equate Roosevelt’s death with Dominic’s. There isn’t a scale conceivable that would measure the distance between the two.

But one of the things I’m learning in this Valley is that every death taps the same wound. Every death hurts my heart. Every death reminds me that this life is not as it ought to be, not as God intended it to be when He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden.

And every death reminds me that Christ came, Christ suffered, Christ conquered precisely BECAUSE death. is. awful.

Resurrection is coming.

But it is not yet.

So I wait.

In hope.

Clinging to the promises.

❤

**My faithful companion died in my arms- peacefully and without pain. ***

Messed Up. Again.

I’m not sure when I’ll get the hang of this life after loss.

Five years is long enough to have completed a college degree, so you’d think it would be long enough to explore the edges of how to walk in the world without my son, without the family I used to have, without the confidence I once enjoyed that “every little thing was gonna be alright”.

But it’s not.

I’m still feeling my way in the dark much of the time.

New challenges greet me and I have to navigate them with the profoundly changed “me” that I neither understand nor like.

I make mistakes.

I get upset and I upset others.

If I didn’t believe that there was a Day when all this would be redeemed, I would just give up.

But I DO believe that.

It doesn’t take the pain away. It doesn’t soften the feeling of failure when my sorrow stops me being what others need me to be. It doesn’t blow soft breezes across my weary soul.

It gives me focus and a goal. It gets me out of bed so I persevere. It helps my heart hold on and not give in to despair.

Today is not a good day.

Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

But one day-

One. Glorious. Day.

Tangible Absence

In response to something I posted in a bereaved parents’ group a friend used the term “tangible absence” to describe what I was feeling.

She is so right.

When I imagine something I’ve never actually experienced-even when I might say “I miss such and such” it’s not the same as when I’ve had something and it’s been taken away.

I can only miss the imaginary in an ephemeral, insubstantial way. I miss what I once possessed in a tangible way.

I know exactly the size and shape and sound and substance of the person that SHOULD be here but isn’t.

I know the energy he would add to a room or a conversation.

I know the point of view that’s missing from the debate or decision making.

And I miss him like crazy. ❤

~Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

Not a State But a Process

C. S. Lewis gave voice to so much of human experience in ways that help us understand ourselves and one another.

His book, Mere Christianity, began as a series of radio talks that were later compiled, published and sold millions and millions of copies.

I think Lewis managed to use a conversational, inviting voice in all his works.

When I read them I feel like I’m chatting with a friend (granted, an extremely erudite friend!). He and I are discussing a thing, reasoning through it together.

He’s not teaching me something, he’s guiding me to learn it for myself.

When he experienced the loss of his beloved wife, this giant of the faith struggled like all us mortals. His grief journal was eventually published as the book, A Grief Observed, and has helped many of us who sorrow describe our feelings and find our way.

I particularly love this quote:

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process … There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape … Not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago.
~C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Lewis understood that grief was not a state which could be changed like ice to water through the application of heat.

There is no quick fix for a broken heart. No remedy for missing someone you love.

Instead, grief is a process.

It’s a lifelong journey of remaking a relationship that can no longer depend on physical presence and new memories. It circles back again and again, asking the same questions, sometimes finding new answers but often having to settle for the old ones.

It’s almost five years since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven and while I have forged new paths in that time, much of my travel has been over well-worn ruts that bring me to the same watering holes.

I’m often surprised that life after loss is not linear at all.

I do feel (as I’ve shared before) that the circles progress ever upward.

I’m not standing still.

But I’m not free to escape the valley.

Repost: “Don’t Dwell On That!

Why is it “dwelling” in one instance and “remembering” in another?

Who gets to decide whether I’m taking out a cherished memory, holding it, stroking it and reliving it because it’s all I have left or I’m clutching the past, refusing to let go?

I will be the first to admit that mulling over past offenses is probably the last thing I need to do. Especially if I’m trying to forgive them. That’s not helpful nor is it healthy.

But there’s a difference between THAT kind of thinking and the kind of thinking every bereaved parent does about his or her missing child.

Read the rest here: “Don’t Dwell on That!”

For One Day

Today I decided for one day to ignore the clock and my own internal tick, tick, tick tracking minutes and hours.

Today I did or didn’t do whatever I wanted.

I refused to check my list.

Instead of optimum efficiency, batching chores and trips upstairs or down, I meandered in and out of rooms. I picked up one thing and passed another. I didn’t “clean as you go” when I made my salad. I started something and didn’t finish. I stared. I hummed. I listened to wind chimes tinkle away the hours.

My big fat cat jumped in my lap and I let him stay there even though it means I can’t do anything else because my arms don’t quite reach around him.

People tell me all the time, “Don’t worry! It’ll be there tomorrow!” But that is precisely what usually worries me-it WILL be there tomorrow.

Today, though, I gulped those words, chewed them and swallowed. Gone.

And you know what?

It was fine.

Fine.

Just fine.

I doubt this will be a trend. Fifty-five years of task-oriented, time-conscious living can’t be swept away by one glorious day of living minute to minute.

But it’s a start.

I Don’t Want To Remember My Son

I don’t want to remember my son.

I want to make memories with him.

I want him to watch me grow old, to watch him get married and have children and to hear his voice mingled with his siblings at my table.

I’ve tried dozens of times to write a post that describes the abyss that divides the life I thought I would live and what it’s turned out to be.

I can’t do it.

A twenty-three year old isn’t planning his legacy. A mom of a twenty-three year old isn’t carefully preserving daily moments in the event he suddenly disappears.

Whatever legacy Dominic has left behind is a function of his huge personality rather than careful planning. And all I have left of his life are bits and pieces I’m trying to string together so he’s not forgotten.

I was not prepared to wake up one morning and learn that his earthly story ended.

I didn’t get to say good-bye, didn’t get to look him in the eye and tell him how very much I love him, didn’t even get to hold his hand as he left this life and entered Heaven.

I know he is just fine. He’s full of joy and perfectly content.

But I’m not.

I don’t want Dominic to be a memory.

I want him to be here.