My son’s death is a point in time for people outside my immediate grief circle. It’s a date on a calendar. There is a period after his name.
But it is an ongoing experience for me and my family.
We don’t only remember on birthdays, holidays and anniversary days, we can never forget.
Yet often others do.
Read the rest here: I’m Sorry
Rocking babies I never dreamed that one day my life would look like this.
I never imagined that one of those tiny bodies I held close to my mama heart would not outlive me.
Now I sit in the same rocking chair in the dark, thinking about how so many things I wouldn’t have written into my story are now part of it.
And if I’m honest, it can easily overwhelm my heart. It can carry me to a place of despair and desperation where there’s no room for thanksgiving-not the holiday OR the feeling.
Here we are-the eleventh year of holidays without Dominic-and I’m no better at it than I was at first.
Read the rest here: Thanksgiving As Sacrifice
My nearly ninety year old father suffered a major stroke in mid September.
Much like the morning when a deputy showed up at my door and told me Dominic was never coming home, my life was suddenly and drastically changed in ways I wish it wasn’t.
I got in the car, drove to the hospital and suddenly became a full time caregiver.
It’s been a rocky couple of months.
I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about navigating our complex healthcare system of doctors, rehabilitation services and finding reliable and qualified respite care.
My patience, self control and organizational skills have been stretched to the limit.
I was forced to cancel several upcoming ministry commitments and am just now beginning to try to figure out how to re-engage directly with parents on a regular basis. I miss that so much!
One of the things I’ve learned since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven is that life keeps coming.
The calendar has no respect for my personal Season of Sorrow or any other, more pressing, stressors being heaped one atop the other. Holidays and birthdays are fixed dates. Babies are born in the fullness of time and don’t ask permission.
I know I’m not the only bereaved parent who is part of the sandwich generation-adult children on one side and aging parents on the other. It is truly a challenging season.
I find many of the strategies and habits I developed while grieving have served me well as I try to navigate a different kind of loss.
Boundaries are so important. I’ve had to tell lots of people that I simply cannot be available all the time. I let text messages go unanswered when I’m engaged in more important tasks. That’s hard and uncomfortable but necessary.
If someone offers to help, let them. There are so many things that only I can do for my dad that when someone offers to do one of the others, I’m trying hard to let them.
I’m honest about the hard. It’s tempting to gloss over or minimize the most difficult parts of our journey. But that’s not helpful for me or for anyone else who might be following my journey. When I share transparently, I encourage others to hold on, knowing they are not alone and give friends and family the opportunity to come alongside and encourage me.
Give grace-to yourself and to others. I don’t always make the best choices and sometimes I say the wrong thing. I get tired and grumpy. I’m human and that’s going to happen. When it does, I need to extend the grace to myself I’d give to someone else.
People are going to offer unsolicited and unwanted advice. They are going to say things that rub me the wrong way. Bible verses and trite, bumper sticker, positive thinking messages have been tossed at me from the sidelines. Our culture insists on bright siding even the darkest and most devastating situations. I try to extend grace to those folks too. (And when I can’t, I mute them on social media and silence their texts and calls!)
I don’t know how long or how hard this season will ultimately prove to be.
But I know that I will survive.
The Lord has been faithful for the more than eleven years since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven.
His love will not fail me now.
I have had my share of pain in life-physical, emotional and psychological.
Some of it I’ve brought on myself and some of it has been thrust upon me.
None of it was pleasant.
But by far the most excruciating pain I have endured is the death of my son.
Read the rest here: Transforming Pain
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.
Read the rest here: I Miss Your Voice: Silent Echoes Haunt My Heart
Many bereaved parents will tell you that after the initial shock of loss hits hard, a blessed numbness falls over a heart.
It happened to me.
The pain was still there, of course, but a fog descended that allowed me to maintain some distance between what I was feeling deep down and what I had to do in order to get through the decisions and days that follow death.
Nighttime was still hard because when the house went dark and quiet, all the emotion I’d managed to push away in the daylight came flooding back. I spent months falling into fitful sleep with tears on my pillow.
And then the fog lifted.
I’m not sure how long it was that I sobbed uncontrollably for some portion of every day and some days all day long.
A whiff of fresh air reminded me Dominic no longer drew breath into his lungs. A random sound upstairs or outside jolted my heart into hoping maybe, just maybe, he was coming home. Everywhere my eyes landed held a memory that screamed, “He was here! Where is he now?”
I felt everything. All the time. No respite.
It was exhausting.
But at some point-maybe in the middle or toward the end of the second year-a blanket of profound emotional silence wrapped itself around my heart and I could not feel a thing.
Really.
Not one single thing.
I could conjure up appropriate facial expressions so those around me didn’t have a clue. I could remember what I was supposed to feel. I could almost-almost-touch a spot deep inside that used to feel. But if there had been a meter on my heart it would have displayed a flat line.
This was more frightening than the prospect of living with overwhelming sorrow and pain for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to hurt like that forever but I didn’t want to give up feeling love and happiness and excitement and awe either.
I don’t really know how long that lasted.
Maybe most of a year, I think.
And then one day I realized some color had crept back into my daily life.
I was beginning to look forward just a bit to a date on the calendar. A smile crossed my lips without effort in response to a joke. Sadness once again took up residence in my heart next to the place Dominic always lived. But joy eased its way in around the edges.
I’ve thought long and hard about that season of “un-feeling”.
Why did my heart shut down? Why the long silence when no emotion pierced my soul?
I think it was necessary.
I think a body and mind and heart can’t operate for too long at warp speed. I think that just like fainting is a response to the brain needing oxygen, numbness is a response to the soul’s need for respite and time to heal.
So if you are in the season of numb, you’re neither crazy nor alone.
It, too, will pass.
Feeling will find its way once again to your heart. Pain, yes, but also joy.
When you are ready.
Hey-I get it.
Who wants to air the good, the bad and the ugly for everyone else to see?
In today’s world where photo filters on our cellphone cameras can turn a pretty rotten picture into a magazine worthy masterpiece no one is anxious to be seen as less than polished and put together.
The pressure is on to pretend that all is well even when all is, well, going quite the other direction.
If you are trudging through a tough patch, let folks know.
You might be surprised by who reaches out saying, “That was me just a while ago. Would you like to know how I made it through?”
If you’ve already walked the long and lonely road of grief, loss, trauma, depression or other difficult circumstance-share your story!
Don’t sugar coat it. Don’t clean up the messy bits. Don’t gloss over the hard spots.
How can anyone learn to walk the hard roads, the rocky paths, the treacherous terrain of life unless someone else is willing to be a guide? And who can trust a guide that hasn’t also made that journey?
Tell it like it was.
Then tell it like it is.
Map the path from there to here.
Shine a light for a soul that thinks darkness is all there is.
Reach back and take a hand.
Help a heart hold on to hope.
I wrote this post six years ago after my mother joined Dominic in Heaven. Her passing reminded me once again (as if my heart needed reminding!) that there ain’t nothing easy about death.
Six years later and I’m no more willing to pretend it’s anything but awful even as I’m resigned to admit there’s nothing I can do about it.
I miss you both so very much.
Melanie
I remember the moment I realized I was going to have to summarize my son’s life into a few, relatively short paragraphs to be read by friends, family and strangers.
It seemed impossible.
But as the designated author of our family I had to do it so I did.
Read the rest here: Ain’t Nothing Easy About Death
Today my heart hurts more than usual.
It’s my mama’s birthday-the sixth one we will celebrate without her here to blow out the candles.
It’s also the sixth anniversary (do you call it that?) of the day Papa had to call an ambulance to rush her to the hospital.
She never came home.
The first couple years after her death were hard. Mama’s death plunged me back into deep grief for her and for Dominic. It tapped the wound that had begun to scar over a bit and the feelings I’d learned to push down bubbled back to the surface.
I finally sleep through the night again most nights. For much of the first two years I woke two or three times in the dark to vividly awful dreams-my family in peril and no way to help them is the theme over and over and over.
Now it’s only every so often.
I know other motherless daughters.
Somehow knowing Mama isn’t available on the other end of the phone or sitting in her chair, waiting for me to come through the door at the farm, makes me supremely vulnerable.
One less generation between me and whatever the world might throw at me.
I know she is healthy and whole, happy and full of joy in Heaven. I know she’s reunited with her own mama, her siblings and Dominic.
On good days, that’s enough to make the missing bearable.
But on days like today, when we should be celebrating another year together but can’t, it doesn’t help all that much.
I miss her.
I miss Dominic.
I miss the me that used to be ignorant of what death steals from the living.
Happy Birthday in Heaven, Mama. We’ll be there soon.
If you think that time makes a difference to a mama missing a child who ran ahead to Heaven without her, you don’t know as much as you think you know.
Time does not heal all wounds-especially the kind that shatter a heart into a million pieces.
It takes time for the wound to scar over, but it doesn’t undo the damage.
So if you are wondering why your coworker still takes the day off on his child’s birthday or the anniversary of her child’s homegoing, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Years disappear when those milestones loom large.
Read the rest here: It’s Been Years-What’s Wrong With You?
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