blog – thelifeididntchoose

November: Four Years of Sharing And Counting

This month marks the beginning of the fifth year since I committed to write every single day in this space.

No one could be as surprised as I am that I’m still here.

I honestly don’t know what response I anticipated when I showed up and started sharing. I just knew that I could not let this heartache go to waste.

Dominic’s death had to count for something.

I had five goals in mind when I started the blog:

To be as honest and transparent as possible;
To encourage others and help them hold onto hope;
To provide a voice for the child loss community in a format that was easy to share;
To acknowledge and admit that faith did not make child loss any less painful, only more bearable; and
To chronicle my own progress toward healing.

Of course, I am a biased source, but I feel like I have met those goals in one form or another.

As I continue to walk the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I find there are always new things to say. I am bombarded daily with queries or comments from other bereaved parents that raise a new issue, offer a different perspective or beg for an advocate along this lonesome road.

I’ve discovered that there are many ways life breaks a heart, many ways sorrow enters a soul.

Life is hard.

Love often ends in heartache.

Sorrow can overwhelm a soul so fast there’s no time to grab hold of a lifeline.

But reaching out, reaching back, choosing to be a lighthouse and beacon for the ones so lost they’ve forgotten that light exists, is as much a balm for MY heart as it is for theirs.

Every story matters.

You don’t have to write a blog to share yours.

Speak up. Speak out. Share the hope and strength that has helped you hold on.

You may be the lifeline the next heart needs to choose endurance instead of ending it all.

❤

Why Am I Still Writing About Loss Five Years Out?

I was one of those people years ago who set her sights on starting and maintaining a blog.

I thought I would post a few times a week and share anecdotes about my family and critters, insight into daily living and inspiration from Scripture and interesting quotes.

No, not THIS blog-the other two I started and quickly abandoned to who-knows-where in cyberspace.

Trouble was that the subject matter, while near and dear to my heart, wasn’t personally compelling enough to keep me disciplined and actively writing.

If someone had said, “Pick any topic to write about”, child loss wouldn’t have been in the first million choices.

No one CHOOSES child loss (Thus the name of the blog: The Life I Didn’t Choose).

But untold numbers of parents EXPERIENCE it every year. This very day, parents somewhere got a knock on the door or a phone call or sat next to a hospital bed as life slipped slowly from their child’s tired body.

Since I was already journaling and had walked this Valley for nearly a year and a half, it dawned on me that the ramblings I’d put down might be helpful to another heart. So I started THIS blog in September, 2015.

And I’ve been here ever since.

I’m not in the raw, breathless place I once was. But grief and loss are part of every breath I take, part of every moment I experience.

I miss Dominic. I still consider death an enemy. Every day I hate what was stolen and long for what was. I mourn the changes grief has wrought in my family. I wish things were different. I discover new ways loss impacts my life and new ways of coping with it.

So I keep writing.

I don’t want anyone to feel alone in this journey. I don’t want anyone to think there’s no way to survive. I don’t want a single broken heart to doubt that God is here and that He will help you hold onto hope.

I’ll spill my heart out in words until the words are exhausted.

It helps me.

I pray it helps others too.

Repost: How and Why I Keep Writing-A Shepherd’s Heart

I am still utterly amazed that since November 2015 I have managed a blog post every day.

At first, I was writing because I wanted to make public the things I was learning in this Valley and to honor my missing son.

He had been in Heaven a year and a half by then and it was clear to this mama’s heart that (1) people (including ME before it WAS me!) had absolutely NO IDEA what life after child loss was like once the funeral was over; (2) one way to redeem this pain was to share how God had been faithful even as I struggled; and (3) I just didn’t see too many honest portrayals of life after loss for Christ followers (which is not to say they didn’t/don’t exist but I hadn’t found them).

So I wrote.

Read the rest here: How and Why I Keep Writing: A Shepherd’s Heart

New Feature on the Blog: Search Bar

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time.

Like many of you, I find myself wanting to find a particular blog post but just can’t remember the title.

Now that I’ve published over 900 posts, I have NO desire to backtrack through all of them hoping to light on the one I’m looking for.

SO...at the request of a sweet friend I finally (FINALLY!) added a “search” feature on the side bar.

I have to admit that changing anything on the site gives me jitters. Dominic was my tech guru and without him I am always afraid to make changes that I might not be able to undo. (He was the one that showed me ctrl-z could rescue that line or paragraph I accidentally deleted in word documents!)

Anyway, it’s here now.

And I hope it becomes a useful tool for anyone looking for a particular post or for posts about a particular subject.

Just put in your word or words and you will get a page (or more) of all the blog posts that are tagged for that topic or contain references to that topic.

It made me smile.

I hope it makes you smile too.

Don’t Want to Miss a Post? Here’s How.

I’m no tech expert. I kind of blunder about like a blind mouse searching for cheese most of the time. So I feel you if you haven’t figured out how to make sure you get each day’s blog post.

For those that do want it each morning here are several ways to get it:

Sign up to receive the post via email. You will get the whole post (minus the featured image at the top) unless it’s a repost and then you’ll have to click through to “read the rest.”

Sign up to receive posts via a WordPress account. You don’t have to actually start a blog to have a free WordPress account. Daily posts show up in your reader list when you log onto the site.

Follow my public Facebook page: Heartache and Hope: Life After Losing a Child. I generally post early in the morning and the post can be shared easily from here to your own FB page if you like.

Go to my personal Facebook page (Melanie DeSimone) where I set those posts on “public” for easy access/sharing.

Follow me on Pinterest: Melanie DeSimone Pinterest-I post the blog on a board called “The Life I Didn’t Choose” and also in “Grief”.

Follow me on Twitter: @DesimoneMelanie. I’m not a big Twitter user but for those that are, this is an easy way to view/share the blog posts.

Some of you are part of closed bereaved parents groups and I post there as well.

But if you want to share the post, you will need to access it another way. If you share from the closed groups it shows as “attachment unavailable” except to other group members even if you set it on “public”.

The social media icons on the right hand side of a post will take you to my Facebook page, Twitter account and Pinterest page. For some reason the Google+ link won’t work but I’ll keep trying (told you I was no tech genious!)

I appreciate each and every person who takes the time to read what I write-it makes me feel that this pain is being redeemed, just a little. And I am so thankful and blessed by feedback on the blog and via social media posts-let me hear from you!

It gives my heart courage to keeep sharing.

Thanks for Listening!

One year ago today I began sharing my grief journey publicly on this blog.

You can read that first post here.

It was (and still is) scary to expose my thoughts and feelings to a wider audience than just the pages of my personal journal.

I’m never certain that what is helpful for me is necessarily helpful for anyone else. But in writing it down I find that I am able to sort through things better than when I leave it bouncing around in my own head space.

I decided upfront that I would be as honest as possible about what I felt and how I was coping. I wasn’t sure if I would post only a few times or a lot, if it would turn into a day-by-day diary or a more sweeping revelation of deeper things.

I think it’s kind of been both at times.

And here we are, 366 days (it was a leap year) and 355 posts later and I’m still here and you’re still listening.

I don’t claim to have any special gifting or knowledge or ability. I am simply one mama whose love for both her child in heaven and her children still here demands that I speak out.

My heart is full of love and pain.

And my heart has been blessed beyond measure by those who read and share what I have written. I’ve met-in person and virtually-many bereaved parents who are helping me as I continue down this road.

I am so very thankful for each one.

I pray that for those who read these words and know the pain of burying a child, I am speaking things you may think or feel but are not willing or able to express.

And I pray that in hearing them spoken aloud, you are affirmed and encouraged that you. are. not. alone.

Dominic matters.

Your child matters.

It’s not only OK but absolutely necessary to admit that life after child loss is a struggle. It is also just fine to take your time working through the pain and sorrow and overwhelming changes child loss brings.

For those who read my posts and do not share this pain, I pray you gain insight into what bereaved parents feel and how burying a child changes EVERYTHING.

I hope you are better equipped to offer the ongoing support we need and crave. I hope you learn that this is not something we have chosen, it is something that happened to us.

And I pray that all of us will be more willing to extend grace, mercy and love to one another.

Words are not neutral.

They bring life or death.

They wound or heal.

May each of us be an instrument of healing for someone’s hurting heart.

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