Tag: child loss

More Grieving Hearts-What Grieving Parents Want You to Know

Two weeks.

Two families added to the roll call of those who have lost a child-suddenly, without warning.  

Two more sets of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins plunged beneath the sea of sorrow.

And those are only the ones I know about-the ones whose lives touch my own.

Every day we are shoulder-to-shoulder with people carrying a load that threatens to undo them.  If you haven’t experienced child loss you probably think you can imagine how it feels.

I know I did.

But I was wrong.

THIS is what it feels like:  What Grieving Parents Want Others to Know

hands and coffee

Grieving Together: Surviving Siblings

“Family means no one gets left behind or fogotten”~David Ogden Stiers

We are in this together, and part of my job as mom to the children still walking the earth with me  is to help them survive the loss of their brother.

I write about that here: Helping My Children Walk Through Grief

Faith

Part of our homeschooling routine was Bible reading.

I’ll never forget the first time I came to Hebrews chapter 11, often referred to as the “Hall of Faith”.  

It begins:

Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see. It was this kind of faith that won their reputation for the saints of old. And it is after all only by faith that our minds accept as fact that the whole scheme of time and space was created by God’s command—that the world which we can see has come into being through principles which are invisible.

Hebrews 11:1-3 PHILLIP

From there the writer lists those who followed God even when the path was dark, even when the promise was beyond sight and even when it cost them their lives.  

I cried.

I remember thinking that maybe one day the children looking at me around that table might face a crisis of faith and I prayed that they would always choose to believe.

I never dreamed that it would be ME that had to wake up each morning and make that choice over and over again.

I’m not talking about the single, life-changing commitment to receive forgiveness through Christ’s blood.

But rather obedience to keep following His lead and strength to walk in His footsteps day after day regardless of how I feel or what I can or cannot see.

The choice I have to make is whether or not to turn my heart toward His, to open my ears to His voice, and to bend my will to accept whatever storms He allows in my life.

Suffering is NOT a choice, but faith is.

The End of the Story?

I have to keep telling myself that no matter how it looks right now, this is not the end of the story.  

Every morning I’m reminded by the “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” of my early rising roosters, that the light is coming….

Read the rest here:  Crowing in the Dark

Keep On Keeping On

The months roll by, the calendar pages turn, soon school will be back in session and you are still not here.

Sometimes I think I have figured out how to do these days that remain between now and when we will be together again.  

And sometimes I realize that I haven’t.

Today is one of those days.

IMG_2637

 

 

I miss you.

I love you.

 

 

I can’t round a corner without thinking of you and wishing this was not my life.

But it is.  

So I’ll keep on keeping on.  Just like you would want me to.

Just like you would do.

Even when it’s hard.  

And some days it is so very hard.

Navigating Treacherous Terrain

One of the things I’ve been forced to embrace in the wake of child loss is that there are very few questions, experiences or feelings that are simple anymore.

Read the rest here:  It’s Complicated

Loving the Wounded

God bless the inventor of Band Aids!

That little tacky plaster has soothed more fears and tears than almost any other invention in the world.

Skinned knee?  Put a BandAid on it.

Bee sting?  BandAid.

Tiny bump that no one can even see?  Oh, sweetie, let me give you a BandAid.

Simply acknowledging pain and woundedness is so often all that is needed to encourage a heart and point it toward healing.

It’s the same in the world of emotional, psychological and spiritual wounds.

But we have yet to invent the BandAid for those.

band aid and heart

Instead, frequently we ignore, refute, minimize and pass over the one in our midst who holds out a hand or a heart saying, “I have a boo boo.”

Believe me, I understand-so many of these wounds are incurable, they are uncomfortable to think about, hard to look at.compassion and stay with you

But often the only thing the hurting heart wants is acknowledgement, a moment of time, a face turned full into theirs, eye-to-eye and unafraid to remain alongside through the pain.

Just as a BandAid bears witness to the wound underneath, our compassionate presence can bear witness to the deeper wounds no one can see.

When we choose to lean in and love, to listen and learn, to walk with the wounded we give a great gift.

compassion is a choice

 

When Will You Be Over This?

Think back on the most awful thing that has ever happened to you.

Does it still hurt?  Do you still carry scars from where it pierced your soul and broke your heart?

Can you forget it? Really, really forget it?  

Has it shaped the way you think about life and how you conduct yourself today?

Are you a different person NOW because that happened THEN?

Now magnify that to an impossibly greater degree and you might have an inkling of how child loss impacts parents and their families.

I will never “get over”, “move on”, “cease feeling sorrow” or “forget what happened”.

My son is my son as long as my heart still beats.  If he were living, he would be part of my life.  Death hasn’t changed that.

I am learning to live with loss, learning to bear up under its unceasing pressure and learning to carry on and keep going.  

I am different than I was and different than I would have been if Dominic hadn’t left us.

But only heaven can undo this injury, only Christ in eternity can fully redeem this pain.

Cfamily never gets over the death of a loved one

Astonished. Again.

For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”? The same leg is cut off time after time.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

No matter how tightly I strap on my armor, grief sends arrows through the tiniest unprotected chink and pierces my heart.

Read the rest of this post here:  Not as Strong as I Look

 

The Hard Question of Prayer

In the wake of burying Dominic, the most difficult spiritual discipline for me to recover has been prayer.

In part because my heart just doesn’t know what to ask for or how to talk to a God Who has allowed this pain in my life.  

In part because I don’t really have a framework for placing the prayers I want to pray inside my ongoing struggle to commit my future and the future of my family to the hands of a Father Who didn’t step in to prevent Dominic’s death.

I still struggle with this.  

“When it’s not your kid you can think of all kinds of lofty, theologically correct arguments or reasons for why God answers one prayer and not another–for why one person is healed and not another–for why one person survives a devastating-should-have-killed-him accident but not another.

But when it is your child that doesn’t survive or isn’t healed or is stolen through the violent actions of someone else…well, that’s a different matter entirely.”

Read the rest of this post here: The Problem of [Un]Answered Prayer