I would much rather be the one bringing the casserole than the one receiving it.
Not because I’m ungrateful but because I’m uncomfortable.
It is humbling to have to depend on other people. It’s hard to admit I can’t manage on my own. It’s downright humiliating to need help with daily tasks that used to come easy.
But truth is, I cannot make it alone.
Read the rest here: Grace Like Rain: Why It’s So Darn Hard to Ask For Help
It’s tempting to try to hide our tears and fears from our living children and grandchildren.
Who wants to overload a young heart and mind with grown-up problems?
There is definitely a place and time to shelter little people-it’s never appropriate to offload onto small shoulders what we just don’t want to carry ourselves.
But it is neither helpful nor healthy to pretend that sorrow and sadness don’t follow loss.
Read the rest here: Why It’s So Important to Model Grief For Our Children & Grandchildren
I totally get it–we are ALL so busy.
Calendars crammed weeks and months in advance and no white space left over to pencil in lunch with a friend even though we desperately NEED it.
It seems impossible to make that call, write that note or stop by and visit a few minutes.
How can I meet my obligations if I use precious time doing the optional?
But when the unexpected, unimaginable and awful happens, suddenly that calendar and all those appointments don’t matter. Balls drop everywhere and I don’t care.
Because when your family or best friend needs you, you come-no questions asked.
Read the rest here: Being There: No Substitute For Showing Up
Oh, sometimes I think I’m clever enough to do it.
I edit my words, costume my body and fix my face so I can act the part. But truth is, I never manage to fool anyone who looks closer than my plastic smile.
I can’t hide my heart.
And I don’t know why I try-I don’t get points for pretending.
There’s no prize at the end of this long road for the one who makes it with fewest tears.
Read the rest here: Zero Points for Pretending: You Can’t Hide Your Heart
In dark and burdensome seasons of life, I am tempted to cling tightly to what I can hold in MY hand instead of clinging tightly in faith to the One Who holds me in HIS hand.
Sowing in tears is choosing to walk obediently even when obedience is costly and there is no visible evidence that it will produce a good result.
There may be a long wait-perhaps my entire lifetime-to see the harvest of choosing obedience in faith.
Read the rest here: Costly Obedience
Although this specific incident happened some years ago, I experience the same flood of emotions at some point nearly every week.
I turn a corner or open a drawer or smell coffee or (rarely now) aftershave and suddenly memories mix with moments until I’m a mess.
There’s definitely a “before” and “after”-a date I can point to on the calendar when everything changed.
But the truth is that daily life is much more convoluted than that.
3 Melanie
Like most parents who have buried a child, a line is drawn through my life.
April 12, 2014 changed everything.
Whenever I hear a date or a memory drifts across my mind, I think, “that was so many days, months or years BEFORE or AFTER Dominic left us”. I can plot events on a calendar like I’m making a history timeline.
Put this one here and that one there. It seems so simple and straightforward
But daily life is much more complex.
I live in a world where “before” and “after” run together in a mighty torrent. And I can’t control the way they mix and churn.
Read the rest here: Confluence
I am not the same as I was before burying a child.
My family is not the same.
Nothing is the same.
Some of the “not the same” is the gap between my understanding of how I have changed and the lack of understanding by others about how I have changed.
Many friends, extended family members and acquaintances continue to relate to me as if I’m the “old” me. That creates tension and requires energy to deal with-I either have to overlook it, try to help them understand or figure out how to deal with it some other way.
We’re just not speaking the same language anymore.
Sometimes I think subtitles would be helpful.
Read the rest here: Subtitles
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.
Read the rest here: Why Don’t I Feel A Thing? Sometimes Grief = Numb.
Years ago I heard a young woman describe a Chinese grieving ritual on an NPR broadcast:
At her grandfather’s funeral, his oldest son was tasked with demonstrating the depth of grief and pain the father’s passing left behind. He stood before the casket, raised a clay bowl above his head and smashed it to the ground while loudly wailing.
The bowl was shattered into fragments too small and too fragile to be put back together in any semblance of what they once represented.
Read the rest here: Fragments
At first everyone talked about him.
It’s what people do just after a person leaves this world and leaves behind only memories.
It comes natural before the unnatural fact of child loss settles in and begins to make everyone uncomfortable.
But at some point after the funeral and way before the tears dried up, people stopped feeling easy mentioning his name.
Read the rest here: Help! My Family Won’t Talk About My Missing Child.
thelifeididntchoose 