It’s even harder to carry it like a precious burden in the bosom of your heart.
Because while it is oh, so true, it does not take away the pain when circumstances just don’t change no matter how hard you pray, how long you endure or how much you wish they would.
God’s ways are not my ways. His thoughts are not my thoughts. He is not required to fit into whatever box I want to put Him in.
We’ve reached the peak of Hallowthankmas in the stores.
I‘ve never liked smashing one holiday on top of another which seems, in my mind, to rob each of their respective unique characteristics.
I’m also particularly frustrated that Halloween-a “holiday” mocking death and focused on fear (for many)-occupies way more space in mass retailers’ aisles than Thanksgiving.
But I can no more hold back the onslaught of merchandising than I can the days marching resolutely toward end of year holidays even if I choose not to join the commercial bandwagon.
So here we are.
Only a short time left to figure out how to honor the missing and love the living through some of the most difficult days of the year for bereaved hearts.
I’ve written many posts about what helps, what hurts, how and when to have hard conversations with extended family members about making space for brokenness at the table and in our celebrations.
I’ll be reposting those over the next couple of weeks since I firmly believe it takes forethought and planning if we want Thanksgiving and Christmas to look more like a Hallmark movie and less like a disaster film.
In the meantime I want to share some questions that are helping me sift through my own expectations, hopes and preferences for what our holidays might look like this year:
What is TRULY important to you, your family and/or close friends with whom you celebrate?
Do you love to make an elaborate meal, bake tons of cookies, pull out all the old family recipes that call for less-than-healthy ingredients? Is decorating your thing? Does it just not feel like Christmas if you miss driving around looking at lights?
Are you fresh on this journey and need a way to skip traditions all together? Maybe you want to spend the holidays away from home or at home with a single candle lit in honor of your child.
Do you have to consider younger children (either surviving siblings or grandchildren) that might pressure you to keep things “normal” for their sake?
Have you asked your surviving children what’s important to THEM? Don’t assume their silence equals assent.
The first year after Dominic ran ahead to Heaven, lots of things had changed in addition to his absence. One son got married and moved out of state, my mother’s health was in decline, my husband was working out of town and my house felt so, so empty.
We chose to put up a very small tree with limited ornaments consisting of family photos and hearts. We gave gifts but asked that others not give us any. We joined extended family for a meal but not for opening presents.
That’s what was right for US for that year.
Each year since has been slightly different.
I have to ask those questions of myself and of my family over and over, recalibrate, shift our focus or change our choices depending on how life has reshaped our circumstances in the past twelve months.
If this is the first holiday season since your child left you might want to ignore it altogether. That’s OK. But at the least you may have to tell friends and family that’s your plan.
So grab some paper and find a quiet spot to think.
Then write without editing your thoughts, feelings or ideas.
Save the page so you can reflect on it and make the decisions right for YOUR family THIS year.
In the meantime, I’ll be posting ideas from other bereaved parents that might help you navigate this particularly challenging part of the journey.
One year ago today Hurricane Michael came ashore at Mexico Beach, Florida packing more wind and damaging power than any hurricane ever recorded hitting there.
What’s more, it held every bit of that strength and smashed trees, houses and power lines for miles and miles inland including the rural county where my folks live 60 miles away from landfall.
My parents and aunt were trapped and unable to leave due to downed trees across the driveway, “yard” and the road leading out to safety. No electricity, not enough fuel to run the generator to power my mom’s oxygen and no running water (well water provided by an electric pump).
They didn’t evacuate because in the 100 years family had been living on that plot of land NO hurricane had ever made it that far inland with more than heavy rain, some strong wind and temporary power outages.
Thankfully, a neighbor had a bobcat tractor and he plus others with chainsaws and tractors were able to clear the dirt road to the main road. Thankfully, my youngest son, Julian, was able to find a way through the downed trees and power lines between our house and theirs and reach them with more fuel, more chainsaws and another set of strong arms to help them evacuate.
Thankfully, the trees that fell around the house didn’t smash it or hurt anyone.
My family had survived the frightening but escaped the truly awful.
It felt like pure grace that no one we loved was killed that day although our hearts broke for those for whom that wasn’t true.
Once power was restored and my parents were able to return home, there was so much to clean up, so much to do and so many repairs to make.
Who could have guessed that less than a year later another kind of storm would sweep across our lives, taking Mama with it?
This time there was nothing left to do.
There never is when death comes knocking and steals a person you love.
I am so grateful for the extra almost-year with Mama. I am so sad there won’t be more.
And today, when I’ve finally stopped long enough to let my heart begin to feel what that feels like, I find my longing for her is folded into my longing for Dominic.
Two deaths, one broken heart.
I’m thankful and confident that death is not the end of their story.
Mama and Dominic and all the people I’ve loved that love Jesus are together in Heaven and waiting for the rest of us to join them.
Unlike the broken trees and broken homes left behind by Hurricane Michael, there will be no tell-tale signs of repair when on that glorious Day our hearts are made whole again.
Every sad thing will come untrue-as if it never happened.
Every tear will be wiped away.
Every promise kept, every stolen thing redeemed and restored.
And Mama will be dancing while Dominic plays his drums.
Looking back I’m shocked at how much I allowed societal norms and expectations to determine how I grieved Dominic’s death.
I withheld grace from myself that I would have gladly and freely given to another heart who just buried a child. Somehow I thought I had to soldier on in spite of the unbearable sorrow, pain, horror and worldview shattering loss I was enduring.
And the further I got from the date of his accident, the more I expected from myself.
I wrote lists of things I needed to do and surprisingly often I actually got them done.
But I crawled into bed each night exhausted, physically and emotionally drained and often unable to sleep for all the pent up feelings I still needed to process.
It was a dangerous cycle.
Eventually, through contact with other bereaved parents I learned that I absolutely, positively HAD to take care of myself. If I didn’t, there wouldn’t be a me to take care of.
And my family would be plunged beneath a new tsunami of loss.
I wasn’t going to do that to them if I could help it. So I committed to practicing better self-care on this grief journey.
I’m still not always good at it, but I’m better at it than I was.
If you are sucking it up, pushing it down, soldiering on, refusing to admit that grief takes a toll no one can ignore or deny, may I suggest you consider taking a step back and thinking about the ultimate outcome of ignoring your own needs?
Here’s a graphic to get you started.
It’s not an exhaustive list and the examples given may not suit your personality or circumstances but they should give you some ideas to find the activities and habits that will help strengthen you to do the work grief requires.
These past two weeks have reminded me once again that there is absolutely NO substitute for being present when someone needs you.
Sure a phone call, text message or card in the mail express concern but there’s just something about showing up with a hug and maybe a casserole or pie that says, “You are important to me.”
It reminded me of this post from a couple of years ago:
I totally get it–we areALLso 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.
Tuesday, October 1, 2019 we said our formal good-byes to my mama. Saw her face for the last time on earth surrounded by friends and family. Sang a few songs and walked away from the cemetery back to a fellowship hall full of people.
A crowded place never felt so empty.
A noisy room never sounded so quiet to ears straining for the one voice we longed to hear.
It was like that when Dominic ran ahead to Heaven five and a half years ago-I stumbled back across the grass to the waiting food and folks both relieved the public spectacle was concluded and horrified that the final act of committing his body to the ground and commending his soul to Heaven was complete.
Left with only photographs and memories.
They were not enough then and they are not enough now.
Flat, lifeless representations of the vibrant, funny, sassy mama that only recently rediscovered her appetite and snuck past the kitchen to the bowl of candy on the dining room table at every opportunity are NOT. ENOUGH.
Even though it was delightful to dig out old photo albums, scour the house for boxes tucked away in corners and open drawers searching for mementos and precious tokens of a long life, it was also a heartbreaking reminder that if she were still breathing we’d never be invading her privacy.
I remember boxing up Dominic’s things in his apartment only a few days after we buried him.
We were trespassing, pure and simple. He deserved to have whatever secrets he’d been keeping (though they were small and not at all dark or dishonorable) and here we were dragging them into the light.
I hated every minute of it. I sucked in my breath and held back the tears as I piled a life into containers of “save”, “toss” and “give away”. A lifetime reduced to lifeless objects.
We buried Mama with a white rose and a small photo of Dominic placed in between her hands. It was a tiny token representing both our heartache and our eternal hope.
I am thankful for every memory and photograph I have of Mama and Dominic.
I tuck the memories away safely in my heart and place the photos carefully in labeled albums.
But they are a paltry substitute for their earthly companionship.
In spite of my best efforts, I have made and continue to make less-than-healthy or ideal choices in grief.
I’m sure some of those patterns are being passed down to my children and I hate that. Grief is hard enough on its own without adding layers of dysfunction that make it harder.
So I try to be mindful of what I model because like it or not, I’m teaching my children how to grieve.
I think it was second grade when I started a notebook dedicated to them-carefully copying out the words of others that spoke the truths of my own heart. Although the topics which draw me are different now, I’m still collecting them.
So here are fifteen quotes on grief that I hope will help another heart:
I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.’
That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Rather often I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote. The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over.
Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it… Every lament is a love-song.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son
You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
Anne Lamott
They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite
Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.
Paul Harding, Enon
This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don’t ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.
Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer
I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never – I never thought it would be this small, did you?
Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
There are no words, not in English, Spanish, Arabic, or Hebrew, that have been invented to explain what it’s like to lose a child. The nightmarish heartache of it. The unexplainable trepidation that follows. No mother loses a child without believing she failed as a parent. No father loses a child without believing he failed to protect his family from pain. The child may be gone, but the years the child were meant to live remain behind, solid in the mind like an aging ghost. The birthdays, the holidays, the last days of school—they all remain, circled in red lipstick on a calendar nailed to the wall. A constant shadow that grows, even in the dark. As I was saying…there are no words.
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.
Yesterday I stood next to my mama’s casket and met person after person who came to pay respects.
It was beautiful and awful all at the same time.
It was precious to hear the many ways Mama had brightened other people’s lives, extended hospitality, shared experiences and encouraged hearts.
It was awful to know she wouldn’t be doing that anymore. Her voice is silent, her smile is forever fixed into a not-really-like-her expression and her eyes closed.
I have been so busy that I really haven’t had time to mourn her yet. It’s coming.
Oh, how I know it’s coming.
But one thing I know now that I didn’t know when Dominic ran ahead to Heaven is this: Hope in Christ creates a safe space for all my questions, sadness and crying out.
God collects my tears. He does not disdain my sadness. He leans in and listens to my lament.
To have healthy fellowship with God we must be honest and realistic about our circumstances and our reactions to them. To have a healthy emotional, spiritual, and mental life, we must be honest with ourselves. One truth about our lives is that we are broken; we inevitably encounter our own suffering and that of others, and eventually we die. How does our Lord teach us to respond to this? He teaches us hope, and within that hope we use lament to speak to God of the painful delay of peace. All laments ultimately go to God, with whom we wrestle and rest.
Kelly M. Kapic, Embodied Hope
Peace is coming but it’s not here yet.
And it is perfectly OK to admit that, to mourn that, to take notice of the gap between the promise and the present.
thelifeididntchoose 