If I find in myself a desire for which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.C. S. Lewis
I remember the first time I felt homesick.
I had been away from home before but never without the company of someone I knew well and loved.
This time was different-I was at a sleepover camp populated with strangers. Kind strangers, yes, but not a familiar face among the crowd.
Read the rest here: Homesick
I first shared this post six years ago when I was nearly two years into this journey and realized that for many of my friends and family Dominic’s death had faded into the background.
It was a date on the calendar for THEM but it was an ongoing experience for me and my family.
I was reminded of how time feels very different to the bereaved this weekend as I spent the third anniversary of my mother’s stepping into Heaven with my grandchildren.
So, so many things remind a grieving heart of the person we miss. So, so many everyday moments transport us back to THAT moment, THAT day.
You might not (I hope you don’t!) understand. It really costs little to extend grace to the grieving. But for those of us whose hearts are broken, it makes all the difference.
❤
You cannot possibly know that scented soap takes me back to my son’s apartment in an instant.
You weren’t there when I cleaned it for the last time, boxed up the contents under the sink and wiped the beautiful, greasy hand prints off the shower wall. He had worked on a friend’s car that night, jumped in to clean up and was off.
He never made it home.
Read the rest here: Grief and Grace:What I Need from Friends and Family
I’m at my dad’s place this weekend for a family funeral.
My great-aunt, the last of seven adult siblings in my grandmother’s family left for Heaven in April. So cousins from around the country are gathering to honor our family legacy and remember, remember, remember.
It’s hit my particularly vulnerable heart (Dominic’s birthday is May 28) hard, hard, hard.
I wake up each morning in the the home where my great-grandparents, my grandparents and my mama lived. My dad still lives here. So. much. life. has transpired within these walls.
Death has been here too.
Grandpapa Cox was laid out in the living room. I remember looking down on him lying there and asking what he was doing, stiff and still in that box.
When I sat in the pew next to more than two dozen folks with whom I share DNA I thought about the hymns and prayers lifted in the little country church we’d all attended at various times. I pictured my gray-haired greatgrandmother, Mama Eva, sitting in the corner by the window-her daughters next to her. I saw my own mama’s casket centered below the pulpit, her hands holding the white rose and Dominic’s photograph.
And here we all are writing new stories while carrying chapters from the old ones with us into the future.
People say, “Let’s not wait until the next funeral to get together” but we almost always do. The most complete family photos tend to be at sad events when folks are compelled to show up and don’t dare offer feeble excuses for not coming.
We have our share of photos from the past couple days. Cousins now lined up with gray hair and laugh lines just like our parents and grandparents before us.
One thing I’ve learned from death is this: you can’t stop time no matter how badly you might wish you could.
For those of us who have experienced child loss we not only mourn what we once had and knew but what we will never have and never know. We lost a future as well as a past.
I’m thankful that most of my folks tend to live long lives and leave for Heaven at a ripe old age.
I’m so sorry that Dominic wasn’t one of them.
Today I’ll breathe and rest and digest the old memories and the new ones.
I’m thankful these good-byes aren’t final.
I’m thankful I’ll see the ones I love sooner than I might imagine.
It’s really hard to wrap my mind around what exactly Dominic is doing now that he’s not here with me. Sometimes I try to create a narrative or a scene or a story line that gives me something to hold on to.
It’s not easy though.
So I absolutely understand why some parents think of their missing child as their “guardian angel”. But that just doesn’t correspond to what Scripture tells me about what happens after death.
I firmly believe that there is a heaven and that my son is there, in the presence of Jesus and the saints that have gone before.
Read the rest here: Is My Son My “Guardian Angel”?
If I find in myself a desire for which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C. S. Lewis
I remember the first time I felt homesick.
I had been away from home before but never without the company of someone I knew well and loved.
This time was different-I was at a sleepover camp populated with strangers. Kind strangers, yes, but not a familiar face among the crowd.
Read the rest here: Homesick
I have doubts some days too.
There are moments when suffering washes over me like a flood and I am swept under with the tide.
It’s then I cling tenaciously to the promise that my wounds, like Christ’s, will one day not only be proof of pain but also evidence of God’s redemptive power.
Read the rest here: On Suffering and Redemption
There are many burdens bereaved parents bear in addition to the heaviness of living with child loss.
Some had unfinished business,
some were estranged,
some had harsh words
or no words at all before their child left them.
And some are oh, so afraid that the child who made a sincere profession of faith in Christ might not be in heaven because he or she was living outside the will of God when they died.
Read the rest here: How Can I Trust My Child Is With Jesus?
I’ve probably thought more about the nature of time in the past seven years than in the fifty before that.
I can vaguely remember contemplating eternity as I drifted off to sleep as a teen but it made my head hurt and I gave up.
Now, though, the relationship between time as I know it and eternity-which I can’t really comprehend-is something I think about often and long.
Years may stretch before me until I join Dominic at the feet of Jesus. But years compared to forever will be but a blink of an eye.
❤
It’s just not comforting for my heart to think my son is looking down on me from Heaven.
I can’t reconcile the idea that he might be watching my sorrow with what the Bible says about Heaven being a place of joy and peace.
Read the rest here: Blink of An Eye
I have been asked how I can believe in what I cannot see or touch. How I can trust a God Who allowed such pain in my life.
It is true that I can’t see God, I can’t prove His existence.
But the fact that I’m still holding onto hope gives testimony to the life of Christ in me.
Read the rest here: Then and Now: How Can Death and Life Inhabit the Same Frame?
I find myself in another season of wordless prayers.
In part, it’s a function of all the reminders leading up to and surrounding the anniversary of Dominic’s death and funeral.
I think I’m also just tired.
That’s something that surprises me again and again-that life after loss keeps coming at me and keeps demanding energy I really don’t have.
This earthly tent is absolutely fading. I feel it every single day.
❤
So often we think of prayer as words.
But prayer can be a heart cry too deep for words.
It can be a groaning soul, longing for release.
Read the rest here: Persistent Longing, Persistent Prayer
thelifeididntchoose 