My daughter, Fiona, wrote this several years ago, in the voice of her brother who ran ahead to heaven.
I am so thankful for her and so sorry that she has gained this wisdom at great cost.
Some of the bravest, most loving women I know are those who have suffered one of life’s greatest losses. I hope you know how truly beautiful you are.
“Dear Mom,
Read the rest here: From The Child Not Here on Mother’s Day.
When it first happened all I could think about was getting through a minute, then a day and then all the decisions and days leading up to a funeral or memorial service.
There’s no road map.
Even when others come alongside (and many, many did!) there’s just no easy way to navigate that part of the journey.
And then I realized that in addition to all the “regular” days that absolutely, positively break your heart, I had to forge a path through “special” days.
It was overwhelming!
Mother’s Day was especially challenging that first year. Our loss was fresh and we’d had to acknowledge and celebrate two graduations and a wedding was about a month away. How in the world could I honor my living children and also safeguard my broken heart?
We muddled through by having Mother’s Day at my daughter’s apartment co-hosted by some of her sweetest and most compassionate friends. Not a lot of fanfare, but good food, good company and a quiet acknowledgment of Dom’s absence but also my living children’s presence.
It was a gift.
This is my seventh Mother’s Day. Every year is different. Every year presents new challenges and every year things change.
Since discovering there is an International Bereaved Mother’s Day my heart has taken advantage of having a day to think about and honor Dominic and then another day to think about and honor my living children.
That helps.
I wrote this post four years ago but can’t really improve on it so I’ll share it again. I pray that each heart who finds Mother’s Day hard will lean in and take hold of the hem of His garment.
It’s really the only way.
Read the rest here: Mother’s Day as a Bereaved Mother
I’ve spent most of this afternoon crying.
It’s beautiful weather and nothing terrible happened today but my heart is heavy and I can’t shake it off.
I try so hard to identify triggers and personal traits that lead me down this path of sorrow.
Sometimes I come up empty.
I do think it has something to do with all the changes we’ve been forced to embrace.
They feel familiar.
Sudden, unexpected events have squeezed all of us into a narrow place with fewer options than we are accustomed to have available. Jobs lost, schools closed and (what is the deal???) no toilet paper.
A life that used to feel like an open vista of opportunity now feels constrained and burdensome.
I’m limiting my exposure to news and social media but there’s no escaping it altogether and it’s affecting my ability to keep a stiff upper lip.
I guess lack of sleep has something to do with it too. And the fact that someone’s dogs got into my chickens and killed half of them. Death-any death-is awful!
Plus Mother’s Day coming up. It will be the first I’ve spent without one of my children and without my own mother being at least a phone call away.
I would normally try to talk myself out of giving in. But not today.
I’m sitting outside in the extraordinary windy day and letting the tears fall. I think that’s what I need.
I miss my mama.
I miss my son.
I miss life the way it used to be.
I know (really, I do!) that people MEAN well.
I understand the temptation to share cute little sayings like these in response to a bereaved parent’s Facebook post.
Read the rest here: https://thelifeididntchoose.com/2019/04/27/why-didnt-i-think-of-that/
It would be easier, in a way, if it happened all at once.
If the vivid memories of his voice, his laugh, his body language, his sense of humor just disappeared-POOF!-now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. Then I could make a single adjustment.
But that’s not how it is. Instead, the living proof of his existence recedes like a wave from the shoreline, only there’s no returning surge to remind me of the force that was Dominic.
Read the rest here: https://thelifeididntchoose.com/2016/04/18/slow-fade/
In response to something I posted in a bereaved parents’ group a friend used the term “tangible absence” to describe what I was feeling.
She is so right.
When I imagine something I’ve never actually experienced-even when I might say “I miss such and such” it’s not the same as when I’ve had something and it’s been taken away.
I can only miss the imaginary in an ephemeral, insubstantial way. I miss what I once possessed in a tangible way.
Read the rest here: https://thelifeididntchoose.com/2019/04/06/tangible-absence/
Whether surrounded by friends or strangers, I sift through the words threatening to fly out of my mouth very carefully.
Like most of us, there’s a script in my head that doesn’t always bear sharing.
But unlike many, part of my script involves a child that lives in Heaven.
And I’m constantly weighing whether or not I should mention him even though the conversation leads my heart to a memory I very much want to speak aloud. It often makes others uncomfortable, awkward and upset when I do. So sometimes I just don’t.
I hate that I edit myself like that.
Read the rest here: Only Natural
I’ve written before that I am oh, so thankful I had NO IDEA Dominic would leave us that early April morning in 2014.
It would have cast an awful shadow over all those years we were blessed with his presence.
But there are some things I wish I’d known.
I wish I had known how hard it is to conjure up his voice now that it’s been nearly six years since I heard it.
I would have taken more short videos, just to have his laugh, his sarcasm, his deep mellow “Hey!” handy on my phone for the moments when I long to hear it. I wouldn’t have erased the backlog of recorded messages on the landline just one day earlier.
I wish I had known there were so few photographs of us together.
I would have gotten over myself much sooner and stuck my fat bottom in every shot my family begged me to take. I would have made certain there was at least one of him and me on each birthday, at special occasions and when he graduated high school and college. I was always the one taking them, organizing something or just to self-conscious to be in the picture.
I wish I had saved more cards, notes and random bits of flotsam from over the years with his words, his handwriting, his childish drawings.
Just a month before he left us, I cleaned out two decades of home schooling records and carelessly tossed so many bits of him into the bed of my truck, hauling it to the dump. Back then it felt like I was unburdening myself of too much paper and too many frivolous memories. Now it feels like an incalculable loss.
I would have listened more often to the wonderful sound of his drums banging away upstairs.
I took a walk most afternoons and Dominic timed his practice for when I was out of the house because it was so very loud. It was considerate and kind. And I DID get to hear him through the windows as I made my rounds but I really, really wish I’d just stopped and fully appreciated his talent.
I could list so many more ways I’d have arranged life differently-if I had KNOWN.
But I didn’t.
So I make my way through another spring, remembering, remembering, remembering.
Always hungry for more.
One of the things even the most uninformed person understands about loss is that the first birthday, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas and all the “firsts” after loss will be hard.
But one of the things no one tells you about is that a heart will mark the “lasts” just as much.
The last time I saw him.
The last time I spoke to him.
The last time I hugged his neck and smelled the unique fragrance that was my son.
Read the rest here: https://thelifeididntchoose.com/2019/02/15/a-whole-series-of-lasts/
There is something about the song, “Auld Lang Syne” that strikes a chord in the hardest heart.
You don’t have to understand the words to understand the meaning behind them.
“Should old acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne?”
Every new year since Dominic left us my heart screams, “NO!” in answer to that question. We CAN’T forget!
But we do. No matter how carefully I mine the memories, I find the details beginning to escape me.
Read the rest here: https://thelifeididntchoose.com/2018/12/31/new-years-eve-and-auld-lang-syne/
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