Stand Rascal Flatts with lyrics

I think that grief isn't a wound that becomes a scar in time...

I think it is a chronic illness that has flare ups and remissions...

I hope as time goes on the flare-ups become fewer and the remissions longer.

Even in remission it is never gone.  Joys are joyful in conscious comparison, always tempered with the awarness that what makes the joy sweet is the bitter tears that are for a time, held under.

I wonder if this is life from here forward.  Never to be free of sorrow, always aware that even in remission the pain is always there to well up again.

So often unexpected, though  sometimes i can feel it coming on... just a sadness that weakens my restraint and I know that I am vunerable.  So I try to avoid everything that might break me.  How is that done?  Hide away, don't be around people because so often they say and do things that stab so deeply.  Don't listen to music.  Don't read books.  Avoid sad stories or sad situations.  Find a way to be numb until some strength returns. 

Is this the way life becomes for everyone as we go through our lives and the sorrows accumulate?


Can remission be sought, brought or bought? Or do we just sit in the dark and wonder when or if life will change for the better or perhaps fear that this is as good as it will get and the future is a threatening expectation for more of the same.

another unmarked grave

Hidden to avoid mockery.

This loss so large, a common secret.

Where hopes and dreams lie with youth,

Dwelling with love grown indifferent

Akin to betrayl. Rejection.

What now but forgetful sleep,

Until the sun brings tearful memories.

Steven Delopoulos- Fire Away

Rob Thomas - Someday (Lyrics)

Hoping rather than Believing

Hoping rather than believing...

Waiting for the change.

Strength and faith?

Seeking a new day.

Are you at the altar

for an unfaithful bride.

Dressed in shamful rags

waiting on redemption.

Hoping rather than believing

on a love longed for.

Trembling for fear of rejection

playing the fool again?

Is the altar empty?

Is it not for me?

Is there a place in love

for the betrayer?

If I walk the aisle that has no end

believing what I know

The fool argues within

that I have gone this way before

A desperate betrayal

Of wanting to believe

waiting on faith and strength

and hoping for something outside of me.

One year ago

Today we visit the stone. 

Leave some flowers, remember and cry. 

The hidden stone that only my husband and I share. 

No one else knows its there. 

No one knows our child's name. 

No one knows our child. 

looking back down the road

 I've been doing the work of grief.


This last Sudnay I went by myself to the cemetary alone.  I sat and applied myself to think and really it was work to be deliberate to think things through a little.  For too long my thoughts have roamed and I have followed without direction.  I investigated some of the situation from the last year.  I made some progress. 


I have two couples in my life that in the recent past have been mentors and friends.  But through the process of grief I have felt abandoned, uncared for, and unloved by them.  I felt that these vital relationships dissolved when I needed them the most.  I have always been the type to try to deliberately not burden others whenever I could.  I try to be a low maintenance friend.  That changed when my baby died and it seemed that these relationships changed because I wasn't able to serve, for the first time, I was in need and they backed away.


Maybe I just have shallow relationships.  My two girlfriends, the ones I have fun with, are still there but if I even beginning to broach the subject, to bring up what happened, to try to tell them how I'm doing, they change the subject. 


One of these is such a dear friend but...  I knew this is how she felt, I had heard hints of it before.  She thinks grief is self-indulgent.  'People' should just get over it.  All people have bad things happen "wah wah wah."  "Buck-up!"   Man that hurts to hear.  Those words cut so deep on my greatest open wound.  My pain mocked by the only one within reach.  Honestly, that sorrow turns to anger and I don't know if I have the character to keep it from becoming bitterness.  


I won't compare myself to Job but I may compare my friend's to his.  Sad.


But, I have another friend... She has always been a cryer.  Not the insincere, manipulative tears but rather the soft hearted tears of compassion.  It is her tears that gave me permission to cry.  Healing tears I've never known.  Her kindness and love expressed to me... I have never known a person so loving... and loving to me.  Only my husband but in this grief, I had to keep some from him since his burden was already heavy with his own grief.  I couldn't let my needs weaken him.


My dear weeping friend loaned me a little book about grief called Good Grief.  It showed me that what I was going through was what I needed to go through.  With that book and C.S.Lewis' A Greif Observed I saw that my grief was necessary and legitament.  I found that part of my grief is the people around me that withdraw, judge and mock my pain as weakness and tell me to get over it. 


Soon it will be a full year since the day I saw my little dead child and it seems there may be a break in the clouds. 


But beyond the grief of the death of my child, the change of my life, the loss of my youth, there is the bitter sting of truth about these relationships.  All this has changed me and I still don't know who I have become.

C.S. Lewis has spoken

I let C.S. Lewis speak for me because there is comfort in not being alone in this experience.  He felt like I felt and expresses is so much better than I can.


It's been alomst a full year now since I almost died giving birth to my dead child.


Yes, that is what happen.  Any of you who have actually read this blog and read it from the beginning have probably speculated on the cause of all this.


Part of me didn't want to share the expericne becuase of fear that my loss would be judge unworthy of the grief expressed.  Not a big enough loss?  Grief measured by what you value the loss to be. 


Strangely, I feel like I need to explain my loss.  That it was more than just a child.  As if that isn't enough.  That this was my third miscarriage in a row.  That I was 21 weeks when I delivered.  That I lost two older children from my home to marriage.  That another child had heart surgeryand that all this happened within nine months.  That with the loss I also saw the end of my life as it has been for more than 20 years.  My identity.  My youth.  Not only did I see my dead child but most likely my last child.  I'm 43 and have been having children since I was 20.  My entire adult life.  I have been pregnant, nursing, changing diapers, sharing a bed, spoon feeding and carrying a child for over 20 years. 


In this great big ugly world, there are those that think I have had too many children.  That there is something wrong with me because I have spent my adult years caring for children.  See, I don't give them away at 5 to public education either.  I home-school them too.  So I have hidden this part of me because I don't want my grief minimized by the rest of the story.   Well you have so many, you have enough, you've done enough, you didn't really need another child anyway.


Yes, I know this voice, it is in the world all around me but also in my head, belittling my grief.  Worst of all, it speaks some truth to my feelings.  I didn't want to be pregnant at 43 so why should I grieve, what right do I have to feel such loss for a child I didn't want. 


I was afraid... afraid the child would be sick or that I would miscarry again. I was embarrassed; I'm too old for this.   I was concerned for the ugly things people would say and think about me and the child.  I hid it for a long time.  I hid the pregnancy until after my first daughter's wedding.  I hid it until I thought I was safe from miscarriage at 16 weeks.  I didn't want to go through the grief of a public miscarriage.  People don't know what to do or say and it is awkward and painful in so many ways. 


Truth be told, I have never wanted children but have never had a child I didn't want.  I am a selfish being and I always thought of the day when I would be free.  Free to do as I pleased without having to consider another's needs, free from being needed.  Now I am at a loss.  I have lost my child, lost my youth, lost my identity.  I am not free from the guilt and pain.  The sorrow and anger are still with me.  The visions of it all still visit me almost daily.  And I am still needed.  I can't check out.  People still want from me and I have nothing to give. 


My heart is hollow and empty like my soul, like my arms.

House of Cards

"God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial he makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down…The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow it is because it was a house of cards. Indeed, it's likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a 'restoration of faith', will turn out to be only one more house of cards."

C.S. Lewis- A Grief Observed

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand." - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed I want to be strong again. But not cold. I want to trust again but I can't forget these lessons learned. I don't want to be bitter but I am broken now.  I am frail.  I am changed. But am I on the other side of it all? Is it time to begin to become something new? If so, what or rather who? And what becomes of my child? Can I continue to love and not mourn? Now what?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'


C.S. Lewis- A Grief Observed

"If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to 'glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood.


The specifically maternal happiness must be written off.


Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild."   C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

Never to kiss, to smell, to caress, to nurse,

 to comfort, to hear, to feel, to hold.

Never.

Stranded.

Some people have said that when someone close to them died that a part of them died too.

That isn't true for me. 

All of me died.

I am not who I was and I am not someone new. 

I am somewhere in between.

Stranded.

Dream a little dream

I lost some friends on this road.


I don't know why.  What did I do or not do?  I needed them the most and they just weren't there anymore.  Sad and then angry but mostly hurt.




This morning I woke from a nightmare.  Someone had hired a hitman to kill me. She was an older lady, she seemed familiar but she was moving and I was watching what she was doing so I didn't see her face full on. She managed to jump me and had me on the floor.  She fired two shots into my head.  I tried to play dead but I couldn't stop moving... there was no blood or pain and I was afraid she would finish me off with a point blank to the back of the head.  I tried to decide if I wanted to fight or just take the bullet.  I grabbed her and got her gun away from her.  It was jammed.  The trigger was stuck in and the lever wouldn't move. I wanted to see if it was loaded with blanks so I pulled the clip out, there was bullets missing. Maybe this was a test.  All my friends were just outside the house and knew what was going on. They saw me go in and they saw her follow. But one of my friends was sitting at the table watching it all, smirking.  And my 9 year old boy was just there, unconcerned but watching.  I asked why she was trying to kill me.  She was hired.  By who!? I wanted to know.  She wouldn't tell me.  I still wondered why I was alive.  Did she have another gun?  Was this a test?  Was I being watched for how I would handle it.  Were my friends watching to see if I was handling it right?  Would my relationship with them depend on how I behaved right now?  The killer told me to put the 9 year old in front of the TV or in the bathroom.  She picked up a hammer and I knew she was going to try that next.  I still kept asking: Why are you here?  Who hired you?  Why are you trying to kill me?  I realized who she was... She was an older version of me.

A grief observed

I read the C.S. Lewis book: A Grief Observed, years ago.  As one of only a handful of Lewis books I had read, I had not made up my mind about him.  After reading this book I wrote up a report for a publication.  I was horrified by what he had shared in this private journal as he worked through his grief after his wife died. 

Was he saved? 

It was so stark, vicious, angry, hard, cold, hopless and confused.

My daughter who has read much of Lewis's work tried to explain that this was only in his grief that he had written these private and raw journals, that were never meant for public viewing.  She knew his writing and he was indeed saved by her judgement which truely... can anyone really know another's salvation when there is no true assurance for one's self other than desperately hoping it is true?


Today I was told that to grieve in a desperate manner like that of Lewis and perhaps like myself, that it isn't how a christian grieves. 


So to be grieving desperately and then with this instruction to be encouraged to doubt salvation.  The only help a man desperately clings to and tell him it isn't his to have and rip it from his grasp.  You might as well push a drownding man under... But that would be merciful.  Let him struggle and gasp while drifting to and fro, just beyond rescue.


I remember thinking when I read A Grief Observed:  I hoped I would never know for myself of this grief.  I would want the strength to grieve in faith.  Never doubt.  Shed a heroic tear, stoic, an example of how a christian is above that sorrow.  I would be above that desperate, dark, life draining grief that cause the observer to measure my faith by the number of my tears because I am a christian "...and death... where is your sting? Where?  Here on Earth where we have to live with it!" 

I think better in writing

Thats why I'm here.


I think better in writing.  I'm the kind of person that laughs at their own jokes.  Someone told me that was bad manners.  I never knew that and I wish they hadn't said it.  I laugh at my own jokes because I'm hearing them at the same time as anyone else.  As they come out.  That isn't to say that I don't have an internal dialog though.


I find myself trying to shut off that internal dialog.  Avoiding day dreams.  Avoiding spending much time in thought.  My thoughts always fall back to the moment... moments so sureal.  I see it all now as an observer.  I watch myself from over my left shoulder.  Sometimes several feet away.  


I listen to the cries, questions, conversations as panicked nurses rush around. I replay and wonder:  "Why didn't I_____"


I am frightened by the panic and helplessness of my husband.  The fear and shaking in the one who's strength has always been stronger than myself.  I have always thought that if it weren't for him we would have no friends.  The 'friends' just put up with me as part of the package.  Everyone loves him.  I believed that of God as well. God would take care of us because of His love for my husband and children.  I was just part of his situation, his setting.  He lived and moved within his faith and I was a part of his exterior world; like where he lived, his job, the people he encountered.  I was seperate from him.  He can get along without me if he needs to.   And that was okay... as long as he is strong.


So now I have to hide all this darkness because when he sees me weak he wants to know what is in my head.  I tell him I can't share because I don't want to bring him down.  One of us has to be strong and it has to be him.  Whenever I share even a little of this lost and ugly place he always pitches in his struggle.  How selfish of me.  Of course this has been a terrible thing for him ... I feel responsible for his pain and I am terrified by it.  He wants to talk about it and I can't.  If I speak, how will I contain it?

abundant tears

I have not cried everyday of the last year
but I have cried on most of them.

Have I sat and replayed the scenes again every day?
No, just most of them.

Fear, pain, tears, blood, panic, black oblivion,
sorrow, lose, death, emptiness, dark.

Everything changed.

Heaviness.  Doubt.  Consequence.

Emptiness, brokeness, helplessness, loneliness.

Am I angry?

No, not really...


The only one I could be angry with is myself.  That would explain some self-destructive behavior.  Self loathing has always been a part of my understanding.  I know me too well to feel otherwise. I am my biggest obstacle to who I think I should be.


I don't blame anyone but myself for where I am or how I feel.


Blaming God doens't come into play.  Questioning God doesn't come into play.  Questioning what I believe is definately on the table.  Everything, all the time!


I never bought into the "'wonderful life plan."  Accept Jesus and life will be great.  That doesn't play out in scripture or experience.  What I don't get and really is frustrating to the point of raging anger is:  Why am I not stronger?!  Where is the overcomer part?!  Victor?! Conquerer?!


failure. defeated. crushed. shipwrecked. destroyed.


Angry?  Yes.  Angry at who I am, what I am and what I believed.  About God and His people. About myself.


People believe what they want to believe.  I believed that faith would make me strong to overcome.  But I find myself beaten, weak and utterly alone.


Here I am now... broken down on the road.  Not knowing where to go from here.   

Am I angry? Yes, yes I am!

Frail - Jars of Clay

Jars of Clay--Silence

Music as prayer

When you can't speak the words, a song can be a prayer.


I have to sing inside because I fear opening my mouth.  Singing, so much like praying is fearful, when that gate opens the tears flow.  I never used to cry.  I always said it was for the weak or manipulative.  Too many women cry as a tool.  Like fake diamonds, fake tears cheapens them all.  I despised those tears, attributing them as hollow, weak, cheap and in turn, now to myself.

Grey's Anatomy - The Music Event - Grace

drive by

When you see someone broken down, do you ever stop?  Do you take a second glance?  Do you even look as you fly by? 


Why don't you stop?  Is it because you have nothing to offer?  Are you simply too busy?  Or do you just not really care.


Would you think to stop and ask that person for assistance? 


What if it was someone you know?  Someone you said you cared about?  Imagine the confusion and pain as they watch you pass them by. 


The time they spend trying to figure out why you made those choices.

The more I know the less I understand

I was never the type of person to ask 'why' when something happened.  I still don't ask why because the answer is simply "No."

"No, you will not understand." 

"No, it will not make you feel better." 

"No, it will not help."

"No, it will not change anything."

I know to not ask.  But... there is no relief.  No lightening.  Just this heavy consequence.  Blame?  I only have myself, because really... It isn't what happened to me, it is how I dealt or didn't deal with it.  Right?  The only power I have is what I choose.  That is the real failure and disappointment.  I used to be strong.  Where did the strength go and where did it come from to begin with?  Was it all imagine or was it untested so no absence was revealed until I needed...need it?


Here I sit by the road... I can't see very far in any direction.  I can't remember where I was going or why.  Was I sent, what was the destination or was I running away?  Now I'm going no where and I start to wonder;

 "How did I get here?" 

The phone still rings

Even in the middle of no where it still rings.  I can still be found.  People still ask of me.  They don't seem to know that you can't get something from nothing.  Still they want and so they ask.  The phone goes both ways... Why can't I ask from them?  I have, and they don't say no; they just act like I didn't say anything, they change the subject, they get away.  Maybe part of the problem is I don't know how to ask or what.  Or maybe it is that no one has ever asks so no one knows how to give.  I never did.


I used to be strong, never needy, never a tear.  People are uncomfortable with grief, sorrow and tears.


You find out just how alone you are when you need someone for the first time.


The call today wasn't asking for something... Just a message.  A cold stone is done.  Nothing was asked of me but so much was taken with that short call.

When everything that was isn't.

What does a person do when they find themselves lost in the middle of a journey?  I can't remember where I was going or why.  Here I am surrounded by strangers and few if any seem to notice me here, broken down.  Some are vaguely familiar.  Friend? Family? Maybe they could help me remember.  How did I get here?  Will it always be this way? Can you help me? Rather, will you help me?


It has gotten dark.  It seems I've been here a while, trying to think; "What should I do?"  I used to help others and now I don't know how to help myself.  It all seems blurry now.  Will light and clarity come tomorrow? 


A voice crying out in the dark... "help me! I'm lost."  Like a dream when you scream and no sound comes.  That is my life in this moment.

So the first question that comes to mind is:

"Are friends ever faithful? 

Have you ever had one that didn't betray you?

A relationship that lasts?"