The hardest thing about this grief process (besides it sucks!) is that is has recently dawned on me that this is my new reality and there is no changing it; I can’t go back.
I realized that there are a lot of things that can go wrong in life from which you can recover. If I dropped out of school, making me a drop-out, I could always go back and finish and I’d no longer be a drop-out. I could marry and divorce and feel as though I had failed at marriage. I could still re-marry and feel like a successful life-partner. Even if Christopher had gone down the wrong path, he could have turned around and made a great impact on the lives of many. Death is different.
Losing a child, however, cannot be overcome; it cannot be undone. That has been a harsh reality these past few months. I’ve described it as a kind of unbelief. It isn’t that I didn’t from day one know that this was permanent, but that reality continues to set in in new an unexpected ways. I will always be a mom of a son who died. There is no way to change this, now, fact.
No matter what I learn about this reality, I don’t like anything about it.
My friends of great faith would probably be disturbed at my words, that this situation can’t be redeemed at least in this life. As I told a friend today, it feels like this life is all that matters. He was kind to acknowledge that the this life is all that matters right now.
I see these friends post statuses on Facebook that would make the great men of faith proud and I am glad for them, but I think that they would be offended to hear me say that those spiritual platitudes don’t work for me anymore even if I still believed every word of them. They are just too simplistic to address a pain as big as the one that I have known for the past eighteen months and continue to experience in new and equally horrific ways.
Anyone dare to argue with me?
Dearest Judy….argue with you???? Not on the wildest bet. Every word you have written hits me in the face with truth…but only someone who is walking the same road can fully understand (and I dare say no one would choose that road willingly). In my own twisted way of trying to identify with your pain, I imagine one of my own children (or grands) being removed from my reality…..the tears come, my heart pounds and I have to pull myself back from a darkness like I really never want to fully know. How do people without faith go through this??? How do people WITH faith do it??? I'm offering no platitudes here…just the acknowledgement that your pain is real and fresh with each new day….and I will continue to lift you up to the One who really knows what it feels like. I'm so glad that you are writing all these thoughts down…..there is a purpose!!!