Moment of Relief and a Smile

In some ways my life hasn't changed at all:

As I cleared the kitchen table this morning of last night's dishes, I removed the tablecloth, which is in desperate need of a trip to the wash.

To remove the tablecloth, I first had to remove the centerpiece, and as I put it back on the table I noticed it for the first time in, probably, days:

A Pier One glass platter,

a tall white candle

and three small sea blue and sand colored votive candles,

given to us by friends when we escaped to Key West at Christmas,

and one unpackaged and half-used roll of dental floss.

Life Used to Be So Hard

Still is.

But yesterday, as I was out walking around the Little Lakes, I saw the most magnificent German shepherd. She loped across the grass like a panther, or a cheetah -- a huge, glossy, shaggy dog of utter gracefulness and elegance.

I think that I might like a little house, with a German shepherd and two cats in the yard.

I know that ease is gone. But a small house and shaggy friends do not seem like so much to ask for.

Just Wrong

Back from my church's women's retreat.

I make stupid choices every day. But once in awhile I make a whopper, one which causes me to be reminded on a second-by-second basis that my life has changed in ways that completely isolate me from regular people having normal interactions with one another.

Everyone else apparently had a great time.

I May Have Figured It Out

No, not death ~ I haven't figured that one out.

But I think I've realized why I have had such a visceral reaction against The Shack, which many generous people in real life and online have recommended to me.

The Shack presents a generous God who cares for all of the people of the world, who lovingly acknowledges the depth both of social sin and individual sin, who exudes forgiveness in situations we would find challenging beyond the possible, and who gently reminds us that we are the creatures and not the Creator. So far, so good.

But in The Shack, as in real life, the child is GONE. She is not coming back. She will never live the life her parents dreamed of for her, she will never marry the young man they would have loved, she will never have the children who would have brought her such joy and made her parents delirious with ecstasy. Her mother will never touch her hair again; her father will never kick a soccer ball down the beach with her again. Her many good gifts will never again be shared with the world. The doctor, the architect, the teacher she might have been ~ she will never be. All of those things which made her uniquely the child she was and the adult she would have become, all of them are gone.

Just gone.

I know that my Musical Friend finds comfort in her vision of the life to come, a vision in which she and her husband will be reunited. She relies in part on the words of her sister, who lost a teenage son and says that when they are together again, none of this will matter.

I find that my own feelings are quite the opposite.

This is the life I want back for my child. This one.

The Shack just rubs my face in the thick, dark reality that it is not to be.

Cross-posted at Search the Sea.

Timing

This coming week-end our church is hosting a women's retreat. Last year I was supposed to make a presentation, but had to cancel because Musical Friend's husband died. This year I offered to try again, since what I had to offer the first time can be re-tailored to fit almost any theme. Other than making the offer and having had it accepted, I haven't participated in the planning.

The theme, as it turns out, is Reconciliation - with self, with others, with God.

W-A-Y too soon for any of that.

* * * * *

I realize that I am feeling a bit resentful. Isolated. Neglected. Sorry for myself.

Our pastor mentioned in last week's sermon (which I read online) that she is doing some reading about grief work. I hate that term, "grief work." My "grief counselor" uses it, too. I think I hate it because it makes it sound as if the journey of grief is a project, something that you could pick up from time to time to work on, like gardening, or a legal brief, instead of the all-enveloping haze that you have to re-negotiate minute by minute.

At any rate, I think that she is doing the reading because she has recently spent a considerable amount of time with a family that has just lost a young child. I wish she had done it six months ago.

Maybe then she would have known that seven months out would be way too early to broach a term like "reconciliation."

* * * * *

Was it my job to be the educator? Our pastors were wonderful ~ spectacular, even ~ in the week after our son died, when there was so much to be done, so suddenly, and in such crisis circumstances. But I had the sense that the long-term process of grieving was not in their realm of expertise.

It was just a matter of intuition.

I suppose that I shouldn't use the word "just" as as modifier. After all, on the Meyers-Briggs, I am 100% intuitive. Not an ounce of concrete affects my approach to life. (Yeah, I'm working on that.)

The thing is, I think I was right.

* * * * *

They keep preaching on the wisdom that emerges from suffering. (Which is why I've been reading sermons online rather than going to church.)

I asked a friend last week, a woman who lost a child many years ago, whether she thinks her experience added to her store of wisdom.

"No," she said.

One would like to think that one might find wisdom, grace, perseverance, courage, in such circumstances.

Perhaps, eventually, such things emerge. Who knows?

No one who understands the cost would want them.

Color

I bought some flowers yesterday. Red and yellow in a vase, arranged in a springtime bouquet from the grocery, they brighten up the dining room.

I used to love to have flowers in the house.

These are the first ones I've purchased since the memorial bouquets that filled every room faded and drooped in September.

When I went out back yesterday afternoon, I looked at the garden beds and felt the smallest stirring of longing. Last fall I had thought, in a vague sort of way, about planting new bulbs, but with getting out of bed being something of a problem, going to a garden center was out of the question. Now, looking at the few scraggly daffodil shoots struggling through the hard ground, I wish that I had been able to do it.

That's something, I thought to myself. Flowers in the dining room and a wish for color and life outside. That's a small beginning.

Backward to the Present

When my boys were born by c-section, the anesthesia didn't work.

I'm serious. The epidural, which had been in place for several previous hours of labor, was compromised, and so the anesthesiologist used a spinal. As my OB began to cut (which I know because I was watching in a mirror), the ineffectiveness of the spinal became apparent. As soon as they boys were out (which I remember) I got a heavy dose of other stuff for the hour of repair work (which I don't).

Weeks later, in great dismay over the general mess made of my so-called pain relief, I called the hospital and spoke at length to the resident anesthesiologist who had participated in the delivery, so that I could understand what had happened. I'll spare you the details.

This morning, at the hospital down the road for my daughter's eye surgery: the anesthesiologist came in and introduced herself as Dr. S. I pondered the last name for a moment and then said, "Are you SS, and did you use to do OB at The Other Hospital?" When she answered in the affirmative, I said, without thinking, "You were there when my boys were born!" "I did some 5,000 deliveries there," she said. "Oh, yes, I was the Epidural Queen."

Well, not exactly. But I didn't mention that.

And then I realized with horror that she might ask me about my boys.

Fortunately, she was too busy chatting with my daughter about where she goes to college than to think to ask her about her brothers, and too busy talking about her own four daughters and where they have ended up than to think to ask me how far away my own children have gone.

Far.

Since she was a resident when my boys were born, then she is likely a few years younger than I am, and since she has four grown daughters and one grandchild, life has been good to her, at least as far as I know.

There is just no place I can go without running headlong into reality.