photo credit: unknown
Grief, I am learning, is something that is not a linear experience. It loops over itself time & time again. Like a jumble of tangled Christmas lights. You can't move to the next "knot" until you work out the current one. Only this strand is never-ending.
After an extremely hard holiday season, I realized I had been ignoring one of those "tangles". I had danced around a truth with light words for the past almost 8 months: our son has passed, the disease took him, he went to heaven. So many phrases, & yet never the 4 words of the stark, bone-crushing reality.
Our son is dead.
Hard to read. Harder to say.
I don't know how anyone gets through this. People will always have some words about how to feel God's arms around us. Or to trust Him & have faith. Please hear me, I have faith. Right now, I think that is all I have. How do I know? Because I am sitting in the dark with my shattered heart. I can't see God right now and I don't feel Him. But I know, that I know, that I know He is there.
When the tears don't stop...I know it.
When I can't get up off the floor...I know it.
When it feels as though my heart is as broken as it can be, yet something happens that breaks it in even more pieces...I know it.
I know it because He said it...& if He said it, He will be faithful to His promise.
I know it & I am still sitting here in the dark. That has to be ok for now. He knows and He is here...untangling the tangles.
"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 & 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..." C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed