What is the word for when a rose becomes all thorns and no petals? When it languishes in the heat and drops, petal by shrunken, desecrated, dehydrated and burnt petal to the dry earth…but the thorns remain sturdy? You can’t call it a rose at all because there is no flower, but people still call it a rose bush. Why do they still call it that when there are no flowers? What is the real word for a rose bush with no roses?
~ Barren Rose Bush
I’m bleeding but somehow no one can see the blood draining every living breath from my body.
I’m laying here, riddled with bullet holes, bright-red blood pouring from every entry and exit wound.
But they go on about their business. Life is a hurry-scurry event, after all.
No one realizes that they may slide dangerously on the thick, but slippery, scarlet, coppery-tasting substance at any moment if they’re near me.
Be careful not to come near me…
They’re not ignoring. They’re not cold. They’re not cruel.
They just cannot see the flood rising beneath their feet because it isn’t their sea.
I’m bleeding but somehow no one can see the blood draining every living breath from my body.
I’m laying here, riddled with bullet holes, bright red blood pouring from every entry and exit wound.
But they go on about their business. Life is a hurry-scurry event.
No one realizes that they may slide dangerously on the thick but slippery, scarlet, coppery-tasting substance at any moment if they’re near me.
They’re not ignoring. They’re not cold. They’re not cruel.
They just cannot see the flood rising beneath their feet because it isn’t their sea.
I’ve been thinking on something while meditating over scripture I had read today. What came to me caused me to do a little further research and here is what I have found:
We get tired of waiting on God to do something about things that we pray over. I’m saying “we” because I know I’m not alone in this.
I want to pray and have it happen…like, now would be nice, right? When Jesus performed miracles he said “Your faith has healed you; get up and walk” or a similar phrase which pertained to their own infirmity. The healing was instantaneous. Just (snaps fingers) like that. That’s how I want my miracles to go. Just (snaps again) like that.
My initial thought was “He’s in the waiting” and I spiritually rolled my teenage eyes at the Holy Spirit (awful) and whined “Yes, I know God is in the waiting but if He’s here, why can’t He do something about it now?” If you are never, ever a wayward teenager when you respond to the Holy Spirit (God), then I applaud you. I’m still trying to grow up and straighten up (pretty sure I always will be) and sometimes my own spirit misbehaves. Maybe that’s just me.
The interesting thing is what I got in my spirit 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵. Yes, Jesus performed miracles and they happened immediately, upon command. I mean, He was Jesus, after all. But the people who we read about in the Bible who were healed had been struggling for a LONG time.
The paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda had been crippled for 38 years.
The woman with the issue of blood who touched the hem of His garment had been bleeding for twelve years.
Casting demons out of a man and into pigs – the Bible says he had been naked and homeless “for a long time.”
Lazarus had been dead and in the grave for four days when Jesus woke him. I assure you that, to Mary and Martha, four days without him seemed like an eternity. An. Absolute. Eternity. Trust me.
You’re probably seeing a pattern like I did by now but there are many more and all of them after long (or likely long) periods of suffering except for the man whose ear was sliced off when Jesus was detained. 𝘏𝘦 got healed immediately.
These people came to Jesus with faith that He could heal them. If they had faith that He could heal them, at least most of them were probably men and women of faith already. So, they had probably been praying for healing or easing of suffering for a long time.
Enter Jesus, stage left…
When Jesus woke Lazarus from the dead, he had received word six days earlier that Lazarus was very ill and He had been asked to come heal him.
Jesus’ response? No, we’re going to wait two more days. After two days he told the disciples that Lazarus was dead and they needed to go to him now.
“But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.” John 11:4 NLT
He waited for the glory of God. Jesus loved Lazarus so much that he wept over the suffering of Mary and Martha when he arrived. But before that, he waited. He told the disciples “Lazarus is dead. And for your sakes, I’m glad I wasn’t there, for now you will really believe. Come, let’s go see him.” John 11:14b-15 NLT
“For your sakes…” For your sakes… For YOUR sakes…
He waited for his friend to die so that others could experience the miracle that the Son of Man performed. So that they could be witness to His glory. He waited so that people would believe.
*********
I don’t like waiting; I’m no good at it. Well, strike that. I have the Fruit of the Spirit and patience is one of those…so I have it but I’m not well-practiced at it because I don’t like it. (There’s that pesky teenager again.)
But He IS in the waiting. If we are waiting for something to happen, it’s going to be in His timing and there’s going to be a reason for that timing. I don’t know what it is and you don’t either, but He has a purpose in the waiting.
That still doesn’t mean I have to like it…but I do have to trust it. And just maybe that will make patience a little easier to use. (But I’m not praying for patience; I’ll pray for grace. If you pray for patience, He may just give you another reason to need it.)
God fixed my broken pieces, but He did it by way of a soulmate he grew, hand-plucked and then planted right into my life. Now my pieces are struggling to remain attached to each other.
My mind keeps going back, over and over and over, to the moment the doctors walked down the hallway toward me, the disastrous results of my husband’s code blue evident on their faces. I cannot stop feeling what it was like to pleadingly and raggedly cry out “No…NO…NOOOOOOO!!!” and then slide down the wall in sobs as my legs failed to hold my weight.
I think I “knew” when I left his room. I’m a nurse. Not only was he not breathing but he had no airway. In the back of my mind I knew the statistics. I knew the potential and likely outcomes at that point. I knew my likelihood of loss. But I was praying for a miracle. I was holding onto hope like I was falling off of a cliff where the raveling thread of someone’s threadbare sweater was all I had to hold onto. I spent about an hour, give or take, grasping that tiny thread so tightly that it wore shreds into the skin of my palms. Or maybe that was my fingernails.
And then I drowned.
I could feel myself suffocating as I slid down the wall. As one doctor said “go get her a chair” and then told me to tuck my head and breathe. I had been holding onto the ICU visitor phone asking if my husband had been brought over yet when I heard them coming down the hall toward me and I remember seeing the handset hanging from the cord, the cord dangling, as I sat in a crumpled heap on the cold hallway floor. I remember men who had walked toward me, four abreast, all of their faces dour, the one clearly intending to deliver the news just a step ahead of the rest searching my face as he prepared to end my life as I knew it. And I could not breathe. I don’t even know how the cries for mercy made their way out except for the breath of wind that caught in my throat as they approached.
My chest clenched. I don’t know what happened to my heart but if you told me it had stopped beating right then, it would not surprise me. I wonder if that’s what cardiac arrest feels like. I wonder if my husband felt like that, too.
I read a post the other day where a widow said that her husband had “died” once before, during a heart attack, for several minutes while they resuscitated him. When he “died permanently” several years later he wasn’t afraid to go. He had told her that during that first time, he knew exactly when he left his body because the pain stopped entirely, there was suddenly no fear and a sensation he could only define as “euphoria and complete peace” overcame him. He thought to himself that he was leaving this earth and he was okay with it. He didn’t bewail the fact that he was leaving others behind but just knew he was safe and that it was okay. He was okay and they’d all be okay.
I hope that’s what it was like for my husband. Of all of the people I know in this world, my husband 100% deserved peace. He spent many years of his life not having it.
There’s a part of me that wishes he’d know how much we miss him, how much we mourn his loss, but not when I think of what that would put him through. So I guess I just want him to know how much and how completely he was loved and how important he was to people here. I hope he knows now that he made a difference, left a legacy of goodness, kindness, compassion, empathy. And I wish I could see his sweet face when he realized that. I loved the way his face lit up because someone really saw him. When someone saw him as the person I already knew he was.
We take breathing for granted. Air goes in; air comes out. We don’t even think about it most of the time. I’ve had many days since that night, well, that early, early morning, where I had to force myself to inhale. It truly felt like my body wouldn’t do it automatically. Or to exhale just so new air could come in. I remember thinking, theoretically, if I didn’t breathe right now, how long would it take? It felt unnatural to just breathe. Like it feels unnatural to be here when he isn’t.
I believe my heart shattered into a million, zillion pieces that day so how can it still feel like my heart is breaking? Or does it heal a little and the scabs then get ripped open every time a thought crosses my mind, those hundreds of times a day. That cannot be good for healing but I don’t know how to stop it because I never know from which direction the assault will come barreling toward me. It’s completely indiscernible until it hits, until my heart plummets to the ground again beneath blood and ash.
Four of “Lillian’s fish” (our granddaughter’s) died from lack of oxygen due to the hurricane this past week; I had no generator to power the aerator. Scott named them Lillian’s fish (even though we’d had them since early 2022) because she loved watching them from soon after she arrived on the outside of her mommy. We subsequently picked out even more colorful fish to entertain her. The fact that some of those fish died, ones he wanted her to have (albeit at our house because he thought that would make her ask to come visit more) has made me cry more than once. Going to the store where we bought them to get her a few more tomorrow will make me cry again…hopefully I can hold it until I get to the car. I’d rather lose my bladder in public than fall apart. People “get” medical issues (like whatever they might assume would cause me to urinate on myself) better than they “get” grief. Grief makes people uncomfortable.
But now, when I say “Lillian, where’s PopPop?” (she is eight months old now,) she turns her head and looks to his picture. That made me cry the first time but kind of makes my heart smile now. I tell her “PopPop loves you, Lillian. That’s Lillian’s PopPop.” She studies his photograph in a way that makes it look as if he is familiar even though she was only just over four months old when he died. It’s like she is trying to remember where she saw him and can’t quite place it, her face so serious and contemplative. It’s a poignant experience because she usually gets distracted so easily but she stares at his photo for a long time without looking away.
And so I breathe. There are moments sprinkled, however sparsely right now, throughout my days that cause me to breathe.
According to my research, Ruach is the word spoken three times in Hebrew scripture for the breath of God. It’s not described so much as a physical being or an entity but as God’s essence that creates and sustains life. Sometimes it is translated as “Spirit of God”, the Holy Spirit.
However, the actual Hebrew term for “spirit,” ruah (notice the similarity) is used 389 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. Ruah is translated using three different words: wind, breath, and spirit. Context decides the translation, but in Ezekiel it is often used with dual context, like breath and spirit are the same thing.
So the Holy Spirit IS breath. Not all breathe by nature of the Spirit’s breath, although all are invited to, but when my natural breath fails to sustain me, the Holy Spirit can. Yes, at some point my body will fail and the Holy Spirit will leave my earthly domain as my own spirit exits, but when my mind no longer wants to breathe, I have a backup generator as a Christian. I didn’t have to go to Lowe’s and pay a hefty sum for this one as it was bequeathed to me and all I had to do was accept the gift.
If you’ve ever been through a high-force hurricane, you know the value of a good generator. And, oh, have I been living in the eye of a hurricane these past almost-four-months. I’ve been living on the strength of my generator ever since the power went out in May.
I’m just going to keep filling up that generator with fuel because without it my life is so very much more uncomfortable…which doesn’t even seem possible but, alas, it is true. It turns out that the Word and prayer are the only fuel it accepts. The dual power generator I have at home (which spontaneously elected not to function following hurricane Idalia this past week) works on gasoline or propane. They’re a lot more expensive.
As you read this, I hope this week finds you healthy. If you are grieving, I hope you have the generator of breath. If you don’t, I know where you can find one for free.
July 21st, 2023
***Trigger Warning*** This post has some graphic imagery related to being a widow at the cemetery. Please read with discretion regarding your own sensitivities in this area.
The cemetery is hard.
People tend to think you should go there a lot, “spend time” with him, maybe that will make you feel closer to him.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it does the opposite.
When I am sitting propped up on pillows in my bed at night, I can close my eyes and listen for his breathing, wait to feel the covers rustle on his side of the bed, catch a smell that reminds me of date nights because I sprayed his cologne on a little throw pillow. It’s an elusive feeling, almost ethereal – like you can almost see him there or, if you close your eyes, turn away and turn back, maybe it never happened at all. Sometimes, I fall asleep now trying to listen, wait, smell….
The cemetery, though…
Everything around me screams that he is gone. All the way gone. No mulligan. No do-overs. No rewind button. No, no, no…
I know that he is not there. Not his spirit. I hope today, when I was there at his grave, that he was deep-sea fishing in beautiful turquoise waters, with a sailfish (the bucket list fish he never caught here) on the end of his line in the great ocean in the sky. I feel sure Heaven has oceans, somehow. Since there must be beaches or us Florida people might be slightly disappointed. (I kid, I kid…)
No, I know he is not there…but I do know that his body is. I saw him in that wretched casket that they want you to think of as having a “beautiful finish” when you’re looking for one to lay them in…so you can put them in the ground inside of it. (Mind you, I know that these people are doing a very difficult job in the very best and kindest way that they know how. The people I dealt with were full of compassion. But nothing in the world would have made me think that any casket that would be “laying him to rest” was beautiful, in any way. I think they would all understand me saying that.) I know this is a lot of imagery. Sorry, not sorry. It’s stuck in my head every single day and you’re reading to find out where my head is these days or because you’re looking for answers as to whether what you see, hear, feel, smell during grief is “normal.” Well, here it is.
As I kneel on the ground beside the place where a few random weed-looking leafy things have begun to sprout up over the dirt that still sits, too recently disrupted to contain grass (note to self: bring grass seed and watering can next time), I know his body is approximately (if folklore is correct) six feet beneath me. He was six feet even. If they’d stood him up in there, he could reach me.
The body, his body, that I used to wrap my arms around and he’d kiss my forehead then rest his chin on my head as his arms, so much physically stronger than my own, wrapped me up in a safety that made me feel as good as the forehead kiss. The body, his body, his chest that I would lay my head on at night and his chest hair would tickle my face but I didn’t want to sit back up. The body, his body, that was the keeper of his voice as he would tell me how much he loved me, that I was the only woman in the world to him, that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that I was talented…and all the things that I felt that day that I was not. He always gave me back things I thought I had lost. He also gave me things I had never even thought to have. Some memories that I will hold like glittering treasure within me.
I don’t have to “sit there and think about” his body being beneath me in the dirt, lest you’re saying, “Try not to think about that part; think about those memories.” As my tires crunch against the gravel when I pull into the gates by the road, these thoughts, the unbidden and unwanted ones, are already coiling around me, squeezing the breath from my lungs. I was here in May and there was a flag laying over him…it’s in my house now. So, as I actively try to think about good things. About where he really is right now, about his smell, his sound, his touch, his face, his eyes….I’m trying…I’m trying…I’m trying…nope. There’s the dirt again. Still there when I open my eyes.
Today I had AirPods and my iPhone. There is zero cell service where he is but I have all of the important songs downloaded so I can listen offline. I played music and, although it made me cry, with harsh sobs that hurt my throat and squeezed my chest and weakened my knees until, there I was, down on the ground with them in the dirt beside him. I stay there so long that my legs begin to have pins & needles from kneeling so I pull them around front and cross-cross them, always ready to leave but never ready to leave. So more music. More memories. More crying. But maybe distracted from the dirt a little bit. I look up to the sky, knowing God sees my tears and counts them, saves them. I feel a tear slip off of my chin and watch it drop to the mound of dirt below me. It makes me think of the movie Tangled. It reminds me of when Flynn Rider died in the end and, as she cried, Rapunzel’s tear dripped onto his chest which began to glow as he returned to life. I randomly think that if his chest started glowing, I couldn’t see it from up here and I wouldn’t even know…at the same time that I remember that cartoon movie are cool but the caricatures can do things we never can. Not ever, ever.
The sobs have stopped. The dirt is still there. But, I feel, somehow, maybe a strangely odd bit better. Like all of those tears, all of those rib-racking sobs, had been hidden away in a pressurized compartment which was becoming too full, the compression becoming too much for the steely outsides. Now that they’ve been released there is room to store them up again for awhile, I guess. I lean back with my hands on the ground behind me and haphazardly wonder whether anyone was in the cemetery witnessing my display. When I walked from the car, I could only see one grave…now there are others all around. I glance furtively around, not because I care if anyone saw my ugly crying, but because there may be someone else who needed their moment of depressurization. No one. But still, it’s time to go.
I had felt dread coming here. I know what it means to be here. I know how it feels to be here. I know he’s here but he’s not here. But now it feels as if I don’t want to leave because I’ll be leaving him again. (Yes, I still know he is not actually here; I cannot control the inert thought pattern. As I said, they do their own thing, coming and going as they wish and I do not own the key to the lock that would keep them out.) When we left my sister’s house after my nephew passed away so that we could drive to a place to stay for the night while the police finished their necessary plundering, she began to cry and said “I can’t leave him here alone.” All I could say was, “Julie, he won’t be alone. They’re going to take care of him.” Because he wasn’t fully gone in her mind yet, and being taken care of was important.
This makes me wonder when I will really, fully believe that he is gone. Gone, gone. The for real, this is it, never going to change, like it or not, imaginary breathing beside you in bed is GONE, gone.
There are times when I fall apart because I think I’ve just realized it, that this is all really real. And then my brain throws out flares and pulls the rip cord that inflates the rescue raft and there’s some kind of chance, theoretically, that this is all just an awful dream. *pinch*pinch*sighhhh*
Driving across the crunchy, loose gravel is just as hard going out as it was coming in. It’s for a completely different reason but I can’t describe it. I’ve not said one word to him while I was here. Because he’s not here even though he’s here. And if I want to talk to him, I’ll do it in our bedroom at home because it feels more likely that, if there were holes in the floor of Heaven, that would be the place he’d most likely hear me from. I hope he only ever hears the “I love you”s and “I miss you so much”s, not the sobs. I would never want him to be as sad as I am, not ever. I guess now he never, ever has to be.
I love you, baby. I miss you so, so much. One way or another, we’ve got this, K? See you later.
July 19th, 2023
I don’t know how to adequately explain the immensity, the all-encompassing grip, the sustained continuity of grief. When someone has never experienced a loss of this magnitude, they cannot understand the way that it trips you up hundreds and hundreds of times every day…even after what seems like a very long time to everyone else.
The most seemingly ridiculous or innocuous things bring me to tears. I’m not sleeping well again, (see my last post) so I know that has something to do with why I cannot seem to keep the tears behind my eyelids lately…at least part of it. But despite valiant efforts to remain a statue of fortitude and strength, my efforts are struck down constantly by vague references that, for me, are enormous catapulted stones headed straight for my head.
This morning a friend who is a school teacher posted a meme that probably means something to school teachers but normally I would have just scrolled past. It said “Today is the 200th day of 2023.” That’s it. Just those words. (I’m guessing it’s a teacher thing because I know they usually make a big to-do about the 100th day of school. I don’t know; I may be wrong – but not the point…I digress.)
Immediately, I was devastated – no conscious thought over what this post “means” (pretty self-explanatory, right?) or pondering this 200th day’s relation to any other day of the year to understand why one would post it. The very first thing that popped into my head immediately was: “165 days left in the last year I saw him, the last year he was ever here.
You see, when you are grieving, nothing has to make sense. In fact, I feel that many, many things do not make sense in my life right now. I often think about situations like this one, or if you have read my post about my first trip to the grocery store after he died and the infamous pickle jar, and wonder why on earth that upset me so much. Some to the point of literal panic attack. These occurrences seem so insipid, so completely without meaning but, for me, the meaning feels like more than I can handle at that moment.
I was telling my daughter-in-love today that I have only watched television twice since my husband died. We weren’t huge TV watchers but there were a handful of shows that we followed and always watched together in the evenings when he was home. Even when he was away on contract work, sometimes on his day off or in the evening after he got home from work, we would FaceTime or use speakerphone while we each watched the show, trading typical banter that we would have if he’d been home. It was just one of our things. Now, a new season of a show just aired this past week that he and I had been waiting to be released. I can’t watch it. I can’t even bring myself to be interested in what had been happening in the previous season finale that made it seem as if it were taking forever for this next one to come out. It just doesn’t even matter.
One of the times I watched TV alone in the last couple of months was to watch the last two episodes of a series that I typically watched alone when he wasn’t home. That went okay except that, when he was home and I watched it, he’d have humorous input on what was going on. (I have a secret addiction to “Married at First Sight”: don’t tell anyone. I’ve seen every season.) He’d always say something like, “Is it just me or is she really being a drama queen?” Or “Oh, I know he didn’t just say that to her. She should just get out now.” I thought of him as I watched, but mostly with fond memories and kind of chuckling at who is is…who he was…
The second time that I watched TV, I thought, okay, I won’t watch anything I’ve ever seen with him. I’ll watch some random older movie and I should be fine. Except the movie had me full-on sobbing by the time it was over. Let’s just say that the description Netflix provided did not accurately provide enough context to what the movie entailed. (It was “The Choice”; and, in my defense, I did NOT see that it had been written by Nicholas Sparks before I watched it.) Alrighty then…no more TV for me. At least for awhile.
My overarching point here is that what makes me sad doesn’t (and doesn’t have to) make sense.
I’ve had several people telling me lately that going back to work should be good for me because “it will help you get your mind off of things.” Ladies and gentlemen: I completely understand where you’re coming from and why this won’t make sense to you. Before this tragedy in my own life, I feel sure I would have thought the same. But, nothing takes my mind off of things. Like, so far, nothing. He was so much a part of every part of my everyday life that every moment screams the regret of my loss. Am I capable of staying alive without him? I am, even though I admit to moments and sometimes days when I’d rather just not. But normally, in the way the world should be, he was part of everything I did. Hear something funny? Text him. See our granddaughter do something new? Sent him a pic. Question about pool chemicals? Him. Aggravated that they dog chewed something up? Him. Proud of something one of the boys did? Also him. Just having a random, hormonal, funky, sad, off day? Still him. I was able to retire because of him and going back to work just reminds me that he didn’t want me to and that I didn’t have to when he was here. And nothing else I have found so far ever “takes my mind off of it.” Two of my favorite things are having my kids over for Saturday lunch and cheering on Lillian, our granddaughter, when she does a new “trick” (she’s almost seven months old now so she learns new things practically every day now.) Although I’m glad that I have my children and Lillian to count on to do everything they can to cheer me up, neither of those things have brought the same joy since he’s been gone. Kelly Clarkson sings a song that says “Since you’ve been gone, I can breathe for the first time…” Since he’s been gone, it feels as if I can’t. All the time. It’s been two and a half months and it still feels like I have to work to breathe. In…out…in…out…like a respiratory metronome. His absence is as all-encompassing as his presence always was for me. I could have breathed him all day long, every day. Jordin Sparks sings a song that says “Tell me how I’m s‘posed to breathe with no air, can’t live, can’t breathe with no air…” Yes, this one fits; if it’s hard for you to imagine, just YouTube this one:
Tell me how I’m s’posed to breathe with no air…
If I should die before I wake
It’s ‘cause you took my breath away.
Losing you is like livin’ in a world with no air.
I’m here alone, didn’t wanna leave
My heart won’t move it’s incomplete
Wish there was a way I could make you understand.
But how do you expect me
To live alone with just me?
‘Cause my world revolves around you
It’s so hard for me to breathe.
I walked, I ran, I jumped, I flew,
Right off the ground to float to you.
There’s no gravity to hold me down for real.
But somehow I’m still alive inside
You took my breath but I survived.
I don’t know how; I don’t even care.
Tell me how I’m s’posed to breathe with no air?
Can’t live can’t breathe with no air.
That’s how I feel whenever you’re not there.
There’s no air, no air.
Got me out here in the water so deep
Tell me how you’re gon’ be without me?
If you ain’t here, I just can’t breathe….
July 17th, 2023
I’m supposed to be writing my book; that’s the window I should have open on my this computer. I should be writing what God is having me write, and Scott encouraged me to finish…but I’m not. I’m back here again, in the grief journal…and I don’t want to be.
You already know from my previous post that today was, for some reason, a rough day. I don’t know why I have had trouble getting through random sentences without my voice breaking, without having to check my resolve before completing a verbal thought process today. My daughter-in-love said it was because I’m overtired. I have been back to only sleeping three hours a night for about the last three nights or so. But I don’t know if that’s it.
Yes, the stuff came today from Legacy (the organ donation people). And yes, it speaks, once again, to the finality of everything that has happened. Part of me says, “I don’t need reminders; he hasn’t been here for over two months.” While part of me screams, “WHY??? Why isn’t he here now? This is America! Where is the judge and jury who says he cannot come back out?”
But it is not a prison cell where he now resides. I know that with every shred of my being.
So, it is not on the fact that he is not here that I demur. It is on the principle of the length of my remaining. While I do not know (why can’t I know?!?) the amount of time during which I will remain tethered to this plane of existence, my mind reaches to the greatest length imaginable before I will be to join him. The average age of a woman in North America is 81 but the oldest person alive is 116 years old. Jeanne Calment was the oldest human documented (in contemporary time, by the people who don’t consider the Bible to be documentation) was 122 years and 164 days old. They say she is the only person verified to have lived past 120 years. I don’t expect to be the oldest person alive (my genetics won’t likely stand for that) but even if I live to be average, 81, that is 31 years that I still have to live knowing that I don’t have him here and, right now, it feels like I’ll stil be here figuring out how I’m supposed to manage that by myself.
There is something special about when God tells you that He has delivered to you exactly what you need. When He says to you, “Hey…I’ve got this soulmate thing for you on lock over here…got it all figured out. You’re gonna love it…”
Yep…there’s something special about that. He doesn’t actually warn you at the time of when it will all be over or how much longer you’ll have to figure things out without him, after that.
Just so you know…that doesn’t make me wish that I hadn’t jumped in with both feet. Ohhhh, and boy did I jump in! When Scott showed up in my life, I lit up like a Christmas tree. I even have a few friends who could still now attest to that statement being pure fact. No sloshy, mooshy, fake gooey love stuff. The real sloshy, mooshy, gooey love stuff. The kind that some people (use to be me, people) don’t even think really exists. Oh, and there was my mother-in-law who called us “twitterpated.” She had to remind me, at the time, that the word was from Bambi but she was right; it fit. I dare say we were twitterpated for as long as we knew one another. (I have watched Bambi at least three times since then.)
What’s hard is knowing how much God loves you, knowing He wants the absolute best for your life, hearing that He wants you to have fullness of joy and gives you a promise for a hope and a future… and then seeing all of that drift away…or surge away in drastic measure and infinitesimally small timespan, in our case.
***But He did. God has showed me some pretty good promises already and He has come through on them, every time. Even in the times when those promises seemed absolutely impossible. Even when there should have been no natural way for some things to occur. He still came through for me. He still fulfilled promises that I didn’t even believe were for me…surely, they had to apply to people who were better…who were worthy.
For today, I am going to choose to say, let it be…. I don’t know the hour He will call me home. I don’t know what blessings or heartache will occur along the way. What I do know is that my God loves me with wild abandon. I know that, despite my doubt, despite my heartache, despite my loss…He is the rock on which I stand. I can only imagine how hard that is for some to understand…but I am grateful that He has given me eyes to see.
July 17th, 2023
I’m trying my best not to get down in the dumps today. Trying being the operative word.
This came in the mail today.
One day you have a husband, a soulmate…
Two months later, you have a certificate of appreciation and a little box.
Long before I lost my husband, I knew he wanted to be an organ and tissue donor. We had talked about it at length and we both had already registered as such before we ever met. I knew that, one day, if he ever left this world before me, this is what he wanted.
He wanted to do the same thing he spent his life doing when he was here, as a veteran and a nurse: he wanted to help people.
Because of the sudden nature of his passing, organs weren’t an option for donation. But other parts, tissue, corneas, cardiac valves (which are considered tissue, not organs, even though they are part of the heart, and even bone could be harvested in order to provide someone who is still here with a better quality of life.
I know he would be proud of all of the people he was able to help. We don’t know how many people that is yet, but they told us that around the end of this year we will get a letter telling us what they were able to give to someone; we’ll know how many people Scott helped in death. The number of people he helped in life is innumerable.
I should be feeling happy, some kind of pride, for the fact that his wishes were upheld and that this would make him happy. I should be feeling so glad that other people are benefitting from something that he no longer needed. I know I should…
But I don’t. I can never tell when the anger is going to pop up, when it will rear it’s ugly head, let out a loud, throaty battle roar, and come charging at me to hijack my day. Anger, sadness, depression, devastation… none of those guys fight fair and they’re never going to give you a head’s up before they attack. I suppose that would be counterintuitive to their intent to lay you out like a boxer, knocked out cold in the ring.
I wish it would knock me out, though. Beats the chaotic turmoil that screams in my belly right now, the cacophony of all of the not-fun emotions trying to take center stage. Sometimes I think it feels like dying…but it doesn’t. It feels like living…
I’ve been on a “good” streak the last few days so this attack came quite out of the blue. I realized I hadn’t checked the mail box since some day last week. There are a lot of things around here that should be done but aren’t. I’m getting a better handle on it sometimes but others just feel like, “Ahhhh, why bother? What’s the point?”
When I opened the mailbox (which I’m glad I checked because there may not have been much room for mail today, oops) this little box and a separate, large envelope were inside and the matching return address on both of them was a beacon, shouting to me that I was entering the danger zone, a lighthouse warning brightly: Jagged rocks ahead!
Scott had already shed his earthly body before I agreed to let them take him away to the donor center. He didn’t need that stuff anymore. It was of absolutely no use to him whatsoever because he already had a new “body” of some sort. He already had the eternal kind.
But I miss the one he had here so much. I miss his “voice box” and how he had a high pitched laugh when he got really tickled about something. I miss his amber eyes that could be brown or almost golden at times, even though they were also always red, much to his dismay, because of allergies. I miss holding his hand. I miss his bald head. I miss hearing his heartbeat when I would lay my head on his chest, the sound that he always said belonged to me because he would never, ever give it to anyone else. I miss…just him. I miss him.
And so I do not regret the decision to help others with his gift. I just regret what made it happen now. I regret that it was so soon. I regret that our plans, dreams, adventures, and hopes were dashed in an instant…in an unexpected instant. Somehow, even now, I just don’t know what to do with all of that.
I don’t cry as much now usually. It’s almost like your body becomes conditioned to what the day-to-day heaviness, sadness, loss feels like and it just doesn’t respond the way it used to anymore; the tears just won’t even come most times. In the beginning, I cried so much that it felt like if I blinked to hard, plop…there would go my exceedingly dry eyeball rolling across the floor because it just got inadvertently squeezed out by the normal movement of my eyelid. Now, though, it is a blessing and a curse to have adapted to this “conditioning,” I suppose. I’m not as likely to embarrass myself in the middle of the pickle aisle, but it also means that a lot of stuff just seems to live inside of me, instead of escaping to the outside. I’ve apparently just grown accustomed to feeling this way…sort of.
I’ve been staying busy writing. My novel has had me tied up for a little while now and I’m 1/3 of the way finished already. I think that knowing Scott really wanted me to do this, that he felt strongly about the fact that it was something I should do, that it was a calling for me…that seems to have punched the time card on my purpose meter. I was able to suddenly write a full outline and know exactly which direction it will go when I’ve been trying to figure out where to start, what the plot was, where to create drama, etc., for literally years now. And so writing is what I do all day when the kids are at work. I’ve had some “good” days; I use quotation marks because good is relative. Good for me now would have been complete misery in The Before. Funny how your perspective changes.
Writing helps me process emotions and, now that I’ve blogged all about how much it sucked rocks to open these, knowing that they are just another symbol of the brutal finality of it all, I’m getting back on a relatively even keel and will return to my authoring tasks.
July 15th, 2023
FORWARD MOTION…
You’re used to my posts being long so I don’t really feel like I need to tell you…but it is long, so…
I’ve been quiet on the grief front for a couple of days. If you can get past the first two paragraphs, this one is a little different than most of them have been, at least lately.
Many of you are probably saying, “thank goodness…that stuff was heavy and sad.” That’s why I often post grief trigger warnings when I know it’s a particularly rough day with darkness in my thoughts. If you need to steer clear of other people’s trauma, you’ll be forewarned (that’s not what today is about, though.)
Others may be thinking, “Good, maybe she’s finally able to get past it, move along, now…” Oh, how I wish there were a sign that I would ever be a “past it, “ or at least an end in sight to the gnawing heartache that seems to be my constant companion from now on.
But I’m writing about something new today. A couple of days ago, I felt a searching in my spirit as I pondered at least the previous week’s worth of writing. Where was the hope? What was the purpose? I use writing to cleanse my own thoughts and spirit, to relinquish some of the weight that sits like an albatross around my neck throughout the days and nights.
Laying it all out on paper or, these days, inside a Word document journal that I sometimes copy to Facebook, seems to take the chaos, the scrambled thoughts, each one warring for top billing in my head, and bring them outside where it is easier to sort them, like various colored Post-It notes that I can move around, cross out and re-write, or scrunch up with a quiet rustle and toss in the wastebasket, swish! Writing allows me temporary respite from the swirling tornado of thoughts by calming the winds down enough to let me try to make sense of some of them.
So as I meandered through some of my earlier posts and then through the last week, I noticed a stark difference, as I’m sure many of you reading them have, as well. My hope was failing. The farther and farther away I seem to unwittingly and unwantingly drift from the days when Scott was here with me, the deeper it has felt like the cave I was sitting in became. It’s a dark cavern without a light source or company, a cold, damp, uncomfortable place with only jagged rocks to rest upon and no visible way to feed my soul; I must feel my way through everything in the dark. I didn’t want to stay there but seemed to have lost the map to leave since I can never go out through the same entrance I came in. I have to find another way out. There has to be another way.
Here’s a short detour but I promise it will all come together; bear with me.
Many have mentioned, either in comments, private messages, or telephone conversation, that I should use my grief to write a book. That sometimes my writing seems to make enough sense to some of them that they can come closer to feeling what I describe on this journey.
What most of you don’t know is that, for several years now, since Scott first encouraged me to retire from nursing, he had been trying to inspire me to write a book. He’d actually said, “you should be a writer, seriously” before that but when I retired, he told me he felt like it was something I was supposed to do. Like it was something God had called me to but I had never followed through.
I had started a few novels throughout the years before but would get a chapter or two in, or even only a prologue, and then just not know where to go with it. I also had various pages of writing that didn’t start as any kind of book but that I wondered what they were supposed to be, where they were supposed to go from there.
Part of the reason was courage (or lack thereof) and, if I’m being brutally honest with myself, lack of faith. If I truly am called to write an entire book, then God is going to be the one who formulates the direction, the idea bank, the path to completion, and then anoint me to receive the words He pours out over me. I was trying to find faith in myself, in my own abilities, and doing it that way just gave me complete writer’s block Every. Single. Time. And from there it just felt pointless to continue.
I started praying a couple of nights ago, at 2:00 in the morning, actually, for clarity regarding specifically this endeavor. Am I called to do it? Would it be any good? Would anyone ever want to read it? Would I even be able to figure out how to send it to a publisher or make a wise and well-informed decision about whether self-publishing would be the best route to take to gain any readership at all? I don’t care about notoriety; I would just really like people to actually enjoy reading it and be able to feel immersed in it if I’m going to write it.
I don’t know much about marketing. I don’t know much about book editing, cover art, catchy titles, or even if my ideas are really in a niché that would catch anyone’s attention. Actually, the first novel I began, several years ago, falls into two potentially conflicting categories, areas that some people who read one might be offended by the other and vice versa. But for me, they fit together, hand in hand.
I know that’s cryptic but I’m not really ready to divulge any more about the actual book just yet. Just imagine it being like the way that there are Pharisee-like Christians who believe that dirty, lost, unsaved people are too unscrupulous and far-gone to be welcomed in God’s house. But they’re not. Jesus says they’re never too far gone to come to him, period…even on the cross. Anyway, let’s just say it falls somewhere along those lines…sort of. A conflict of alternate beliefs, in a way.
It started when I was sitting in Miami after leaving my nursing job. I was down there to stay with Scott for a week and, although we had five days to spend together, he had to work two shifts in the middle of my stay. I had kept myself busy; there is a lot to do in Miami and I won’t deny taking a couple of trips to my favorite pastry and coffee place for almond croissants, Cuban coffee, and spinach empanadas.
But during one of those days, I was sitting alone in the sweet AirBNB where Scott had been staying during this contract, and truly just out-of-the-blue, something popped into my head that I knew I needed to get down on paper. I grabbed my iPad (which is more like a laptop, with a keyboard), opened a Word Document, and just started to type words that flowed from somewhere I couldn’t describe.
It wasn’t like I was thinking through phrasing, metaphors, context, or plot development. It was like what some people I know call a “download” from God. Some may disagree, and that’s okay and I 100% love and respect every single one of you, too. But I knew that, although there are similarities to some events in my life (they say you write best when you write what you know), most of it just came from what seemed like a whisper.
I typed furiously because the words, the story, were coming faster than I could keep up. It was only a couple of pages long but took me just minutes to write. It felt like a prologue, a middle of the story piece that then flashes back to how it all started. I showed Scott when he got back from work. I eventually showed a handful of friends because I wanted to know if it was intriguing to them, if it drew them in. All responses were, and vehemently, “You have to finish this; you have to write the rest of it. Can I read it when you’re done?”
I’m not tooting my own horn because, in a way, I feel like I didn’t even write it. It was inspired from a seemingly intangible source (maybe intangible l, but known to me). But several times following this, I tried to sit down and figure out where the story was supposed to go from this one little blurb. I didn’t know how to flesh it out.
Despite feeling like I didn’t write the first part, I felt responsible for figuring out the rest and that felt really big, overwhelming. Everything I contemplated felt like something others would think was dumb or boring or trying too hard or (insert any number of negative remarks here). Every time, I walked away from the dining room table defeated. Man…that enemy is a smooth talker, eh? Sucks you right into his vortex where you feel ill-equipped to muscle your way back out of the centrifuge.
After that 2:00 in the morning prayer session this week, I woke up at around 6:00 the next (well, the same) morning and, before even brushing my teeth, getting coffee, or making breakfast for my baby boy, I grabbed my iPad and the mini “desk” I use when I’m writing from bed, and located that very first prologue I had written, hidden in my iCloud files.
Instead of trying to just pick up the story and run with whatever popped in my head or getting stuck because nothing did, I prayed again and then scribbled out an outline. The entire book. Rising tension, climactic discovery, resolving conflict, all of it. There are 24 chapters unless I add or take away during the rest of the writing process. Each of those chapters already has a plan, a road map like I wish I had for this part of my life.
Somehow, knowing that I would be finishing something that my adoring husband always encouraged me to do feels like it needs to be done. He would have been so proud of me if he had been here to see me finish; I’ll regret that one day when it’s done, that I didn’t do it when he was still here to see it, but I will have done something he felt was important and assured me would be successful. And even if I finish writing it but it never goes anywhere, that will be a success. I’ll know I did it.
Maybe it will be successful (by the world’s standards) or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’m called to do it or maybe I’m doing it because it feels good to be doing something for Scott, in a weird way, at least something he had always wanted for me.
I say all the time that I try to tell God that I am not good with subtlety. I pray for neon signs because the more faint arrows pointing which direction I should go seem to go unnoticed too easily for me. I know I probably talk too much and listen too little (quiet in the peanut gallery, please.) I’m not going to try to pretend to know, for sure, if this is His purpose for my life now or if I’m called to write this book because there are people who will like it or even because there is someone out there who needs to hear it…maybe it’s only one person but that one person can glean something from it that they really need in their life.
I’m writing it, though. In the last two days, as I’ve been radio silent here on Facebook (and in my own journal), I have written a complete outline and almost five chapters. I tend to write rough drafts of each chapter then go back and tweak them rather than doing the whole thing and starting over. I have the rough draft of Chapter 5 and am about halfway through the rewrite of it. I’m sure I’ll reread it again when it’s finished and do the same thing with the whole book when it’s complete, but I’m finishing up Chapter five out of 24 today.
Who knows, I may get a second wind (my energy levels still leave a lot to be desired) and start on six.
After it’s finished, I have NO idea where to go with it or what to do next but I’ve decided not to get bogged down and discouraged by that part just now. For today, I am thankful I spent time in prayer and petition two nights ago. I’m thankful for an early morning answer that sparked me to begin doing something that is making me feel productive and, like Scott, would be, proud that I’m doing it.
I know I’m still going to have rough days. Like my dear, wise friend told me, “Grief isn’t a choice; grief just is.” But today I’m able to lift my head and choose gratitude and forward motion in at least one plane of my life. I’m not moving on from Scott, but I’m moving forward, at least for today.
P.S. Look at my handsome hubby. We always had a different kind of smiles when we were together. Life was always good when we were side by side. ♥️
God is in the Outcome 