Tag: wife

I Just Didn’t Know…but a few things I do know…

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As I closed my eyes to sleep the night before we woke up to leave for your common surgery, I didn’t know it was the last night I would sleep in bed beside you. I would lay in bed next to you…but only after you were gone.

As I opened my eyes that morning, I didn’t know it was the last time I would wake to roll over and touch your arm, see your face, hear you breathing beside me.

As we drove to the hospital that morning, I didn’t know it was the last time we would just chat and be relaxed in each other’s company. I didn’t know I was telling you not to worry, it was all going to be fine, we’d be driving home the next day together and you’d be feeling much better already…when we really wouldn’t. I didn’t even know I wasn’t telling the truth.

When we sat in the waiting room, awaiting someone to speak your name to call you to pre-op, I didn’t know it would be the last hours that would be somewhat “normal” together. I didn’t know we were living on desperately borrowed time. When your parents came to sit with us, to wait with me through your surgery, I didn’t know it would be the last time we were all together…until it was at the funeral home.

When they called from post-op to tell us that the surgery went splendidly well and you were doing well in recovery, I didn’t know…they didn’t know… that they were horribly wrong. As they kept me sitting in the waiting room because they were too busy for visitors in post-op and said I’d see you when you got to a room, I didn’t know that those hours that ticked by as I anxiously waited to see you were part of the last day of your life, save for but less than an hour of the next.

When I saw you smile at me as you came into your hospital room when they wheeled you in and said that you already had less pain, I had no idea how short-lived our relief would be…so very short. I didn’t know that the next hours would be filled with fear, then with the most devastating loss of my life.

When you stopped breathing, I didn’t know yet that they wouldn’t save you. I didn’t know that was the last time I would lay eyes on you…alive.

When they came to tell me you were gone. The absolute forever kind of gone, I knew instantly…every fiber of my being, every inch of my body contorted in pain, knew that life would never, ever be the same. I knew I hadn’t done enough. I knew I should have somehow done more. I knew I’d never forgive myself for failing you.

As I left the hospital, I knew where you were and yet I did not know how to leave your body there alone. I didn’t want to leave your body in that building because then it was real. It was real. It was real. And I could never turn back.

I can’t believe it’s real. I cannot believe it is real. How can it be real when I just didn’t know? I just want to go back to when I just didn’t know.

When I first met you, I didn’t know you would change how I felt about myself. I didn’t know you would make life so much better. I didn’t know you would make me a better person. I didn’t know that I would soon trust you with my whole heart. But I did already know, instantly somehow, that you owned my heart and that God alone had sent you to save me, even from myself. I already knew, in a crazy and unexpected way, that you were finally The One. You had finally come for me. I just didn’t know it would be for such an unbearably short time. I didn’t know.

As I sit here now, I don’t know how to navigate this life without you. It’s been six months and I still don’t know. I’m walking through minutes, hours, days, months, as if in a trance because even though I know you’re gone, I still don’t know. I really feel like I don’t know.

What I do know is that you are not in pain. I know that grief, the definition of grief for me, is the presence of all of the love I want to give to only you but cannot. It is love unrequited. It is love no longer reciprocated. It is painful, to my very core. But I know you are without pain. I know you are experiencing the greatest days imaginable. I know that you will greet me when I arrive and we will still share a love incomparable to all others.

What I do know is that our love has not dissolved. What I do know is that I am still holding onto it until I see you again. What I do know is that, although you are not here to share in it, I love you still. I always will. What I do know is that we were, and we are, soulmates. What I do know is that this is forever, not just for here. I know you are still mine and I will always be yours.

Even If…

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Written December 3, 2023

You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people. Genesis 50:20

I’m trying to ascertain where this is going to fit into my life, my situation, and my grief.

The enemy was alive and well in that hospital when my husband died. He thwarted possibilities for recovery over and over by using the actions (and inaction) of people. He stopped every action that would have turned it around. I cannot count the number of times, the number of decisions, that could have turned this all around and let me drive home together with my husband. I know each and every one of them but they are many. A tidal wave of failures, one right after the other. An indefensible path to an outcome that we can never return from.

I remember praying in the room with him, when he was having trouble breathing, more and more so. Praying “God help him.” Praying with a security guard in the ICU waiting room while they were coding him. For this stranger, I will always be grateful because he spoke words that refused to be plucked from the whirling dervish of panicked thoughts inside my head. When he left to go back to his work post, I remember texting and asking my Daddy to pray and then saying “Jesus, please, help him. Please bring him back. I need him.” Something like those words over and over and over again. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

I do not believe that God chose this path for my husband. I believe He knew it would happen because He is omniscient. I believe He could have stopped it because He is omnipotent. I believe He was with me in that waiting room, with my husband in his hospital room for every terrifying second he was still within his earthly body, and with my mother-in-law as she traveled to be with me, because He is omnipresent.

So why didn’t we get our miracle?

Because God gave humans freedom of choice. He could have forced Adam & Eve to worship him. Made them bow to Him and serve Him. But humans would have then been slaves. If a man or woman tries to force you to love them and stay with them, how much more likely are you to try to get away, to end up hating them? No, He gave us free will.

Part of Joshua 24:15 says “Choose this day whom you will serve…” That day, some people chose wrong. I’m not calling anyone a Satanist. We all choose wrong sometimes. When you have an attitude or are being prideful, you’re choosing wrong. When you are arrogant. When you gossip. When you snap at someone because you’re hangry. We’re all guilty of choosing wrong. Some do more often than others.

For some, even kindness and compassion are difficult to display. And then, mixed in with bad decisions, there are probably just some plain accidents and some ignorance of what to do sometimes…and this time, with us, unfortunately an egregious amount of outright negligence when it came to people, trained and licensed, to whom we entrusted his safety.

There are myriad reasons why he’s not here anymore but it all comes down to the fact that sometimes the enemy wins a battle, already knowing he will never win the war. He (the enemy) knows what the Bible says. He believes in God because, to put it gently, they’ve met. Satan knows Him. He’s just always trying to see if he can sway more people to his side while he’s still got the chance.

For some people, loss does cause a sway. Some people cannot imagine how there could be a good God if people who don’t deserve to die, do. The thing is, God doesn’t cause those things. Satan made sickness, not God. And sometimes faithful people don’t get their healing this side of Heaven. I’m not going to pretend to know what God sees that He allows it to happen. But I do know that what we see is like looking through an old-fashioned keyhole. Our vision is so very limited, just what you can see by putting your eye up to that little keyhole. God can already see the whole world of things on the other side of the door. The full panoramic view. I trust that He loves me even when I don’t understand. I trust that He is for me when all else seems to be against me.

My granddaughter is going to the doctor for shots today; one of her parents will have to help hold her still while she receives them. When my children were young, I took them to the doctor for vaccinations, too. I remember the look on my sons’ faces when they were little. That “I thought you loved me; why did you help them do that to me? You didn’t protect me” look. But I was protecting them. From chicken pox and pertussis and polio. I knew something they didn’t. I knew it would be a moment of pain for a lifetime of protection. I could see what they couldn’t.

As for my husband, glory to God, he is enjoying himself now. There is no pain, no heartache, no loss, no weeping, no disappointment. He went through so much of that in his life and I’m so thankful that he’s free of it all now. That doesn’t change how much I selfishly wish he was here with me.

As for me and my house, we will still serve the Lord. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednago (in the beginning chapters of the book of Daniel) were going to be thrown into the fiery furnace. They told the king that God would save them but then said even if He doesn’t, we won’t worship your idols. We’re still going to worship only God.

God not stopping the tidal wave of events that caused my husband’s demise does not make me hate him any more than my kids, knowing I loved them and cared for them, stayed angry at me after shots. They immediately held onto me afterwards because, even if I allowed something that hurt them, they still knew I was their best protector, biggest fan, and first love.

God still loves me just as he loved my sweet husband. I don’t know why He allowed him to be taken away so young and left me here. I don’t know what plans He still has for me or what purpose He wants me to fulfill but Here am I, Lord. Send me.

I’m always, always going to wish that things had turned out differently. I’m always going to dream about our plans to grow old together, travel, play with grandbabies, and all the things. But even still, I trust that one day I will be okay. I trust that one day He will bring joy and purpose back into my life.

By the time you’re reading this, it will have been a while since it was written. I write because I need you to know that, even when there was wrong done that caused the death of my husband, even though I run a race against anger every day, trying to head him off at the pass with forgiveness, I am still about my Father’s business.

Choose, this day, whom you will serve. I’m still choosing You, Abba God. I’m still choosing You.

Every Single Day is a Wake-Up Call

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I don’t want to cause hurt to anyone who may read this. Whether you’ve been through this before and you’re just further on in your journey than I (and I don’t know “how that works” as you get farther out from where I am now,) or whether you’re reading it going through the same now, or somewhere down the line, I’m farther out and you’re just beginning your journey, I don’t want to cause you pain so ask yourself now if you’re called to read more at this point.

I don’t know who to talk to about this because I do know that people who know me and love me, my kids, my family, my closest friends, they’ll all hurt for me as they watch me hurt. Sometimes I just feel trapped by the need to let all of this pour out but also by the need to hold it in, behind a Hoover Dam type of internal apparatus that keeps anyone else from experiencing it.

Today my daughter-in-love left with my granddaughter, who stays with me during the day while her parents are working or schooling, to go home. My youngest son, who still lives at home, came home from work but left again (like teenagers do) and I sat down, like I always do, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do now, until bedtime.

Today it’s hitting me all over again that I’m alone today and that this is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life…just alone. I sat down to try to watch TV, just noise to fill my house and my mind, but this time it’s not filling anything, even partially. Today it just makes me feel even more empty.

My husband and I used to watch TV together. I mean, we didn’t watch a ton of TV but there are shows we always liked to sit down and watch together, discussing the events, the plots, what would happen next in the series. I still can’t watch any of those programs. But now, even trying to fill my mind with useless stories just feels fake, like even “reality TV” actually is.

It hurts so much to think that this is what I have to adapt to because there’s no going back…and he won’t be back. It’s been five months and my brain still cannot fathom the idea that this could possibly be forever. Even when he was away for work, he always came home. We always talked on the phone or FaceTime multiple times a day while he was gone. He’d have to be at work by 6:30 a.m. so I’d wake up just to talk to him as he got ready and was on his way to work. I haven’t had a day with any part of him except memories for over five months and I just still cannot make my mind accept the fact that he is gone from me until I see Heaven.

I’ve struggled through every 10th of the month since he transitioned to the other side. This month I made a conscious decision to try to be positive. To think of good memories, to honor who he was. I’m trying today to go back to that mindset but I just keep getting dragged back down into the muck. I MISS him terribly. I just miss who we were together and that feeling, that emotion of sadness and despair over never having that again refuses to be challenged.

I know that prayer should be my first decision during times like this but these times, the worst times, are when words to pray are least likely to surface. I do know that the Holy Spirit translates my agony into superfluous prayer, but it always takes time for the comfort to come. The amount of time varies but it is always agonizing until it arrives.

When it does come, I’m able to be grateful for the comfort and some level of peace so I do pray then, praising in the midst of the lighter rain of the storm. I guess I put it that way because it has rained for a lot more than forty days and forty nights here, but there are times now when it’s more like “sprinkling,” or at least less like a deluge.

I know God is here because, even in the sadness when I cannot stop myself from sobbing, I feel him here. He is here and yet the physical absence of my husband feels no less so I cannot resolve the coalescence of those two feelings. It is what feels like the tearing apart of the two that seem to undo me.

Often I feel like I’m not being “a good enough Christian” in how I’m handling this. Understand that, as I admit that, it is not anything I would ever judge anyone else of, only myself. I know fully-well that, if I were listening to someone else say the same, I would admonish anyone else for their overly harsh criticism of themselves. But I cannot escape the feeling that, if I were more faithful, I should just be trusting God to work it all out. Satan screams inside my head that I’m failing while God’s voice is always a calming whisper…if only I could fully interpret His words beyond the noise of the enemy. “You call yourself a Christian but you can’t even believe what you say you do! What a crock. Do you even believe what you keep telling everyone you do???”

Yes. I do. And I’m fortunate to be well-read on spiritual warfare and spiritual attacks. And yet, in the moment when it is I who am standing at the warfront of a barrage of enemy fire, still I fall victim, at times, to his relentless firepower. Even armed with the Word and speaking it aloud doesn’t immediately silence the battle cry.

I say this to you so that, if you, too, feel that you are being held captive, you will remember that Paul was arrested in Caesarea and imprisoned for two years, was shipwrecked, and then spent two more years imprisoned on house arrest in Rome. As a human, albeit a faithful one, he must have experienced spiritual attack because who would Satan have in his sights more than someone who would help write the New Testament. Paul had to have times when He felt alone, dejected, forgotten, and yet he still proclaimed his faith in the midst of it all. Remember that Paul was Saul, who persecuted Christians. Satan has to have screamed his unworthiness to him many times, but Paul persisted in faith.

Persistence is never easy. It means that, despite difficulty, one continues on their original path. Paul continued. While I have no inclination to be compared to Paul’s level of dedication and faithfulness, I am choosing to continue on a path of trust. A friend said to me this week, “faith is easy because it’s specific; trust is harder because it is in the dark.” That has been a resounding message for me this week. Faith, for me, is easy because I have seen evidence in my own life of what it has already done. Trusting that God still has a plan for my future when it feels interminably bleak is harder, but His faithfulness has been true to me in the past.

I’m clinging to that. The future will mimic God’s faithfulness of my past because He never changes. That’s what I’m counting on today.

It Isn’t Their Sea

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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.

The Breath of Life

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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.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

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“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.”

I’ve heard this scripture passage hundreds of times in my life.  The 23rd Psalm.  When I was in about 5th grade, I earned a silver (colored) coin in Sunday School for memorizing it.  It has been somewhat liturgical for me until now.  You say it, you know it, you know what it means.

And then one day you 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 what it means.

Yea, though I walk through the valley (as I’m definitely not on a mountain-top these days) of the 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩….  Suddenly the scripture takes on new meaning.

I am living in the shadow of death.  It looms overhead in everything I do, making the world appear dark, cold, clammy, scary.  Death is a giant, weighty boulder blocking the sun from shining on me.

And the next part goes “I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.”

This is where it gets tricky.  God is with me; of that I have no doubt.  It’s the “I will fear no evil” part that trips me up now and again.  After what happened to my husband, there are 𝚜𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 to be afraid of.  I can’t even list them all but one of them is undeniably a fear of losing someone else in the sudden manner in which I lost Scott.  I’ve always known we’re not promised tomorrow but nothing has ever quite made it as real and as terrifying as this.

I’m trying hard not to live as if there’s a goblin in every corner but it’s honestly not easy.  I watched him go with my own eyes and stood there yelling for people to 𝘥𝘰 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨!!! I cannot go into more detail at this time about the circumstances but suffice it to say that it is the most traumatic situation I have ever suffered in my whole life. As a nurse, I’ve seen a lot of people die and I have cried over most of them either during or later, but this was my person and in this scenario there was nothing I could do to help him. So call it severe PTSD (as the therapist has) but I have enormous difficulty with trying not to be afraid of anything that could happen to people I love day-to-day.

I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.  Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.  Now, this part really was liturgy for me.  I know that there are many references to shepherds protecting sheep in the Bible and I chalked it up to another shepherd reference, which it is, but I didn’t understand what it really meant.

This is what I learned:  The rod and staff can be broadly categorized as tools of protection and guidance, respectively. The rod warded off predators; the staff was a guiding tool with a hook on one end to secure a sheep around its chest. Only the two tools together provided comfort to the sheep.

Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.  Thy rod wards off predators (they are many these days but they are supernaturally being warded off because The Lord is my shepherd.) Thy staff guides me, keeping an arm around me to keep me from straying too far (into anxiety, for one) and showing me how to move next.  They comfort me.

The thing about that is, because sin and evil were invited into our world way back in the Garden, God can ward off predators but evil still has an opportunity to have its day.  If that weren’t the case, my sweet mother-and-father-in-law wouldn’t have lost two sons within 15 months.  So it’s scary.  I AM comforted by the fact that He watches over me and will send angels to fight for me in spiritual warfare, I also know that the devil gets his day sometimes.  He’ll never win the war but there are battles he keeps gnashing his teeth through just to try to get a leg up.  

So I will keep repeating this Psalm because, now that I know I’m actually in the figurative valley of the shadow of death, I need the reassurance that I’m not here alone.  

I feel like I’m living my life between the two gardens. I guess we all are somewhere in between the Garden of Eden, when life feels like paradise and you can’t believe how blessed you are, and the Garden of Gethsemane, where sorrow runs rampant through your veins and you know there is know way out of the pain you are and will continue going through. I think one of the hardest parts for me is that my two gardens met up in one moment of time. One moment he was here and it was still paradise; the next he was gone and I haven’t been able to fully lift my head or my body since.

So, I’m adding in a little bit of John 14 (this part is from the Amplified version because the wording is clarified in just the way I need it):

“I have told you these things while I am still with you. But the Helper (Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor—Counselor, Strengthener, Standby), the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name [in My place, to represent Me and act on My behalf], He will teach you all things. And He will help you remember everything that I have told you. Peace I leave with you; My [perfect] peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid. [Let My perfect peace calm you in every circumstance and give you courage and strength for every challenge.]”

‭‭John‬ ‭14‬:‭25‬-‭27‬ ‭AMP‬‬

You’ll notice that in the bracketed Amplified text it explains “give you courage and strength for every challenge.” It does NOT say “Don’t stress out because I’m never gonna let anything bad happen.” Nope. This part: “Do not let your heart be troubled; nor let it be afraid.”  actually indicates that we WILL have trouble. Let My perfect peace calm you anyway.

His perfect peace has the ability to calm me, to shield my mind from gnawing thoughts that constantly try to invade.  His perfect peace is a forcefield.  I cannot control what is going to happen in the world around me.  But I can know that He gives perfect peace in the midst of immeasurably difficult circumstances.  I’ve felt it but now I need to cultivate it.  I need to focus on not feeding the demon of fear but fertilizing the seed of faith and, from that, increasing my measure of peace, because God does have the power to pour that out over me.

Daniel ought to have been terribly afraid in the lion’s den.  And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.  Moses and the Israelites as they stood before a great sea with enemies charging up from behind while they seemingly had nowhere to go.  But fear was an unnecessary evil (although it most likely still existed) because God’s plan went before them. He calms fears.

The long and short of it is this:  bad things do happen to the best of people.  My testimony to that is my husband and the deplorable way that he died.  But “Do not be anxious or worried about anything, but in everything [every circumstance and situation] by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, continue to make your [specific] requests known to God. And the peace of God [that peace which reassures the heart, that peace] which transcends all understanding, [that peace which] stands guard over your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus [is yours].” Philippians‬ ‭4‬:‭6‬-‭7‬ ‭AMP‬‬

A peace that transcends all understanding.  It’s over and above my head and my pay grade.  It’s a peace that just simply shouldn’t exist in some circumstances but it does anyway simply because He is God.  I’ve felt it.  I want to bottle it up and drink it for breakfast lunch and dinner every single day.

But it cannot be bottled because it has already been written down.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner scripture is my new diet.  If I keep feeding myself then I become less weak.  So why wouldn’t I feed myself?  Laziness? Apathy? Forgetfulness? Busyness? Depression? I still need nourishment.  “I lift my eyes unto the hills.  Where does my help come from?  My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.” Psalm 121:1

For the record, I’m still going to struggle with this.  Being a human makes me susceptible to attacks any time, day or night.  I’m still going to be afraid sometimes.  I’m still going to be angry.  I’m still going to wish it wasn’t like it is.  But I’m going to redouble my efforts to combat those feelings with the Sword of the Spirit.  At least I’m fighting back (for today.)

The Cacophony of Silence

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The sheer cacophony of the unabbreviated silence is deafening.

I’m just indiscriminately drifting, without any method of control, toward an unknown yet unwanted destination.  I may be a nomad progressing forward but I’m still looking back, surveying the path of destruction that will always be behind me now.  But it’s also in front of me; it surrounds me. Yet I’m always still looking back in a desperate hope to see him in the rear view, chasing after me and yelling “wait up!”

Our dreams were a joint effort.  Every single one we had involved both of us.  Any kind of aimless search for a new dream without him feels inconsequential.  It seems now that they were all just hallucinations, pipe dreams never capable of coming to fruition…but how would we have known that?  We were living on the hope of tomorrows adventures that have now faded into oblivion.

I’m an eery stranger to my own life.  I don’t recognize myself anymore, in the mirror or in my heart, and he isn’t here to share my heartbreak over that enormous detail.  He was always here to share my heartbreak and, even as his broke for me, he devised a plan to turn it all back around. Dear God, I don’t know how to turn it back around now. Life has brutally pushed me forward, unwillingly, to where I’m destined to go, whether I like it or not.

I’m living in the constant predicament of yearning and missing in a world where absolutely everything is bittersweet or just bitter…never only sweet.  If it appears it should be sweet, he’s still not here to enjoy it and that allows the bitterness to soak through every fiber of my being.

It’s about so much more than missing his physical presence; it’s about finding myself in the aftermath of a Cat 5 hurricane followed by a trail of tornadoes where trees are wrapped around each other like tumbleweeds in every direction with no clear path in sight.  Finding who I am without him is not only daunting – do I even like who I am without him? – but also seems pointless and disheartening. I feel blinded and deaf in a screaming silence.

God is here. I know He is because I still am. There is no other explanation. I’m not strong enough to stay here on my own, despite everyone telling me how “strong” I am; I know, full-well, that I’m only doing it because God has put life rafts in place to float me past the parts that try to sink me. My sons, my daughters-in-love, my granddaughter, sometimes other family or friends, they are the tugboats, the barges, the canoes, the life rings that glide across the water toward me, hailing me to grab on, to climb aboard the safe vessel that their loving me has built.

It’s funny how no one can hear me screaming.

I was watching a movie recently. Not a sad one; I know better than to wade even deeper into the flood. There was a beach. My husband loved the beach, the ocean, the waves, the sounds, the fishing, the boating. We loved being in The Keys together, paddle boarding the mangroves or fishing the bridges. All I could think was “we’ll never be able to reserve a hotel at the beach together again and just have a getaway.”

That epitomizes pretty much my entire day, every day. Cleaning up after Hurricane Idalia? He’s not here to do it with me. Cooking dinner? He won’t be coming home to eat. Grocery shopping? No reason to buy all of his favorites as I walk past them on the aisle. Trying to sleep? I can’t reach across and just know he’s right there. It’s everything. Ev.Ry.Thing. Every day, all day, a perpetual, rolling tide of agony that refuses to recede more than an hour at a time.

Fortunately, most days I’m good at putting on a happy face. My mask is nearly impenetrable and imperceivable most of the time. I occasionally have lapses in my ability to maintain its stalwart visage but typically it is the picture of perfection and strength. The “picture” of it.

I pray daily for this “strength” that others speak of. I pray for relief. I pray for justice for my husband. I pray for reform in the processes that accelerated his death. I pray for hope…a glimmer of hope. I have big faith in a big and magnificent God and I am working steadily to grow the measure that I have. All of these things are, by human nature, a slow process. I pray for divine hastening. I remind myself that I am not in this world alone when I feel alone in this world.

Be kind, always. You know not what path another is walking, even when you think that you understand it. Some things cannot be presumed or perceived without actual experience. This is an experience I never want you to have.

The Cemetery

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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.

Breathing With No Air

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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….

Psychosomatic

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July 18th, 2023

𝙋𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙘

Well, I’ve finally gone crazy.

(Okay, crazier than usual…)

It seems my brain has found a way to give my body physical symptoms.  Isn’t that fun? 😕

The word psychosomatic even sounds like it means you’ve gone nuts.  It has the word psycho in it, so there’s that.

I’ve developed something called neuropathic dermatitis.  Also known as neurodermatitis.  And dermatitis sounds like there would be a rash but there’s not; there is no physical, outward sign.  Basically, it means that nothing is actually wrong with my skin but my brain tells the nerves in my body “Listen, you’re not okay.”  My brain tries to say that to the rest of me some days, too. 

I start itching in the same couple of places every night, right at bedtime.  And I don’t mean a little annoying feeling where you can scratch or rub the area and it’s gone for awhile.  I mean 𝘴𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦 itching, like I have never experienced before, that makes you want to scratch so hard that you could rip your skin, and then scratching does 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 to alleviate the itch – it doesn’t even stop for a few seconds.  In fact, the worst and most common complication of this diagnosis is skin infection from where people do just that, injure themselves just because they can’t stop scratching it so hard.  It feels like you need to scratch 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 your skin.

Yes, I know, if it itches, DON’T scratch it.  More histamines start dancing around in there and make it worse.  You’ll itch even more.  But you don’t understand this kind of itching.  Creams don’t help it.  Steroids don’t help it.  Oatmeal baths don’t help.  Warm or cool compresses don’t stop it (in fact getting warm makes it even worse somehow.) Antihistamines don’t help it.  

I can’t fall asleep until somewhere around 2:00 a.m. every night and wake up around 5:00-6:00 because I’m itching; apparently my brain is still working overtime in my sleep when I don’t even know I’m stressed.

The most common causative factor (often referred to as “trigger” these days) of this idiopathic disorder is…(drumroll, please…) S͛T͛R͛E͛S͛S͛.  Yep, you read that right.  Stress (also translated as grief in my scenario) has taken over.  It’s in control.  Clearly I am not.

Y’all, I really actually checked my bed for bedbugs (and I don’t GO anywhere to even be exposed to anything like that) because I couldn’t figure out what could be making me itch this badly.  

I’m not using new soaps, laundry detergent, lotions, etc.  There is no rash.  There are no bug bites.  If it’s not currently itching (and so I’m not scratching) then you can’t even see any indication that there is a problem.  But it literally feels like something is crawling around under my skin…hundreds of something’s.  It doesn’t spread anywhere, always the same two spots and always at night.  These are apparently two hallmark signs of this specific diagnosis.  It will occasionally itch a little (same spots) during the day and yesterday I was able to pin those episodes yesterday with times when I actually was more upset and stressed.  Fortunately those times aren’t as bad as at night, only mildly annoying.

WHY AM I TELLING YOU ALL OF THIS?

Because it is real and it was 100% caused by my grief journey.  They can say it is stress-related, yes, but every particle of stress I have right now is related to losing my husband.  I have only mentioned this to a couple of people because it makes me sound like I have either the plague or the creepy crawlies…or that I’m just plain nuts.  I am NOT contagious and there are NO bugs!  I can neither confirm or deny the rest.  I also know that I’ve required a lot of prayer from a lot of people lately and it probably gets old hearing about how screwed up my life is right now.  I haven’t wanted to say that there is “something else wrong with me,” plus it makes me sound like a lunatic and like it is “all in my head.”  I assure you, it’s not; if you could see those places on my skin at night or when I first wake up in the morning, you’d know that there’s more to it but that still doesn’t make it sound any less ridiculous even to me.

I’m getting very little sleep, am beginning to feel delirious at times, have even less control over my emotions (because I’m getting no sleep), and it is beginning to feel like more than I can handle…again.  I was just starting to feel, not “better,” not less sad or lonely or lost, but maybe just as if, well, if I’ve gotten this far then it’s not going to be fun and I’m still going to hate this life without him but it looks like I’m going to do it; I’m going to live through it.  Now…now it just feels like the task got even bigger.  If this is what Paul’s “thorn” was, in the Bible, I know now why he begged to have it removed from him; it would make perfect sense to me now, for it to have been this unexplainable thing that appears to have no reason to occur but, nevertheless, just IS.  (I know a lot of experts believe it was epilepsy but I’m just saying this would have been bad, too.) 

Isn’t it funny how, when you’re grieving, you feel like telling other people how you feel is too burdensome?  Like, if you keep telling them how awful you feel, it’ll just be too much for them and they will avoid being around you?  Heck, I’d avoid being around me right now, if I could, probably.  If you’re someone who is grieving and are having more physical symptoms of that condition than you would care to explain, just know that it is real and that our minds can only take so much before it tries to find a way to protect us.  Unfortunately for me, this particular coping mechanism may take my mind off of grieving temporarily as I claw at my own skin, but not in an effective way; only in a way that feels even worse than it does at all the other times.  And maybe for you it’s not being able to sleep due to insomnia (I had that for the first few weeks), maybe it’s not being able to eat, no matter how much you know you need to (I lost about 12 pounds in the first two weeks and then have continued steadily, albeit less quickly, since then.  Maybe it’s nausea or diarrhea (yep, been there, too).  Or maybe it’s something I haven’t experienced but it’s making you feel like you’re going insane.  Well, insanity is relative, I suppose.  I certainly feel that way sometimes now because I don’t recognize who I am a lot of the time.  The day I went from a “we” to just me…I lost a piece of myself and it feels like it equates to having an essential part amputated.  Like learning to walk again after losing a leg while still having terrible, excruciating phantom pains because your brain often tells your body that the leg is still there when you can look and clearly see that it’s not.  But it hurts anyway.  That change of identity makes you feel a little “crazy” for awhile.  I mean, how is it possible for me to not know who I am?  Still, it feels as if I don’t because I’m so different now.

So, for now, I learn to live with a new thorn and just keep praying daily that it will be removed.  Life was feeling hard enough, impossible really, before this problem came along so I could certainly use a break.  I do know that, even in the roughest nights of the storm, God is still here.  He still holds me in the palm of His hand.  For today, knowing that is enough.  So I just keep swimming…