Tag: wife

Rage, Rage, Against the Dying of the Light

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May 26th, 2023

GRIEF TRIGGER WARNING (This means to swipe past this post now if my pain right now is too much for you, especially if music is the trigger for you that it is for me – there’s nothing wrong with protecting your own heart and you should. This one is tough for me so it may be tough for you, too, especially if you’re an empath. Read ahead at your own risk.)

When I wake from nightmares in the middle of the night, praying as I reach for the clock that it will be 5 a.m.or later, that’s when it’s worst, I think. He isn’t laying beside me and I know it before my eyes open because I just saw his face again, not in the way that I wanted to.

It’s worse tonight because I don’t even have the release of tears, of a “good cry.” Sometimes the numb and the gravest sorrow intermingle and then it still hurts deeply because the tears refuse to come and help me let it out a little. I can’t sob over his loss so the anger comes back at some point. I’m not there now, just yet, but I’ve already learned the patterns. I know it’s coming.

Anger protects me even though I hate how it feels. I’ll want to scream. Not a “woe is me” scream but the blood-curdling kind. The kind that says I’m out of control because everything around me is. He was taken from me before we had a chance to finish this dance. He was ripped away when we were still in the prime of our beauty. But I think we would have always been in “the prime.”

I’m not angry at Scott. I’m not angry with God. This world is filled with evil all the way back to the serpent who slithered into the garden. Satan is the god of this world and that’s why I can’t wait to leave here one day, to have all of the people I love in one place, together again, where there is no sadness, no mourning, no loss, no pain. I am not meant to go now, understand me. He left me here because there is still work to do, and if I listen then He’ll show me what it is.

But right now the anger won’t come yet, either, so this numb is only the kind that is silencing but still painful. And so I turn to the only place, the only One, who still guards my heart.

He can handle my sadness. He can deal with my heart wrenching pain. He can bring peace, even though it’s temporary when it comes, for now. I go to the foot of the cross. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, Lord. Lift me above the raging waters that threaten to drown me. Rescue me.

“Take me to the King. I don’t have much to bring. My heart is torn in pieces; it’s my offering. Take me to the throne. Leave me there alone, to gaze upon your glory and sing to you this song….take me to the King.”

This chorus has been in my head all week. I haven’t had the strength to listen to it until now. I’ve heard it many times before all of this happened but never felt it so much, never experienced the raw emotion behind the lyrics until now.

The Bible is the same way. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover before (not always in the order it’s written) and have read many passages enough that I can lipsync them when someone starts to speak a verse. But sometimes God gives me new perspective on what a passage is saying when I am going through different joys or trials in my life. The Bible isn’t static. Oh, His word is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but it isn’t always spoken in the same tone. Different seasons of life will alter the punctuation, the way it is spoken to your heart. If you haven’t read it in awhile, take it out. See what He’s trying to tell you today and, although He won’t say something “different,” you’ll read it in a new light with the changes you’ve experienced in your life since the last time you read it. Ask Him to take you where you need to be and don’t stop after reading one sentence, but let the story of that passage be revealed to you. For me, sometimes I read at first and cannot figure out why this pertains to me, to my situation, but it always comes to me later when that happens.

I know that, one day, this song won’t bring me pain anymore; it will bring me peace. Peace because I will know that even in my darkest hour, He was finding a way to speak to me. Finding a way to reveal Himself. Finding a way to remind me that He is still here and that all I have to do, when I feel empty and have nothing left to give, is to seek Him. To go to the throne of His glory. On that day, when it no longer hurts, this song will represent yet another promise that He always will.

He is here, hallelujah.
He is here, amen.
He is hear, holy, holy.
I will bless His name again.
He is here; listen closely.
Hear Him calling out your name.
He is here; you can touch Him.
You will never be the same.

Forever was Fleeting

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May 23, 2023

I never imagined that grief could feel like this.

I was sad when I lost my Granny. Very sad. I could tell myself that she lived a long life. She wasn’t sick anymore.

I was really sad when my stepdad died. So sad. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s for years and I could tell myself he was better off now, could picture how well he was in Heaven.

When my nephew died, I was heartbroken. I cannot explain the sad because he was healthy and way too young and full of life and beauty and color and noise. And the heartbreak of my sister and brother-in-law took my breath away. Scott was there to walk through it with me, to hold me when I sobbed. To take me to be with them. To join me in every small measure of help we could muster.

I still never imagined grief could feel like this. People keep saying “I can only imagine what this must be like for you.” I know you’re trying to imagine it but you can’t. As hard as you might try, you just can’t. A very precious few friends who have already walked in my shoes can feel it, I imagine all over again, by watching me go through it because they have lost soulmates. They have been where I am today.

I described it to someone as having been given a paralytic before surgery but someone forgets to give you the actual general anesthesia. Someone starts cutting, opens up your body and starts taking parts out, and you can’t even scream or move to tell them you’re feeling all of it. And since you can’t really imagine that in a way that you can feel it, I’m thankful most cannot feel this either.

My sister and I are close but we cannot really comfort each other now. We’ve texted but have only spoken on the phone a few times since it happened. The rawness of my pain and of hers intermingle and pour over us like white hot lava, but a mysterious kind that doesn’t consume anything in its path; it just solidifies and burns continuously, taking your breath once over and over. How did sixteen days steal so much from our family?

My mother-in-law is the strongest person I know right now. She has lost both of her children in less than a year and a half but still finds a way to comfort me and hold me up when my knees no longer want to. And we do not grieve as those who have no hope but, dear God, I don’t know how to wait on that day right now.

Today we do what they call “laying him to rest” but there is no rest for me and he has already been resting for almost two weeks. I doubt I have consumed what would normally be one day’s calories in two weeks and have slept three hours or less per night except one when I miraculously made it to almost five. Everyone keeps telling me to eat and sleep. But even when I eat it returns and sleeping brings no rest. I’m thankful Scott is not in any pain, that his heart doesn’t hurt like mine, but it doesn’t change the fact that my pain is so deep that I feel I cannot breathe. There are literally times when I feel like I have to think to take a breath, like my body doesn’t know how to do it on its own anymore without him.

All of our children and our granddaughter are what keeps me tethered here. Without our boys and our girls, I don’t think I’d bother getting out of our bed…it’s such a huge bed now. Scott’s body was always like a furnace; I used to tell him that he could keep me alive in a desert tundra just by staying/sleeping near me. I imagined yesterday that I would be comforted by being able to put my hands on his face one more time. It wasn’t comforting at all.

I don’t know how to walk through this day. Or all of the tomorrows. Why does this day feel like such a final goodbye when I already know he’s been gone for so long…how is it only two weeks? There will be people there who try to comfort me, people who want nothing more than to ease my suffering. I wish I could make them all feel better by acting like I do…but the life sentence of living without him beside me reaches so distantly into the future.

I will be okay one day; I know that I will although it doesn’t feel like it is possible right now. Like everything else in life, God will give beauty for ashes even in this, as unfathomable as that seems right now. He’ll find a way to use this thing He didn’t cause to bring cause for me to walk a dark path with someone else who hurts. And then He’ll give me the strength to do it.

But today feels like an ending, all over again.

I love you, Scott. I miss you insurmountably.
I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with you. But I realize now that you spent the rest of your life with me and I know that you loved me with your whole heart until the moment you had to go.
Until we meet again, my heart. ♥️

My Grief Journey

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There have been two HUGE losses in my life in the last two months. I don’t know how to recover. The boat feels as if it has filled, already, with so much water, that I’ll never be able to dump enough buckets to keep from sinking.

On April 23, 2023 my 14 year old nephew died…suicide. He was so very young. So full of life and joy. My sister said he was full of color and noise and, with him, it made perfect sense to me. It was so unexpected and shocking. My family reeled from the loss and from the questions…why? My husband and I drove the hour and a half to get to my sister and her family as quickly as we could. We sat in her driveway as police officers and investigators traipsed in and out of her home, documenting the scene.

My sister and her husband were the ones to see him first. They heard a gunshot and ran upstairs to his bedroom, having to kick in the door to get to him. A gruesome scene that no parent should ever have to endure and that will never leave their memory.

We spent the next two weeks with them, making arrangements, fielding phone calls and text messages, helping organize food deliveries and visitors, and just trying to provide any comfort or relief that we could.

I didn’t know then that those were the last two weeks my husband and I would have together.

We went home for my middle son’s graduation from college and then for the couple of days before my husband was scheduled for a “routine” and common surgery. Something our surgeon had performed hundreds of times. The details of what happened are not important at this moment except that my husband died just after midnight following his surgery. Our surgeon was not at fault; there was a complication that is not common but is known to be a risk of this particular surgery. It was a complication that could have been corrected fairly easily but the hospital staff overlooked every warning sign that it was occurring even as we kept begging for someone to help because we, as nurses with a combined 50 years of experience, knew something was not right and we were ignored, treated as if my husband was just experiencing anxiety and I was being an overzealous caregiver as I advocated for treatment for my husband.

I was with him when he coded. I yelled for the nurse to call the code, to get help. I was escorted shortly after to an ICU waiting room where I was told he would be transferred.

He never arrived there. Instead I was approached nearly an hour later by a physician who had responded to the code blue and three other unidentified people, all walking toward me in tandem. He never had to tell me. I saw the look on his face as he walked toward me down the hall and all I remember is screaming “NOOOO!” and sliding down the wall to the floor, a puddle of despair.

And so then my own grief journey began, just fifteen days after my sister’s world had crumbled. I’d walked with her through the beginning of her walk with grief and still had no idea how to keep breathing as I was navigating it myself. My husband was 49 years old. A little younger than I am, even. How did this happen?

I wrote this following passage when my nephew passed away, unknowing that tragedy would soon strike again, and I couldn’t seem to figure out how it had happened. Why? What next? How do I do this? The next few paragraphs are from the day after my sweet nephew died, but also strangely applied the morning I got home from the hospital after my husband dying:

When I put these clothes on yesterday morning, everything was normal. And now I’m still wearing them, but nothing will ever be normal again. It’s irrevocable. 💔 Jesus, help me. Please.

I still don’t understand how you can wake up one morning and everything is “normal”, the day goes the way most of the rest of them go, you’re just living in the beautiful monotony of everyday life…and then it’s gone. The normal is gone, irrevocably, unexplainedly, devastatingly gone. There are why’s that can never be answered. It feels as if the world just stopped, or it swallowed you up, and yet everyone is still moving around, doing normal things, when normal is gone and can never come back. Your heart aches like it’s being squeezed and pummeled and tortured and savagely ripped apart and people you love are suffering in a way that will never, ever allow them to breathe a whole breath again. Terrible, awful things happen to other people, the ones on TV or movies, all the time…but not to us, right?

It was never supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to be this way. There would have been a warning. Someone turn back the clock. Please, please, please, turn it back. Give me time back. Please.

After my husband, Scott, died, I began to use writing as a tool to process my grief, as I often had in the past. What follows in the upcoming posts are the things I wrote about as grief fell over me in wave upon wave, crashing and pounding me into something that felt unrecognizable. The world became unfamiliar. Time didn’t make sense as it somehow moved quickly and agonizingly slowly at the same time. The only way I knew to sort out and process what I was feeling was to write about it, get it down in print so that I could read back over it, change the wording to match the way it really felt, and then wait for the next wave to crest.

My hope in posting this is that, in some way, my thoughts will reach someone who is suffering a similar path and that, as some of these feelings resonate with you, you will realize that you are not alone. You are not “going crazy,” because, believe me, it feels like it sometimes. You’ll realize that the things you’re being forced to experience are normal for this process and, most importantly, that you will live through it.

As I’m typing this introduction, I confess that I am not yet on the other side of this Category 5 hurricane, the storm that still rages over my everyday life. I don’t even know if there is “another side” to come out on. As I begin posting my journal pages to you, two months have passed since he died. Two months since the last time that I saw his face when he was alive and breathing. Two months since the last day he said “I love you, baby,” and I said it back.

In much of these journal pages that will follow, I am speaking myself into healthy patterns of grieving by giving reminders of the One who holds my future and to turn to Him when I am lost, alone, sobbing, screaming, questioning, and distraught.

God didn’t “take him too soon.” Neither of them, actually. I don’t even believe that God caused his death. It was a result of the prevalence of sin in our world, like so many other things that take place here. People who made poor decisions about his care caused it. Lack of empathy caused it. Lack of professionalism caused it. Maybe even some ignorance caused it, although it doesn’t seem that way. The enemy is always seeking ways to destroy those who love Jesus and the willingness of others to engage in sin are ingredients of the perfect recipe.

He almost succeeded with me, in destroying me; he’s still actively trying every single day. Those are all things that I have had to come to terms with forgiving; admittedly, I backtrack on forgiveness at times and then have to lay it all down at the feet of Jesus again. You’ll read of times when my soul cried out in anger comingled with anguish. And you’ll read about how I walk myself back toward Jesus so that I can feel at peace.

My husband knew Jesus. He’s getting to hang out with his own brother, who died just 15 months prior, my step-dad who thought Scott was the cat’s meow, my Granny, whom he never met Earthside but who I know would have absolutely loved him just because of the way he loved me. Scott is living in glory now and I’m thankful for that. He isn’t in pain, isn’t suffering the way we are down here. He is free and is spending his days worshipping. I can’t wait to see him again and get the grand tour.

I hope in reading on, you’ll find a little bit of your own peace. I hope you’ll be drawn to rest in the arms of Jesus when you can find no rest any other way. I hope, in some way, your pain is diminished, even a little, by the words of someone who has traveled a similar path. I hope it feels like I am holding your hand as we manage it together.

In His Love,
Jennifer

Tick Tock…

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VERY IMPORTANTLY EDITED TO ADD:

For those of you just joining the merry-go-round ride that has been my life, the posts up until this one have been about learning to a single mom, learning to be alone, learning to persevere, learning to be okay with just being me, not a part of an us.

And I had finally become okay with it.  I was, yes, somewhat jaded, but I had decided that I was better off alone than with the wrong person.

Then the right person…the only person…came along.  This post was made five days after my very first date with my husband (yes, my second husband but the one who God sent to me,) my soulmate.  Did you know that I met him somewhere around two weeks before and already knew we were meant to be together?  That God was somehow whispering in my ear:  “This is him…now you’re ready…”

I don’t know why words, writing, has only every come to me in darkness; it’s when God speaks to me more clearly, I suppose.  And perhaps I should take that as a hint, now that I think about it.  Maybe I’m just listening more intently in darkness.

If you’re just now jumping in, during my exhaustive grief journey, learning about this thing I am calling my life but have yet to fully understand, I wanted you to know that this was him.  If you go back and look at the dates yourself, there was this huge gap between when I met him and when he unwillingly left me…and that was the time that I wasn’t sad.  The time that I wasn’t in the dark.  The time that I was truly loved.

AUGUST 18th, 2013

Is today a new day? Is a new hour actually at hand? Seconds tick by on the clock of human existence and I wait, still hesitant to believe that a change would ever come.

A standstill has been in effect. A time warp has presided over life and love for what has seemed like centuries…or has it been minutes? No. Time has halted in an effort to thwart the loss of any further tears in the form of love blood lost in the heat of a heart’s battle. Time stopped for me because I became jaded. It stopped because I was lost. How can one go on looking when one knows the consequences of heartache? Of the murderous slaughter of one’s former understanding of “love”? How?

But…well…I digress.

So, has time now begun to move forward again? I am afraid to feel the merry-go-round begin to spin in its ever-forward, mild and perpetual motion. I fear the haunting noise of the childish, happy music and the laughter, feigning joy and bubbling sanguine spirit as the ride speeds slowly upon its course to full speed. And yet the most gentle and benign of all excursions is like a death-defying roller coaster of doom to my pitiable countenance. Who will calm my hysteria? How can my panic be allayed?
Whispering winds float between the whimsical horses: “Sois Courageuse”. There is only one way. Only one source has the influence to overcome past wrongdoing and defy fear itself. “Sois Courageuse” – “Be Brave” The horses in their painted costumes prance merrily around the circuit and I feel a childish amusement returning as I watch. Standing, carefully but feeling just the beginning of a carefree skip, only the rider can choose the mount. Is today really a new day? Is a new hour truly at hand? Where is the clock? How does one know?…