A stubbed toe - an amputated foot - same thing right?

Well I broke down and ate in the break room today with all of the co-worker friends I used to eat with; something I had really not done in a year and a half. 

It was a colossal mistake.

I only sat there long enough to eat a bowl of soup and was back at my desk in less than twenty minutes.  It was long enough however, to wreck the rest of my day.

The table conversation was about one of the girls’12-year old dogs.  She had four when we used to eat together.  A few years ago we both had a Chihuahua and I made the mistake of asking about hers. She told me that he had died around this time last year.  I told her how sorry I was to hear that at which she replied “I know. It was awful.  Losing him was just as bad as…” and she stopped dead in her tracks leaving the unsaid words hanging in mid-air.  Both of us sat in awkward silence knowing what she was about to say.  I was sitting desperately trying to think of what I was going to do if she had actually said it.  I probably would have stuffed it down, pretended I had to run back to work and brushed it off to keep from making a scene and making her feel bad.  But I was sitting there looking down at my phone staring at the wallpaper into those beautiful smiling brown eyes and what I wanted to do was shove that picture at her and say:  “Really?  Really losing your dog is exactly like losing him? I beg to differ with you.  I’ve had dogs.  I’ve had dogs I really, really loved but at no point would I compare the loss to losing my child.”

I remember sitting and watching the videos in GriefShare and hearing the story from a mother that had lost her two-year old to a drowning, tell about being somewhere in a social situation and having someone come up to her in a gesture of “comfort” and tell her to “Look at the bright-side, at least you won’t have to potty-train him.” What is wrong with people?

A few weeks back I ran into a friend.  She was visibly upset and when I stopped and asked her if she was okay the dam broke and she burst into uncontrollable tears.  I grabbed her and said, “Hey what is wrong?  What can I do? Are you okay?”  Instantly I felt the pain of her grief because judging from her reaction clearly someone important to her --had died. 

Nope.  Turns out she had a fight with her best friend and she had not called her in four days…

I seem to compare every loss against "this" and everything seems small in comparison. However, in all fairness I have sat and thought about what was earth-shattering drama to me just weeks before this happened.  I've thought many times about what I worried about, lost sleep over and even obsessed over.  How I would love to go back to a time of innocence where my biggest worry was getting in the long check out line at Publix or how aggravating it was to get cut off in traffic. Oh to go back to when I was blissfully unaware about how terribly cruel life could really be.  

I could sit down at any given time and cry and scream solid until this time next year and not even put a dent in all I have to cry about.  We could start with how the pain of losing my child, my daughter-in -law and my baby just goes on and on and how still seventeen months later I keep reliving that horrific day or waking up in a panic as I realize it is, in fact, really “real” over and over again.  Or I could cry about my sister and all that she is having to go through as I worry over her every single day as she fights the effects of not only the leukemia but worse still the treatment; overcoming one trial just in time for the next one to hit and sometimes they are overlapping.  Not to mention the frustration of going from doctor to doctor to doctor and the multitude of medication she has to take and all of the diagnostic procedures she is still having to suffer through not to mention the financial devastation of millions upon millions of dollars in medical bills that she will never be able to pay.  Or maybe on a slow day I could cry for the way that Brian’s existing two children are running off the rails trying to deal with all of this and the feeling of despair that I feel as I watch helplessly as their lives slowly deteriorate as this cancer slowly eats away at my family.  Or when I have nothing else to cry about – I could cry about the fact that after a year and a half I still do not even know what happened to my children or why and worse still is the fact that I may never know that.  Or I could cry over the fact that my other son has not spoken to me in almost a year because he has so much anger and nowhere to constructively place it so it landed on me.  So instead of losing one son, a daughter-in-law, the baby I adored – I can, for no real reason that I can understand, lose two. 

My entire family is in shambles and if that is not enough and friends are the subject of the day if I have any tears left I could cry about the friends I have lost as a result of this – not just one but several in all areas of my life.  Church friends, neighbor friends, work friends as well as the one friend that has shared every aspect of my life for the previous 37 years.  And I don’t even have tears enough left over to cry for my loss of her.  Sadly she is way down the list.  I’m sure I will get to it eventually – maybe in eight or ten years I can find time and tears to grieve the loss of that relationship. And then as icing on the proverbial cake there is the loss of my faith as I knew it and the loss of the relationship I have always had with my God and my comforter and really --what can compare with that? 

I have so much to grieve over that I don’t even know where to begin.  It will literally take years to even get through the list and so far I’m not having much luck getting past number one.

Christmas...yet again.

As hard as it is to believe here we are back in December and chose again not to celebrate Christmas  and again this year two days from Christmas Day --sitting at a funeral.  Last year it was two days before Christmas - funeral. My aunt passed away.  This year - two days after Christmas - funeral.  Another aunt passed away.  Last year right after my aunt passed away my youngest sister lost her brother in law unexpectedly.  This year right before my aunt passed away my other sister lost a sister in law unexpectedly.  Both were in their mid 50's.  Last year we had Christmas dinner in the Waffle House and I thought that was bad.  This year we were in the middle of nowhere in South Georgia and there wasn't even a Waffle House.  We ate day-old fried chicken from a gas station! 


Seriously, this has got to stop.  That is about more weird than I can handle.


Tomorrow is New Year's eve.  And keeping with tradition, we are heading to my best friend's house to spend the night.  Again, glad to see the year come to a close but not nearly as glad as last year and I'm not sure why because it did not change a thing. 


Christmas came and went.  We ran away from home as usual.  We went down to South Georgia to see Brian's oldest son.  I didn't want him to be alone on Christmas and it brought me closer to his dad to be with him.  Then we left there and went straight to where the funeral would be held.  Maybe this is God's way of getting me to gather with family for Christmas?  Last year it was my mother's family.  This year it was my father's.  Scares me a little wondering what's coming next Christmas.


On a different subject - I've been thinking about something lately.  Since I remember very little about Brian's Memorial Service and everything about not being at Kara and Paxton's service seemed so wrong.  The three of them separated and even in separate states just seemed so terrible to me.  I've been considering having another private Memorial Service for the three of them - maybe on the second anniversary. 


I want both families to come together and have a service for them as a family.  It is asking and expecting a lot I know and it may not be received very well but I'm just considering it - for closure - for comfort - for having them and us together - for letting go?  It's still in the thinking stages.  And it may not work out any better than the birthday dinner we planned last year for Brian's birthday - who knows?  But that is just a thought that has been steeping lately. 


December was a rough month as bad as I hate to admit it - we kind of went backward a bit.  It was an entire setback month.  Today I talked to my cousin that I'm very close to.  She lost her youngest daughter at four years old. That was in 1977.  We've almost never spoken of it because it very nearly destroyed her.  But today we did.  And I asked her "How long? How long before you actually wanted to live again?"  I know everyone is different and I know everyone grieves at a different pace but no one will even give me an idea of what to expect and I really, really need to know.  "Three years."  She said, "Maybe three years or maybe a little longer."  That gave me a measure of hope ---for about two minutes right before she added: "But I'm better now."  Now!  Now? Dear God.  Did you get that part about it being thirty nine years ago? 


We are in serious trouble.

Two Moms

We first met over a dish of lasagna and I remember thinking as she told a funny story of something that happened to her in Home Depot that she was one of the funniest people I'd ever met and someone I could really enjoy spending time with.  She had me laughing until the tears rolled.  I have always enjoyed a good sense of humor and I imagined what good friends we would be.  Somehow though that never happened the way I had hoped. As our lives intertwined over the next few years things instead seemed formal, polite and well...even kind of weird.

We shared a lot in common but never did I dream that six years later we would again share a meal as well as one of the worst tragedies imaginable.

This past weekend I had dinner with Kara's mom.

This was actually our second such meeting in the past few months.  The first was five hours of an emotional roller coaster as we discussed the events of the past year. Unlike that, this meeting was a Christmas celebration with family.

Ours is a weird relationship that according to her, a lot of her friends and family do not understand. Quite honestly, I'm not real sure I do either. It has been a relationship that by all normal standards probably should never have happened, but I, for one, am so thankful that it did.

We had the worst imaginable common bond. One that would have driven most people to opposite ends of the spectrum.  My son.  Her daughter.  Our baby.  She had anger.  I had guilt.  Neither of us chose those emotions. Neither of us chose our roles in this odd family dynamic. But here we are --clinging to each other to get through this however possible.  And as hard as it is to believe, we seem to find comfort in each other.  And though we completely understand how hard this has been for our entire family we also know that no one else understands the devastation we live with like the only other mother and grandmother involved in this.

Still, the extraordinary graciousness she has shown towards my family has been unbelievable to me. It has gone a long way to provide me peace from the horrific guilt that I have suffered over this.  As I've mentioned before although "we" do not in any way believe Brian could have been capable of this - we are acutely aware that the rest of the world certainly does and just as it causes me discomfort with people in my neighborhood and my small town, it has also bombarded me in heaps of  guilt where Kara's family is concerned. I have enough empathy to walk in their shoes and in doing so I can't help but wonder how she is able to extend the grace towards us that she does.  Only one way that I can see.

What a true example of God's grace and His forgiving love.

Techno Grief

Grief, like everything has also changed with technology. Technology issues were things that were never considered just a few years ago and not something I have heard anything about in all my reading and research – how technology makes it difficult to accept a loss because your loved one keeps turning up in texts, emails, voice mails, phone contact lists, Instagram photos, Youtube videos and worse still --old news feeds.

We really don’t realize on a surface level how deeply ingrained we are in the technology that permeates our lives today.  So much so until it, at times, seems to override reality. It never occurred to me how much our subconscious minds automatically believe what they see through our daily  blasts of technology because we are so conditioned to it.  One instance was when Siri asked me if I want to call Brian.  Now on a logical level I knew that wasn’t possible but for just a split second my conscious mind wanted so badly to believe she/it could until I found myself desperately wanting to try.  And like sometimes I find myself just looking up their phone numbers on my contact list as if seeing it there makes this somehow less true or not real even if it is just for a moment.  Or looking up old texts where even seeing their words typed on a screen makes me hear their voices because I was so used to being able to actually “hear” through their typed words, their inflections and their tone – like finding the silly comments Brian had left on my Shutterfly page and as I read them I could actually “hear” the mood he was in; the lightness, humor and sarcasm in his voice --making it feel like they are actually there on the other end of my computer, email or phone.  And for just a minute – it feels so good, so right and so normal.  It is a break from the sadness and a moment of “before”.   I even find that I look on other emails I’ve sent and I note the date as being before the loss and I grasp for the lightness that was in my own voice and hang on to that free easy innocence that I will never know again.  The voice I had and the person I was “before” when the most asinine things took priority in my life and I spent my days worrying over the lifelong battle with my weight, getting my hair to behave or the fact that my phone wouldn’t hold a charge; when the little petty annoyances of an everyday life were the things that dominated my thoughts.  Or things like fretting over who was and who was not going to come to Christmas or being aggravated at the fact that I had changed the day and time four times to try and fit everyone else’s schedule.  I look at those emails and mentally take myself back to that life before I knew catastrophic multiple loss when I believed God watched over all of my children, when I thought things that horrific only happened to other people.  And I can remember and take myself back to feel the very atmosphere of the "before". 

It seems my entire world is divided into two parts.  There was me before August 23, 2014 and there is me after August 23, 2014.  August 22, 2014 – hair mattered.  August 24, 2014 - life did not matter. June 3, 2014 - I was emailing an editor to see if they had accepted a story I had written.  September 23, 2014 – I am trying to survive one day at a time by writing out my pain, my frustration, my love, my grief and Brian’s story on this blog unconcerned with whether anyone else will ever even read it or not.  March 31, 2014 I was setting up a closing with a real estate attorney to close out the sale and put Brian and Kara’s house in their name.  February 12, 2015 I am emailing a foreclosure attorney setting up a date for the sale of that same house on the courthouse steps.   

There are other things too like the notification not long ago that was on my phone when someone had hacked an old email account and I got an email in my inbox that said it was from Kara – for just one moment I was so happy and just because it sat there in real time saying that it was from her, I had a moment of relief even joy and excitement although on a conscious level I knew better.   And strangely enough, it doesn’t even feel crazy to me???  Sounds crazy.  But it doesn't feel crazy. Not because nothing is crazy now but instead because everything is, if that makes any sense.   My life, my actions, my thought processes, my logic and my reality –everything seems so skewed until even the craziest stuff seems…well… normal.

Home is where the heart is...or at least where it used to be.

We are coming up on Paxton’s fourth birthday and with Christmas but two weeks later I have decided to get an early start on the crying.  I’ve done a little better lately but am having a rough time getting through December.   I had hoped that after the first year of holidays that Christmas could return.  And maybe it will some time but clearly this is not the year.  This year, we are just going to let it slide again.  I don’t “think” I am being rebellious about it.  I hope I’m not.  But I am just not up to it.  Especially since the last Christmas we had together, was the one where Paxton cried out “Nana, I missed you!” when he saw me and brought both me and his Mama to a puddle of tears.  He had just turned two and I had hardly heard him say a single word you could understand and suddenly he throws out an entire sentence.  That is all I have been able to think about for a week.  So when and if Christmas comes back – it is going to have to look a whole lot different.

Thanksgiving however, was actually good --better than I could have hoped.  We had fourteen which is way above our normal Thanksgiving crowd.  I had a long-time friend and her daughter come that I had not seen in twelve years.  That was a pleasant surprise and she and I had a really nice catch up visit for the entire weekend.   

Brian’s only daughter and first grandchild came – a bitter sweet time for both of us.  This was the first time she had been back to our house since the Memorial Service the week after they all died.  It was difficult for her I know but I am hoping that now that that hurdle has been scaled, it will get easier for her and we will begin to see more of her and the baby.   All in all, it was an enjoyable family gathering.

Speaking of family gatherings, this house has always been the family gathering spot.  We have a lot of space and it has been great for entertaining.  Problem is that is what all of us see here now.  Every family thing we have ever had included Brian and for many years – just Brian.  We have had Sunday Dinners, cookouts and egg hunts, fishing and canoeing, swimming and hiking.  We have held every Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day,  July 4 and Labor Day celebration that was held --here. All of the grandchildren learned to swim here, caught their first fish here, climbed their first tree here.   This is where three little boys and me camped out in the back yard - for about two hours before they said, “Nana, camping was FUN!!  Now let’s go inside.” 

There are so many memories here both good and bad.  We’ve been snowed in together without power for a week here during the only blizzard I have ever experienced in over 60 years.  This is where Brian’s oldest son got snake bit on my birthday the year he was two.  The boys worked side by side with Donald and I as we built our very rustic barn from a hundred year old oak tree that fell on the property.  And the boys and Donald spent weeks building an apartment for my mother in the bonus room over a detached garage and that was where she moved into and spent the last four years of her life. 

We have taken 20 plus years of family milestone photographs here including prom pictures, graduation pictures, first car pictures, first fish pictures, wedding pictures and baby pictures. 

This has been the home that has always drawn a crowd and over the years we have hosted well over seven thousand people here for various functions.  Think about that just a minute....

For the last three years of my mother’s life I hosted a party for all of her retiree friends that she worked with for over thirty years.  I have had cookouts and picnics for forty plus friends and co-workers at the last three places I worked at.   We have held over 100 weddings here and at least half-dozen baptisms and of course every single family holiday was here.

For the past twenty three years this is where we have called home and it has truly been the first place that I ever really felt “at home” safe and like I belonged.  The roots we planted ran deep.  Since living here we have loved and then buried twenty years of family pets and here we have experienced every stage of our family’s life – watching as our family has grown exponentially from a family of five to a family of twenty one. 

But this is also where we were when the world came crashing down on us.  This is where I collapsed in a puddle in my bedroom floor surrounded by a steady flow of tears and prayers as together both immediate family and church family learned the details about the loss of my son, my daughter in law and the baby I adored.  

This is where I became intimately familiar with the fuzz in the dark corners of my closet floor as I reeled in shock and tried to absorb all that had happened.  This is where hundreds of friends and family flowed in and out for the following week bringing food, words of comfort, prayers, cards, and support however we needed it.  This is also where I was stared at everywhere we went for the months that followed.  This is where we felt deserted and disillusioned as most of the same friends that had been here that first week seemed to drop off the radar and have never set foot here again.  This is where total strangers and casual business acquaintance asked questions and pressed for details prying open the gaping gashes torn in my heart.  This is where the guy that was so enthusiastic about getting to cut our grass and do some landscaping for us asked around and found out we were “those people” and suddenly refused to show up or take my calls anymore.  This is where for fifteen months my granddaughter and my oldest son have refused to come back to because of the sad reminders that will always connect them to the worst day of their lives leaving me feeling lost and abandoned and not knowing what to do because though that is true for all of us --this was my home.

It once seemed like home to our entire family. 

It's sad that it doesn't feel like home here anymore.  

Girl's Night...

We are back from the concert.  One of the first songs MercyMe sang was The Hurt and The Healer – the song that started it all for me.  Thank you again R.B. That was an awesome concert and I wish I could have shared it with you!  We had a really great time. 

My best friend’s sister just lost her husband a few months ago and the day of the concert was his birthday; their first since losing him.  To keep from being alone on his birthday his daughter came up from Jacksonville, Florida and joined us at the last minute.  We all needed this and it did not disappoint. It was one of those little Divine Gifts that I ended up getting to see the very band that started my new love affair with Praise music.  I have not been to a concert since The Doobie Brothers!  This was a little different …

It was a girl's night.  Turned out to be an overnighter for my daughter and I because the concert was 75 miles away and so we stayed the night in a hotel and met the other girls for breakfast before we headed home on Friday.  There were six of us altogether and we had a really great time of good friends, worship and fantastic music.

And as I listened to the lead singer in the band speak of his childhood of shame and abuse I realized I had a lot more in common with them than just the words to their songs speaking to my heart.  Maybe that was the deeper common bond that drew me to their music. His music is from his heart, a part of who he is. 

Only thing missing that kept it from being a perfect night - was my sister.  But on that subject, Praise God, she got some good news recently and we will certainly take it!  She deserves some good news for a change.

Today is the fifteen month anniversary.  I have been doing better but somehow my spirit always knows what day it is even when I do not consciously think about it.  I dreamed last night that I was in a store in front of a display of hand-crocheted baby things and I had a little matched sweater set with a hat in my hands touching the soft yellow yarn and remembering what it was like to be shopping for and buying precious little baby things for Paxton before and after he was born.  And right there in the store I had just decided to pull up a chair in front of the display and do exactly what I always fear I will do. I sat down in the middle of the store right out in public and just cried. 

Today...

I keep trying to write but for some reason I am having a really hard time; me - the person that can sit down to write a thank you note and ramble on for ten pages.  I cannot think of anything useful or edifying to say.  I never had any plans when I started this blog for how it should go, what it was going to be about, where it was headed or when it would end.  I just needed an outlet so I jumped in and wrote whatever was on my heart that day.  I needed to be able to express the torrent of thoughts that bombarded me daily: the questions, the memories, the insecurities, the inconsistencies, the anger, sadness and confusion as well as the doubts, the lessons, the insights, the epiphanies and the other boggy, mud-covered steps I’ve taken through this process.  But eventually something would have to change.  Either there is growth and progress as I healed in which case it would eventually just ride off into the sunset or it would have to morph into something completely different but you cannot just keep going with a continuous rant about the same old stuff.  And I am certainly not healed and the journey has not ended. Not by any stretch of the imagination but instead it seems to be going in a circle and I really don’t know how much can you write about a journey where the scenery never changes?  

This has been on my heart for several weeks and I actually took the blog down from public view for a week or so.  I had a little feedback from people closest to me asking what happened or blaming themselves and so I put it back up but I suspected even as I did that – that it probably wasn’t for long.  I didn’t want to take it down again without at least letting everyone know what was going on.  I owe you that. 

It is beginning to sound like I am in a phone system loop.  Push one if you would like to hear about my unabated anger, Push two if you want to hear about my latest crying fit, push three if you would like to hear about about my faltering faith, push four if you’d like to repeat this menu…

Better instead of bitter - that's what I'm shooting for and in checking my inner feelings against those of others that have experienced profound loss I do see a few things that I feel that are different from a lot of them.  I am not now nor have I ever been angry at Brian.  I do not see other people that still have their sons or grandchildren and feel jealousy or anger at them and wonder “Why my son and not yours?” That has truly never crossed my mind.  I would not want any human being to suffer this loss. And I can look at it and say instead "Why not mine?" I'm nobody special.

I can see people enjoy their small children or grandchildren and it does not bother me or make me sad. What does bother me however is a child crying over something preventable; a parent that does not seem to appreciate the child they have or a parent doing exactly what I would have done prior to this – taking something away from their child because of rules or to make a point and making that child cry.  That will make me cry in a New York minute and I do have an almost uncontrollable urge to tell them to please just give the baby whatever it wants, just let it be happy and love it while you can.  You could be sitting where I’m sitting.

So here is a progress report – I am functioning. Better.  I laugh but I also still cry – randomly and without warning. I am able to shop and pass the toy department and baby department without the trip ending in a puddle of tears and me running out of the store.  They are still the first thing on my mind when I wake up and the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep when I can sleep but there are more times in between that I don’t dwell on them obsessively. Strangely enough, it is getting more difficult to look at their pictures and videos??? I don't get that.  I still have most of their stuff in my building.  "Most" being the key word here.  I still have Brian’s Pepsi in my fridge and Paxton’s booster seat is still attached to my dining room chair and I am still breaking my nails on child safety latches on my kitchen cabinets.

I am beginning to go out in social situations although still few and far between.  I still prefer to be with family or close friends on a one on one basis.  I still have problems with crowds or large social functions.  But I am pushing myself.  I have tickets to a Mercy Me concert next week with my daughter, one of my two best friends and her sister.  It will be a crowd.  It is a social situation and it is not one on one or just family so that’s a baby step. 

I am planning to have Thanksgiving Dinner this year on Thanksgiving Day and try slowly to stop “pretending” (sneaky denial.)  I am still not planning to celebrate Christmas – I’m just not ready for that and I don’t have a “new normal” version to work with yet.  But again, it’s a start. 

My faith – here, we are still on shaky ground.  I’ve done everything I know to do to hold it together. One corner falls down and I run get a book or two and put under it.  It holds it for a little while and then the other side begins to lean – I go grab some Christian music and a few podcasts from Charles Stanley and carefully prop it up on that side.  We’re good for a week or two and the other side starts crumbling again.  I borrow some faith from my sister to use to fill the cracks, nail another sermon from church to that side and grab a chapter or two from the bible and glue them along the sides.  And I’ve managed to hold it together long enough to go search for more material. It is not a plumb, square or sound structure. And it is just as shabby as it sounds and I hate that but I’m doing all I know to do.  Truthfully, some days I want to take a bulldozer and just mow down what’s left of it and push the whole mess off a cliff.  And actually that may be what it takes. Maybe I will have to let God rebuild it from the ground up because my shoddy patch job trying to put it back together with the scraps I’ve got is just not working all that well.

To me, that is still the scariest part; the saddest part and believe it or not, the worst part of all of this. 

And how much longer I will keep the blog going is still up in the air but for what it’s worth that is where we are today.