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Tuesday's Trust
Will Life Ever Move Beyond
"Functional Griever"
for Us Child-Loss Grievers?
Tommy and I were wrapping up a teleconference on child-loss grief with a group of child-loss parents we have gotten to know fairly well. We had addressed the "Top 10 TRUTHS of Child-Loss Grief" as we see them from our point of view. And, as is so typical of child-loss-grief, we had visited the pit of hell with one other in revealing some of the devastations each of us had gone through in losing our child, yet as we were closing the evening with a lighter discussion, we were somehow able to come out of the pit of hell and reach into the heavens of "good" feelings on a more light-hearted note. We were closing the evening with a lighter discussion, when Carol, our interviewer, asked a question, something to the effect of,
"Y'all decide what you want the Princes to address in our next teleconference, and let us know."
I got tickled, and teased Carol by asking the group,
"Wait a minute, some of you are from Oregon, Colorado, some from New York and New Jersey, and Maryland, some are from Florida, Canada, and California...
~ Do y'all know what 'y'all' means?"
Most of us cracked up, laughing at the "language" differences between us. And then we heard a pitiful voice speak out in a very serious tone,
"You all are laughing!"
My heart stopped. From the height of the heavens, my heart dropped back into the pit of hell, immediately feeling this precious mother's pain. I was rendered speechless; Tommy was rendered speechless by the shared pain he too felt with this mother.
Thankfully, a few mothers were able to respond, and attempted to explain,
"Sometimes we laugh when we run out of tears, and there's nothing else to do."
Another said,
"I remember the days when there was no laughter; it will get better for you."
But tell me,
How does the world go on when we've lost our world?
Last night, Tommy had been consolidating boxes of some of the children's things they had brought home from college, and typical of kids, they had just "dumped" their college life in piles in one of the rooms we use for storage. After going through the children's things, and of course, some being Merry Katherine's things, Tommy found himself rendered to tears a few times. So, finally, Tommy decided to take a break. As he walked up the stairs, he heard me talking to my family of origin about the strange dynamics that can take over a family when processing through a will after the death of parents...
He was disgusted ~
How can they get caught up in such trite things when our world has dropped out from under us?
Indeed, it feels like it's an absolute miracle to us when our hearts can step "away" from our grief long enough to be distracted and then actually can get caught up in big laughter!
One difference we see is we can easily fall down into the pit of grief, back to square one, but the difference is we don't stay down in that pit as long...
Can we trust that our lives will ever be anything beyond a "functional griever's" ~ where we are barely functioning, but when we do function, our lives still are consumed with the loss of our baby...?
Can we trust things will get better?
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