Wednesday's Woe - No Hits, No Errors, but a Whole Lot of Hurt… ~Tommy Prince

Wednesday's Woe

No Hits, No Errors, but a Whole Lot of Hurt…

~Tommy Prince

I was making a WalMart run. Usually I don't like to see anyone I know when I run errands, but especially this particular day because I was shopping for diapers… not for our granddaughter, but for myself…! Yeah, that's what comes with recovering from prostate surgery!

So, what happened was… in the store, I briefly encounter this guy, recognizing him as a guy that I knew from high school (Yeah, I'm living in the same city that I grew up in), and his son played sports with one of our sons as they were growing up, only his son pursued a professional career in athletics and was called up to the major leagues this summer to play catcher for a professional baseball team. I saw this acquaintance briefly and then he was gone; I began remembering some things about him.

I finished shopping and was leaving the store. As I was approaching my car, I spotted him coming to his vehicle that was parked fairly close to mine. I went over to talk to him. I told him ~ "I've only watched two baseball games this year, yet your son played in both of them, and he was even featured in ESPN Sports Center because of the outstanding plays he made as a catcher!"

As we were talking along and catching up with each other, his question comes back to me, "So what all's been going on with you?" and I haven't seen him in over ten years….

Chronologically, my dad has just died, and I've had a radical prostatectomy in the last few weeks, but I find what comes out of my mouth was,

"Our 19-year-old daughter was killed five years ago!"

It overrode everything, and I heard myself saying how horrible it has been for us. Fortunately he was very kind and told me how sorry he was, and that (the death of a child) sounded AWFUL, and that he can't imagine how bad that is.

We talked about whether or not we go to class reunions, and I heard myself say,

"I don't go very often because this is what would happen -- I would say my daughter got killed, and there's nothing like that for a conversation stopper."

We continued to talk along and ended up on an upbeat note.

So, I walk away from the conversation, glad that it went okay, but feeling so vulnerable. Telling about Merry Katherine's death in a spontaneous encounter like that, and for it to be his first time in hearing the news, effectually exposed my deep woundedess.

This encounter happened on Thursday, but it affected me all weekend. I was depressed all weekend. It's like at some level, I think I have my grief over her death at a "manageable" or at least tolerable level, yet such an encounter tends to blow it wide open.

I was surprised at how I was so powerfully impacted by all (that conversation) in such a negative way. It's like I let the wound out, and it was not going away. And to think, this was actually a positive encounter with a caring dad that, at some level anyway, could "get it."

An innocent conversation with an old acquaintance opens up the woundedness, and it takes three days to get it back to a manageable level. Just a brief encounter, yet I'm down for the count for at least 3 days… And who are those people who think we can somehow be "over" our deep loss? It couldn't get much better than what happened in this impromptu meet-up, yet my heart was sent back to square one…

Picture, thanks to The Compassionate Friends, USA