Wednesday's Woe - "Weighty Problems"? ~by Tommy Prince

Wednesday's Woe

"Weighty Problems"?

~by Tommy Prince

This past week has been quite an interesting and eventful one! On Tuesday, I underwent major surgery to have my prostate removed as I discovered I had a malignant cancer there; hopefully the cancer was contained inside the prostate (I will probably find this out for sure tomorrow), and thus, it got removed.

At the same time I was in the hospital, they had admitted my 85-year-old father (a surgeon who has still been practicing medicine (but not surgery) full-time) who had an emergency rupture of an (unknown to him) bleeding ulcer that suddenly caused him to cough up 3 pints of blood! The doctors cauterized the ulcer, got him stabilized, and sent him back home the day after I went home from my surgery. However, two days later, as my father was preparing a "sermon" to share at his church the next day, he suddenly passed out, and an ambulance was called. But this time, he died before arriving at the hospital!

So today… I get an email from an old friend I've known since high-school. He lives in Nashville, while I still live in Knoxville where we both grew up. He wrote to me via email something to the effect of

"How do you cope with the weighty problems of having cancer and of losing your dad ~ I don't know what to say!"

I immediately responded to him,

"Oh, these problems are nothing compared to losing Merry Katherine!"

These problems are just minor inconveniences relative to losing a child. Those who haven't lost a child see these other issues as borderline devastating, and it sort of stunned me when I read the e-mail.

What??! This recovering from surgery and losing my dad when he's 85 is a minor inconvenience in comparison!

I was talking to an aunt tonight who was checking up on me. She has two friends who have each lost two (2) children, so my aunt is very aware of how Child-Loss Grief impacts you. My aunt is 80, and so her friends are around that age too, and yet my aunt says her friends have never gotten over their losses. So there you go.

Everything pales in comparison to such a devastating loss as Child-Loss; even these 80-year-old mothers have never gotten over it, so they can attest to that!

So, is the picture at the top of the page two faces or a vase? They always say it is a matter of perspective.

But one blogger noted

It seems the more complexity that is introduced to a subject, the more "perspective" there is on it. But he makes the point,

"The closer you get to simplicity, the less room there is for perplexity."

~Slayerment.com

I, for one, think we child-loss grievers are living in that kind of simplicity in which we can see clearly what no one else seems to be able to see...

We live in a different dimension, a different-plane-of-being than everyone else around us. Our reality is always going to be a huge contrast up against what the world experiences and what the world thinks is important.

In some ways, we see some of this experience as rendering us a gift because we know what is important in life.

In other ways we are devastated because we --never again-- will ever be the same…

Picture, thanks to http://www.slayerment.com/blog/2-people-can-look-same-thing-and-have-different-perspectives-and-both-be-right

Also, the perspective vs. simplicity thought is found at the same blog site as the above address