Wednesday's Woe - Another Visit to Hell...

Wednesday's Woe

Another Visit to Hell...

We get a call on Monday from our older son, Rollin, asking if we can keep his (now seven-month-old) daughter Ellie for the night on Wednesday. Meanwhile, we need to clear out a room to have a place for our granddaughter to stay… The room we have in mind is packed full of our kids' things, and writings of mine about my precious daughter amidst these 5 1/2 years of grief. We have lived in the same house for the past 26 years, and this room had always been dedicated as our "baby" room, complete with clown on the wall, stars on the ceiling, etc. that our children wanted us to leave there over the years. So, now it is our spare bedroom / our children's college-leftovers storage room. So my husband Tommy decided to try to tackle the room while I worked with my clients.

The idea was to make room to set up the crib that our son, our grand baby's daddy, used when he was a baby. This chore is something we have delayed doing because of the massive amount of "stuff" there. Tommy actually started on it weeks ago in preparation for such a time as this, but he found he could take it on only in doses. But now there's an urgency as she is coming tomorrow night, so Tommy had to face the room in a way he hadn't had to before…

He got a glimpse, he says, of what hell is going to be like. It's not just going through all the possessions nobody wants to deal with, making a decision about what to do with each possession… But then, there was the running into a few things of Merry Katherine's, any one of which could have put him away for days: He ran across a laminated version of her obituary, the newspapers that told of her car crash in which she was killed, and the funeral home's "In Remembrance" bulletin for her funeral service. Then came the coup de grâce. The final blow. Her death certificate staring him in the face...

"Now I've been rendered emotionally semi-conscious, and the room is still not ready for our grandbaby.

"Were this not Ellie coming over, there is no way I would put myself through this."

Welcome to Hell, just another "special" day in the life of the Child-Loss Griever.

Or as Tommy says,

"Welcome to… 'Now, how in the hell am I supposed to function?'"