Saturday's Sayings - Progress in the Healing Journey… - Part Seven

Saturday's Sayings

Progress in the Healing Journey…

Part Seven

Grief gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness."

~C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

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We never really "heal" from Child-Loss Grief and Trauma, but we're always in recovery. We can be in a process of healing, but healing will not completely happen this side of Heaven.

Amidst our Child-Loss Grief and Trauma, when you think about it, we have been assaulted emotionally, physically, and spiritually! We never really "heal" from Child-Loss Grief and Trauma, but we're always in recovery. We can be in a process of healing, but healing will not completely happen this side of Heaven.

~Angie and Tommy

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"The case of a parent losing a child is very special because the most deep-seated protective and nurturant emotions are brutalized. Because this “injury” is so severe to such primitive emotional processes, the grieving parent is likely to feel and express the pain associated with it for the rest of his or her life."

~Dr Joanne Cacciatore

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~Death of a Loved One 

How refreshing that one of our Christian heroes, C. S. Lewis, in his own deep grief over losing his wife Joy, could admit to himself and to us who come after him, the desperate nature of the grief over his loss. Despite naysayers all around you, one of the healthy features of grieving Child-Loss is developing the ability to admit to yourself the desperate nature of your own grief as you learn to accept that life will never be the same, and it becomes a matter then of how you may best cope with that which is overwhelming and often unbearable. 

~~~~~

~Death of a Loved One 

People around us seem to go on unmercifully with their lives as if nothing has happened. Even the sun seems to betray us as it continues to come up every morning even though our own world has come to a standstill. Somehow, in our planting one foot in Heaven with our child while one foot is still on this earth, we must learn to grapple with the constant dissonance we feel with life going on while our child's death seems to bring ours to a complete stop.

In the words of another grieving mother,

“Every morning when I awake

my heart begins it now familiar ache

the sun comes up, the sky is blue

it doesn’t know I don’t have you.”

~Grieving Mother, TeriAnn Sargent, to her son Jarred 

~~~~~

~Death of a Loved One 

What other people don't seem to realize when they ask us to "move on" from our Child-Loss Grief and Trauma is that each and every inch of Grief's journey that we muddle through is as a "forest of razor blades" that no one in their right mind would race through, nor would they come through intact if they did so. No, we learn we must crawl through even if just one inch at a time, and that will just have to be enough.

~~~~~

~Death of a Loved One 

Comfort from the civilians to our Child-Loss Grief and Trauma War is often going to ring hollow as they honestly can have no real clue as to what we are up against in our steep climb uphill day after day after day. We learn to take their words in stride as we learn to more often turn to other Child-Loss parents for the understanding and comfort we need.

~~~~~

~Death of a Loved One 

There is a certain peace we attain once we come to an acceptance of our never-ending grief, that this is our lot in life, and we begin to realize that any time we spend in actively grieving is also time spent in meditating on that love we have and always will have for our missing child even as we also bask in the tenderness we feel for that very precious child.

~~~~~

I never knew I could slip through grieving this bad:

The daily struggle, the heartbreak which I have.

My strength is slowly dying inside, the pain truly (exists).

Really I couldn't feel anything else, only this.

Grief is such a mysterious emotional drainage

Living in limbo, trying to live with such courage,

This is actually hard, be easy with me.

I didn't ask for this, it's not an act, you see.

Attacking me verbally doesn't make me rush through it.

It only prolongs the grief and (ruins) our relationship.

So don't be (surprised) if I don't come to your door.

You have hurt me deeply with words you thought (were) the cure.

~Lu

~via Death of a Loved One 

The secondary injury can sometimes feel worse than the first when those we expected would love us through the world's worst grief not only aren't there for us, but they say some of the most hurtful words, or show the meanest of attitudes when they feel threatened by the depth of our grief. This disappointment and hurt we feel adds loss upon our loss and feels almost unbearable. As the graphic says, we ultimately learn to not "come to (their) door."

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~Death of a Loved One 

On the one hand, in losing your co-rememberer, it feels like you have lost the heart of the memory itself, as the memory seemed to hold its importance because it included the both of you, and the two of you could at any time bring it to mind and re-cherish it. But without the co-rememberer, it feels as if some of the life was sucked out of it…

And as one of my sons said, "She held all my memories," as he was feeling lost without her, not only for any present or future together, but also in much of their past because she carried many of those memories off with her.

“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.” 

~Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Much of our healing will occur with the fond recall of the memories which hold our child in them; it is as if we bring a little part of them back to us with the retrieval of each of those memories.

~~~~~

~Death of a Loved One 

As my hubby recalls Jesus's words, "A father is always seeking his little lost lamb," so we too seem always to be seeking our little lost lamb, even if in the faces, resemblances, or mannerisms of others. We "know" we will not find her, but it's as if our hearts need to ever be seeking her anyway.

Picture, "Broken," thanks to ~Death of a Loved One