After Mother's Day... “Losing My Mind, or Minding My Loss?”

       “Losing My Mind, or Minding My Loss?”

One of my sons sat before me a few days ago (only days after Mother's Day), questioning, in essence, if I am losing my mind…??? 

I sat there, amazed at his impudence, but also amazed at my somber, sober reaction. Internally, I immediately felt, “Of course not!” (After all, I am a therapist who hears people’s hurts, and by necessity, I must be able to remember those vivid details of a person’s life who has risked sharing his or her very deep-seated horrors.) So I wasn’t much moved by his audacious question. I immediately said that if I had not remembered some things he had told me, it was more likely that I was feeling traumatized at the time and just couldn’t take in more information. He was not easily persuaded of this truth.

What is it that Trauma does to us? It can be downright horrific, and for me, especially around this Mother’s Day holiday, I am indeed traumatized by my loss of my precious daughter; to me there is absolutely nothing strange about my reactions to such loss. And when I am dealing with that deep degree of pain, I very likely will not be up to “taking in” everyday chitchat. And, for me, that is Okay.

Tommy and I have found it crucial that we process our ongoing loss; it is more painful than anything this world could throw in our path. Our loss of our child is absolutely the most devastating loss anyone could ever suffer, and the pain does not cease and desist just because time passes. This all-pervasive-loss occurs and re-occurs in our hearts and psyches, often when we very least expect it. Our loss must be allowed to process through whether we are “ready” or not, and it can feel downright horrific as we walk through it. 

But walking through such hurt can also be very healing. We are drawn closer to our child, and closer to our own broken hearts ~ all of which is crucial for our own healing, and for our own connecting with the precious child we lost. May our surviving family members accept our brokenness as part and parcel of the Love we must be allowed to continually pour out, not only for our precious living children, but also for the precious child we lost!

In His Love,

Angie

Tuesday's Trust - by His grace...

Tuesday's Trust 

by His grace...

  

"But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 

~2 Corinthians 12:9

~~~

by His grace...

We cannot climb into another's pain

Nor imagine their distraught

That consumed their heart to make them wane

And leave them so overwrought,

But we can climb into God's arms

To ask Him ever to hold

Our dearly beloved safe in His arms

And into His heart, to closely enfold.

We cannot know the ways of God,

Of how He holds the fragile sparrow,

Or how He holds our little ones

Who may fall upon His road so narrow...

But we can know that His great love

Overcomes all our weaknesses and fears

And takes us safely to Him above,

Who lovingly awaits to wipe away our tears. 

Such tender hearts belong to Him;

He guards them all the way,

Even, and especially, when days grow dim,

When they can't see the light to find their way,

For He alone created the miracle that brought them here

To grace this earth and be with us awhile;

So too, He alone could return them Home

To restore their souls, and return the gleams unto their smile.

So He alone can come alongside

Us grieving dads and mothers

Who long for our children through this long while

For despite the pain and the angst that still smothers,

He sends His comfort and soothes our hearts,

While our little ones from our sides are briefly torn away…

Restoring the Hope for when we nevermore will part,

On that blissful, Eternal, Life-giving Day.

Thank You dear Lord for Your Life-giving Grace;

May it ever spur us on, as it did our child, 

As You work in each of our hearts with Your mercy mild,

As we, too, falteringly flail on, until we too finish our race,

And then, by Love's great mercy, we'll see You face to face!

~~~

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.…

~Hebrews 12:1-2 (New American Standard)

~~~

Dedicated to Merry Katherine and all our deceased children, and to Andrew, a friend of Merry Katherine's, a beautiful, bright, and caring young man, captain of his State-Championship high-school soccer team, one-year younger than Merry Katherine, who died just 2 weeks after Merry Katherine had been killed… 

Andrew, along with his brother, had just sent us a sweet note of condolence just a few days after Merry Katherine's death. May God be with precious Andrew's mother and daddy and two brothers who are left behind in their great grief… 

Thank You God that Merry Katherine and Andrew, and so many others of our children just like them, because of Your great love for them, have all been safely escorted Home where we all may meet again.

Poem - by His grace… ~Angie Bennett Prince - August 19, 2013

Saturday's Sayings - The Reflection in the Mirror

Saturday's Sayings

The Reflection in the Mirror

Who’s that woman looking back at me in the mirror?

She doesn’t smile back at me; she has so much pain in her eyes.

I don’t like looking in the mirror; she is so much older than me.

Who is she and what does she want from me?

There are times I can see tears in her eyes.

What can I do for her?

How can I help her?

Does she know me?

I don’t recognize her.

I need to know her name; I think I’ve seen her before but, I’m not sure.

How long is she going to look back at me?

I don’t like this can someone please tell me her name?

Oh, wait a minute, I think I know her.

I’m looking at the face of PAIN.

~Unknown

*****

My husband Tommy came home from the doctor's office this week and said that while he was sitting on the doctor's table, he looked up and caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He was shocked to see puffy eyes with black circles underneath, and such a deflated look... He came home and asked me,

"Do I always look like that?!"

I too am shocked when I go to brush my teeth, look in the mirror, and think,

"Who is that old woman with the incredibly sad eyes looking at me?"

-- I look like I've aged at least ten to twenty years over these past five years of deep grief..."

*****

A grieving mother from one of the grief groups to which I belong shared this on Monday:

"When someone we love dies, a part of our life-dream dies, too...the depth and magnitude of the life-dream loss colored by the depth and magnitude of the love shared. There should really be two funerals. One honoring the person who died. The other honoring the part of our life-dream that has been crushed, obliterated, destroyed, and forever changed."

~Tom Zuba

Thank you Kristine.

*****

Another precious grieving mother shared with me last week:

"[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all . . . rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather."

~Frederick Buechner, in Telling Secrets

She also shared this scripture; in this, may we take heart...

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

~2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (NIV)

Thank you Leslie.

Picture and Poem - thanks to Grieving Mothers

Wednesday's Woe - Helplessness Amidst our Child-Loss Trauma

Wednesday's Woe

Helplessness Amidst our Child-Loss Trauma

A Psychological Trauma is an event, perceived to be inescapable, that confronts a person with actual or threatened death or serious injury (physical or psychological) to the self or other.

Such trauma overwhelms our coping abilities, creates helplessness, anxiety, fear, and other types of psychological distress and dysfunction. It violates our assumptive world (the way we thought things would predictably work). It stimulates physical reactions stemming from built-in fight, flight,or freeze reactions.

~Therese Rando, Ph.D., Grief and Trauma Specialist

The essence of trauma is helplessness.

If the essence of trauma is helplessness, then initially, our losing a child is more about psychological trauma than it is about grief, especially if our child-loss is due to sudden death through violence as in a

• a fatal car crash,
• a homicide,
• a suicide, or
• a sudden medical death.

We need to realize we are not walking simply through child-loss grief –which in itself would be hard enough, but our loss is heavy-laden with psychological trauma due to our beloved child's traumatic death.

Our children are a part of us, a sacred part of us. What hurts them hurts us! If they have been traumatized, we become traumatized. And the immediate trauma of their death is the first thing that hits us in the face.

Something horrific, traumatic, and violent, fatally assaulted our precious vulnerable child, and now we must face what they faced...

The general public has NO CLUE that we child-loss mourners fight a great deal of anxiety, fear, irritability, and traumatization.

Our "job" is to keep our child safe, and we could not.

It does not seem to matter that we are not "at fault," for psychologically we feel at fault anyway if we could not save them...

• We live and relive their violent-death trauma.
• We live and relive any and all relationship-issues that were not quite resolved.
• We live and relive our own inadequacies, whatever our perceptions of those inadequacies may be (or perhaps even what our child perceived them to be, whether accurately or inaccurately).
• And we don't have our child here to successfully launch them into the next phase of their life and be a part of that with them, so their "absence" traumatizes us, and continues to traumatize us.

Personal Disaster

We have been through what the trauma-specialists qualify as a "Personal Disaster" complete with the symptoms of

• shock,
• denial,
• disbelief,
• helplessness,
• distress,
• high arousal,
• shock over images,
• alarm at information trickling in, and
• many times, the confusing, shocking, and emotionally distressing dynamics involved in relating to courts, witnesses, the police, the district attorney, the medical examiner, the firemen, rescue workers, etc.

Too often if we do make it into counseling to deal with any areas where we may find ourselves "stuck" early in our

Traumatic Stress

amidst our grief and mourning, we find counselors who are ready to talk about grief and loss but who are totally unequipped to deal with our massive trauma.

And yet, Trauma is the FIRST thing with which the child-loss parent needs urgent help...

And Child-Loss Trauma, by its nature, renders us absolutely helpless.

Picture thanks to http://photobucket.com/images/grief