Tuesday's Trust - Trusting...Amidst a Suspended Life

Tuesday's Trust

Trusting...

Amidst a Suspended Life

Tommy and I listened last night to a talk-radio program by Michelle Rosenthal, a "Post-Trauma Coach" featuring Dr. Robert Scaer, Neurologist and a premier Trauma specialist whom Tommy and I first met and trained under just this past September of 2011. We are purchasing his new book on Trauma that comes out this month, and he is doing a lot of speaking to promote his book. In this talk, he explained how traumatic it is for us to lose a child:

Death of a loved one is a Trauma - A trauma is something that threatens your life - The death of a loved one threatens your life... Death brings trauma into our life --- Your life is composed of the social structures of your life as much as it is the survival of your body!

The death of a loved one is a trauma, especially he says… 

"Frankly, a Parent's Loss of a child is the most traumatic loss there is." 

You go into a freeze response. Helpless, you freeze. If you don't come out of the freeze, you have PTSD or Trauma. You have to process the traumatic memories to heal enough to develop resiliency. And you will need to process this grief over and over and over.

~~~~~

This week, my son put a post in Facebook:

C. S. LewisYour place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.  

~ The Problem of Pain

A child-loss mother friend wrote this next to his post:

What a peace over came me when I read this... My place in Heaven has been made just for me. I can only imagine what (my son) Justin's place looks like :) ... This mama's heart aches for Heaven.

~Patty Sisk Whitaker

~~~~~

I just read a poem of a Child-Loss griever tonight, asking God to give people the grace to understand her need to grieve, her need to still treat her child's birthday as special, and her need to feel her child's nearness. Basically, she, like we, recognizes and understands that the love for our children and the memories we have of them don't ever go away, nor do we want them to...

A Special Birthday

(author unknown)

Please God, make them remember that

Today is a special birthday.

Make them understand that

The memories don't go away.

Bless them, with ears to hear and hearts that care.

Enable them to listen while I share.

Shelter them that they may never know my pain.

Help them to help me know that my child's life was not in vain.

Help them to remember, Lord, that I wish

That my child was here

So we could still celebrate,

To understand that I still

Feel the nearness of my child,

To see beyond my smile and the

Words, "I'm okay."

Please God, just let one remember today

Is a special birthday!

~~~~~

The process of grief, I have found, can mirror that of writing: it is surprising, trying, frustrating, daunting, terrifying, comforting, chastening, challenging, and at times, heartening; grief can provide fellowship with others interested in the experience; it brings out the best in us, and at times the worst, if only because it is utterly human.  It can feel inevitable, but it is so personal, so differently pitched for each, that it can reside across a great gulf.  Yet poetry, like grief, can be the thing that bridges the gap between us, that brings us together and binds us...

I have gathered the poems in this anthology to reveal the many ways poets seek to find words and form to contain loss and to fulfill the reader's need for comfort and companionship in the words of another.  Often, in death, everything else fails.

~From the Introduction to The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, KEVIN YOUNG

Another quote of his reads,

To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from.  You must live through grief.  You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever.  You must survive the sorrow.  

~~~~~

Unfortunately, the Child-Loss War civilians (who entail most of our friends and family) do not seem to understand our grief is not about the aforementioned "logical" processes where one just decides NOT to be sad, as if we could "outsmart" grief. No, indeed, we "must survive the sorrow."

~~~~~

People don't seem to understand the back and forth processing that we do, and that we must do in Child-Loss Grief. In the grieving mother's poem, there is an appeal to God to help people understand she still loves her child, and still misses her child and always will this side of Heaven. The all-encompassing message we feel is "I miss my child!" We go back and forth with I wish they were here, and yet remembering C. S. Lewis's sentiment of "Thank You God that my child is in Heaven, and that Heaven is a perfect fit for her!" It is a constant back and forth, a re-interweaving of our foundation that's been blasted out from under us with the death of our child. 

As Dr. Robert Scaer says, you can't just eat the right foods to help you heal through traumatic grief; you have to work through all the hurts, all the confusion, all the feelings of betrayal, all the precious memories, processing them over and over and over again. It's all a part of our "healing" ~ never total healing, but a getting stronger, more resilient over time.

The idea with trauma is that you have to get to the point that you can feel your abject pain and loss and grief, and yet still live your life in the process. People do not understand the hurt never goes away; we just learn to accept it as a part of our lives now.

But the hope, as Elizabeth Edwards so lovingly reminds us... is always there.

The real truth is:

"We never move on, we just get used to the pain"


Even as we ever ponder...


While the new reality for our child, we thankfully cry out along with our child:

I am not gone. My soul

lives on but in a better pace,

Surrounded by the light of God

in all His glory and grace.

Pictures: The first two, thanks to Barbara J. Karrer of Grieving Mothers in loving memory of her "forever-6-year-old" Jonathan,
and the final picture thanks to Cindy Goolsby Martin, In loving memory of her precious "forever-19-year-old" April Michelle Pera

Saturday's Sayings - Finding Hope Along the Journey, ~The Grief Toolbox

Saturday's Sayings

Finding Hope Along the Journey  

~The Grief Toolbox

Tools for finding hope along the journey: Understanding healing


Can we heal from the death of a loved one? When we are grieving sometimes our answer is NOT EVER! What does it mean to heal? If we look to physical wounds we can learn something about healing a broken heart. When we are severely cut or break a bone they heal, but they are never the same; residual pain and scarring can be there for a lifetime. The initial constant, searing pain of a broken heart will subside but the aching will remain. Healing is not the absence of pain; it is the recognition that sorrow and joy ca co-exist.

~ ©The Grief Toolbox

 

~~~~~

"In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all…it comes with bitterest agony…Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot realize that you will ever feel better…and yet this is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have experienced enough to know what I say."

~Abraham Lincoln 

(In the U.S.A.,) Twenty-two of our 44 presidents and their wives are bereaved parents:

• John Adams, lost his son Charles, 20, while he was president. 
• Thomas Jefferson had six children and only two lived to maturity. One daughter, Mary, 26, died while he was president. 
• James Monroe lost a son two years of age. 
• John Quincy Adams lost a daughter in infancy; a son died while Adams was president; and another son died five years later. 
• William Harrison had ten children; six died before he became president. 
• Zachary Taylor had six children; two died as infants and a daughter died three months after her wedding. 
• Millard Fillmore's daughter Abigail died at 22. 
• Franklin Pierce lost two sons in infancy. Two months before his inauguration to the presidency, their only child, Benjamin, 11 years old, was killed in a railroad accident
• Abraham Lincoln, lost two sons during his lifetime: Edward, four years old, while President Lincoln was in office; and William, 11 years old. 
• Rutherford B. Hayes had eight children, three of whom died in infancy. 
• James Garfield had seven children; two died while still infants. 
• Chester Alan Arthur's eldest son died in infancy. 
• Grover Cleveland's eldest daughter, Ruth, died at 13 years of age. 
• William McKinley, lost both children: Ida, four months old, and Katherine, four years old. 
• Theodore Roosevelt's son died at 21 years of age. 
• Calvin Coolidge had a son, Calvin Jr., who died at 16 while his father was in office
• Franklin Roosevelt's son, Franklin Jr., died in infancy. 
• Dwight Eisenhower's son, Doug Dwight "Icky," three years old, died at Camp Mead, Maryland. ©The Grief Toolbox

·      John Kennedy’s two-day-old son Patrick died in 1963.

·      George H. W. Bush’s daughter Robin died of leukemia at the age of 3 or 4 in 1953.

Quote by Barbara Bush about her daughter Robin:

"So I am glad, not that my loved one has gone, but that the earth she laughed and lived on was my earth too. That I had known and loved her, and that my love I'd shown. Tears over her departure yes but also a smile that I walked with her a little while."

~~~~~

Tools for finding hope along the journey: Honor the hole of grief

When someone dies we are left with a hole. It can seem dark and empty and something that we try to fill. It may seem a strange or impossible thought, but we can learn to honor the hole that is left, knowing that it represents and reminds us of the love that we have given and received.

~~~~~

Tools for finding hope along the journey: Trust

There is a certain innocence that is taken away when someone we love dies. We not only come to understand the fragility of life, we also find out how difficult it is to find support and understanding even among our family and friends. Life is unpredictable and we are no longer able to trust that things will continue as planned, to do so is like putting a building on shifting sand. What is solid and able to be trusted is the knowledge that each and every one of us can survive and flourish no matter what comes our way.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Grief is crazy making not clinically but our emotions are so all over and that is difficult for others to understand. It is important to interact with others who are on this journey. That gives us strength to face the ones who say the wrong things.

~~~~~

Tools for finding hope along the journey: Perspective

Shortly after the death of my 4 year old son someone asked me,

“Given all the pain you are feeling do you think it would have been better not knowing him?” 

I answered immediately, 


“I would suffer a hundred times this pain for the privilege of having known him.” 


How could anyone imply that it would have been better for me if I had never known my son? Thinking about it I realized that if he had never been a part of my life I would be spared the pain but also denied the joy. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had not known him. I would choose knowing him, even knowing all the pain of his death.










Pictures, Quotes, and Content thanks to grieving mother, Tanya Lord's "The Grief Toolbox"