Friday's Faith - Passively Being Changed? ~by Tommy Prince

Friday's Faith

Passively Being Changed?

~by Tommy Prince

"He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength."

~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Change happens when you are powerless. Going into surgery, there was not a thing I could do for myself. The optimal thing for me to do was to do nothing. The whole control I had was to relax my anxiety through deep breathing exercises. And then I put my hands and my life into the physician's hands. Being powerless and helpless, and then yielding to the surgeon was the catalyst for change.

Now in recovery, I have much more power. Being in compliance post-surgery however, is still a yielding because I am restricted in how much weight I can lift, in the type of exercise I can do, and in the kind of food I can eat. All these activities must be adhered to for the healing --that I cannot see-- to go on. Again, yielding to the physician's orders is my doing my part to facilitate healing.

The overwhelming sense of helplessness (which is part of the definition of trauma) in our Child-Loss experience is also the thing that is going to save me, and that is my yielding to the healing Spirit of God...

Picture, thanks to Heartlight.org

Wednesday's Woe - No Hits, No Errors, but a Whole Lot of Hurt… ~Tommy Prince

Wednesday's Woe

No Hits, No Errors, but a Whole Lot of Hurt…

~Tommy Prince

I was making a WalMart run. Usually I don't like to see anyone I know when I run errands, but especially this particular day because I was shopping for diapers… not for our granddaughter, but for myself…! Yeah, that's what comes with recovering from prostate surgery!

So, what happened was… in the store, I briefly encounter this guy, recognizing him as a guy that I knew from high school (Yeah, I'm living in the same city that I grew up in), and his son played sports with one of our sons as they were growing up, only his son pursued a professional career in athletics and was called up to the major leagues this summer to play catcher for a professional baseball team. I saw this acquaintance briefly and then he was gone; I began remembering some things about him.

I finished shopping and was leaving the store. As I was approaching my car, I spotted him coming to his vehicle that was parked fairly close to mine. I went over to talk to him. I told him ~ "I've only watched two baseball games this year, yet your son played in both of them, and he was even featured in ESPN Sports Center because of the outstanding plays he made as a catcher!"

As we were talking along and catching up with each other, his question comes back to me, "So what all's been going on with you?" and I haven't seen him in over ten years….

Chronologically, my dad has just died, and I've had a radical prostatectomy in the last few weeks, but I find what comes out of my mouth was,

"Our 19-year-old daughter was killed five years ago!"

It overrode everything, and I heard myself saying how horrible it has been for us. Fortunately he was very kind and told me how sorry he was, and that (the death of a child) sounded AWFUL, and that he can't imagine how bad that is.

We talked about whether or not we go to class reunions, and I heard myself say,

"I don't go very often because this is what would happen -- I would say my daughter got killed, and there's nothing like that for a conversation stopper."

We continued to talk along and ended up on an upbeat note.

So, I walk away from the conversation, glad that it went okay, but feeling so vulnerable. Telling about Merry Katherine's death in a spontaneous encounter like that, and for it to be his first time in hearing the news, effectually exposed my deep woundedess.

This encounter happened on Thursday, but it affected me all weekend. I was depressed all weekend. It's like at some level, I think I have my grief over her death at a "manageable" or at least tolerable level, yet such an encounter tends to blow it wide open.

I was surprised at how I was so powerfully impacted by all (that conversation) in such a negative way. It's like I let the wound out, and it was not going away. And to think, this was actually a positive encounter with a caring dad that, at some level anyway, could "get it."

An innocent conversation with an old acquaintance opens up the woundedness, and it takes three days to get it back to a manageable level. Just a brief encounter, yet I'm down for the count for at least 3 days… And who are those people who think we can somehow be "over" our deep loss? It couldn't get much better than what happened in this impromptu meet-up, yet my heart was sent back to square one…

Picture, thanks to The Compassionate Friends, USA

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