Grief Is a Unique Experience

"You may feel it is useless to talk about your grief because no one truly understands what you are going through.

You sometimes feel after an experience like this that you’re talking a foreign language,” says Dora, whose daughter died. “You feel like there’s no way anybody can know what you’re feeling. There is absolutely no way anyone can know the depth of your pain. So you feel like it’s futile to talk about it because words can’t express the pain.”

Although countless people have experienced grief before you, each person’s response to grief is different. Your path of grief will be uniquely your own.

Be encouraged that regardless of how your grief appears to you or others, it has a precious uniqueness to the One who created you. God, who knows intimately your personality, your relationships, and the experiences of your life, knows your grief and isn’t shocked or surprised by your responses.

“O LORD, You have examined my heart and know everything about me…. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex…. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed” (Psalm 139:1, 14, 16 NLT).

Father, thank You that my way of grieving is distinctly my own, reflective of all You have sovereignly created me to be and experience. Amen."

-GriefShare

It Would Change You

All of this. . .

"I can’t find the words to properly explain the ache I feel in my heart.
I have so many words, but not enough words, not the right words, not descriptive enough words to make you feel the deep loss, the devastation, the hurt of losing him.

Of losing my son.

I have come to understand that if I had all the words in all the languages of the world, they still wouldn’t be enough. The only way you can feel my heart is to experience the loss of a child – and I wouldn’t want that for anyone.

If it were possible to let you into how It feels for just a few seconds, I would welcome the invasion into the private and protected areas of my heart, the heart that holds his memory.

For just a brief moment, if you could touch that place and gain the understanding, it would change you forever.

Yes, it would fill you with emptiness. It would feel like a cavern of darkness. A longing that nothing can fill.

A tenacity that you didn’t know you were capable of.

A strength that only comes from enduring the unendurable.

Yes, it would change you.

You would see the sadness in the eyes looking back at you from the mirror. You would see yourself, but you wouldn’t recognize the person you have become.

You would no longer be so afraid. After all, you would understand that you lived through the nightmare every parent feared. A nightmare realized.

The nightmare you would only briefly let yourself ponder – afraid that thinking about it too long could somehow make it happen. Bring it into existence.

What other fear could come close to that?

What monster under your bed could make you tremble after that?

In those few moments, of standing in my shoes, you would gain compassion.

An understanding.

A broken heart, but a bigger heart. You’d understand that words are meaningless in a situation so terrible. Platitudes are for card stock and not for conversation.

You would learn that your faith is everything, your days are numbered, and now you are longing to hear the trumpets sound and to see Jesus come down and gather all His children together for a reunion of unimaginable joy.

That will change you.

In fact, you’d start living for that day. Waiting for that day. Grasping for any glimmer of a future that wasn’t filled with tears and grief.

You’d want to believe the books that promise healing, but you’d know down deep that some losses don’t belong in the healing column — some losses you can’t put a checkmark behind and move on.

If you could feel my heart for those few moments, the world would change for the mothers who are missing their children, because, in those few moments, we would feel understood.

We would feel seen.

At that moment, you would remember our child and see how important it is to us to say their name and to remember them.

Yes, it would change you."

~adapted from Still Standing Magazine~

I Just Miss You

These are not my words, but they really could be. The pain remains and will until we are reunited in glory. ❤💔

"I just miss you. There really is no other explanation for the heaviness felt in my heart. It is as simple and yet as complicated as that – I just miss you. What I wouldn’t give for one more moment. One more moment to hold you. To look into your eyes and tell you how much you are loved.

What I wouldn’t give to go back in time to the moment where I last held you. Where I was able to kiss you and where I was forced to say goodbye. Because I would relive all the pain of what came after – for just one more moment with you. I would hold you close to my warm skin, with my arms wrapped tightly around you and I would breathe you in. I would soak in that moment all over again, even knowing it would be our last.

What I wouldn’t give to have a second chance. A chance to do things differently even though I know those things couldn’t change the outcome. But I’d do them anyway because I would do anything to try. There are a thousand different versions of how our story could have played out – and this version is the one I didn’t expect. I cannot undo what has already been done – but what I wouldn’t give to try just one more time.

I never knew missing someone could hurt so badly. I never knew that missing someone would change me so irrevocably. I never knew how deep and wide love could flood into my life. I never knew how precious this life was until I met you. I never knew just how much love could hurt until you left. And I never had a clue that the cause of insuperable pain could be narrowed down into four little words – I just miss you.

Your absence has flooded through every part of me. And like a flood, it has left cracks in my foundation. The flood of your absence has obliterated the core pieces of who I once was. It has cracked my heart wide open and my heart has bled with nothing but undying love. And it left me fighting to survive it all. But I would do it all over again.

Because our love is so much more than a flood of your absence. Our love is like a lighting that rushes through me. It has illuminated the darkest parts of me. It ignites my soul and has thundered through my life – pushing me to live a life full of you. For you. Because of you. You – the one who has changed me. The one who has taught me so much about this life and my ability to love with every cell in my body.

For you – I keep breathing, I keep fighting, I keep living. For you – I love more deeply and laugh more freely. For you- I cherish this one life I’ve been given. No matter the amount of pain and heartbreak. For you – because you exist in every corner of my soul. And your name has transcended from the title you were given while you were still here and into a feeling that describes your absence. Because on the days where I just miss you all I can do is utter your name. And when someone asks me what weighs heavy on my heart yours is the name that flows out. Nothing more is needed to describe what it is I am feeling because you are that feeling. The feeling of missing you, loving you, longing for you, and all the feelings in between. You are the reason they are there and you are the reason I feel them so profoundly.

I never wanted any of this. No one ever wants this. But I wanted you. And sometimes no matter how much we want – it isn’t enough to stop the waters from rising and the flood from sweeping into our lives.

So much time has passed and still some days there is a heaviness that weighs me down. I keep searching for the words to explain where it comes from or why it’s there. It feels so complicated yet the only words I can muster are – “I just miss you.” I miss you more than words can say and emotion can express. Everything I do has been washed by the waters of your absence. Even my heart beats to a steady rhythm of you and its echo rings through the space where you used to be. I have never known so much love, so much joy, and so much heartbreak, until you. And some days the only explanation for the suffocating pain that still lingers on is…

I just miss you."

~Jessi Snapp
The Far Side of the Rainbow

Not Ungrateful

"As a loss mom, I live my life every day, without.

I live with joy, I live being grateful, I live with my heart full of love –

- but I also live without.

In time, I have learned how to carry my son with me more gracefully but every so often, even now, I will feel the full weight of his loss and lose myself in the misery.

It seems unrealistic, I’m sure, to continuously hear the dichotomy of my joy and woe.

No mother should feel shame for showing the world the love, devotion, and pride she carries for her child.

We all stand in awe, as we watch a grieving momma dolphin carrying around her dead calf in mourning, but then admonish the loss mom who dares to grieve out loud.

Let us share the stories of the voiceless who live on in our hearts so everyone can know our journey doesn’t make us ungrateful.

It makes us aware,

it makes us empathetic,

it makes us capable of being vulnerable.

We are our children’s storytellers, we are the ones left behind to live for the lost.

We are the brave souls who live through the impossible act of saying goodbye.

We are not ungrateful, we are anything but."

~an excerpt from Still Standing Magazine~

Stuck or Unstuck?

Stuck in grief”-it’s a theme of blog posts, psychology papers and magazine articles. The author usually lists either a variety of “symptoms” or relates anecdotes of people who do truly odd things after a loved one dies. “Complicated grief” is a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis.

But who gets to decide?

What objective criteria can be applied to every situation, every person, every death to determine whether someone is truly stuck in grief? How do you take into account the circumstances of a death, the relationship of the bereaved to the deceased, trauma surrounding the event or any of a dozen other things that influence how long and how deeply one grieves a loss?

Obviously there are certain signs that someone needs professional help, medication or intervention. If a person is abusing drugs or alcohol, acting out in ways that harm or threaten harm to themselves or others, or is experiencing depression or uncontrollable anxiety then please, please, PLEASE get them to a doctor who can diagnose and treat them.

But for the rest of us, “normal” grief covers a wide variety of behaviors, feelings, attitudes and timelines:

Posting photos or videos of our missing child is normal. It’s the last visual link we have to someone we can no longer see.

Mentioning my son in conversation is normal. I mention my other children and his life is still intertwined with ours.

Crying-even years or decades after the loss-is NORMAL Grief waves can hit with tsunami force from out of nowhere and slam me to the ground. The only thing I can do then is let them wash over and around me until they pass.

Keeping space for my son in my home, at my table, in my heart and on holidays is normal. Some parents do this with a special candle, photo or ritual. Some do it with a stuffed animal or other item that represents their child. Some do it with words or deeds of kindness done in honor of the missing one. No one has sat in Dominic’s space at my table in these three years. It’s my silent witness to his ongoing influence and irreplaceable presence in our family circle.

Keeping a room exactly as it was is normal. Boxing everything up is also normal. Every heart is different and every heart has to decide what helps it heal.

Sleeplessness is normal. Some parents never return to pre-loss sleep patterns. I wake every morning at about the time the deputy came to our door. Every now and then, if I am extremely tired, I may fall back asleep for an hour or two. Sleeping the day away is normal, too. Sleep may be a welcome relief to a weary heart and some parents find that when they can, they sleep a lot. (Note: if this continues for days or weeks, please check with your doctor about the possibility of depression.)

Anxiety is, sadly, VERY normal. The worst has actually happened and that makes the possibility that it could happen again oh, so real. Anxiety may well spread to things that seem to have no relationship to loss. It’s also normal to have a “devil may care” attitude. The worst has actually happened, so what could be worse? Might as well live life to the full.

Withdrawal is normal. So is over-scheduling and staying busy. Both are ways someone may try to deal with heartbreak.

You don’t have to be “stuck” in grief to still feel the pain and have it continue to affect your life.

I am and have been highly functional since the morning the deputy arrived with the news of my son’s fatal motorcycle accident.

But I am a very different “me” than I was before that doorbell rang.

Some things I can’t do anymore. Some things I do differently and some things are brand new and I have only done them since he left us.

Labels are rarely helpful when applied to people.

Every person is unique, every relationship unique and every situation unique.

And every grief journey will be unique as well.

~thelifeididntchoose.com~

Grieving Well

The following is an excerpt from a letter written to a grieving mom by John Piper. Very well written!!

"God’s crucial word on grieving well is 1 Thessalonians 4:13: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” Yours is a grieving with hope. Theirs is a grieving without hope. That is the key difference. There is no talk of not grieving. That would be like suggesting to a woman who just lost her arm that she not cry, because it would be put back on in the resurrection. It hurts! That’s why we cry. It hurts.

And amputation is a good analogy. Because unlike a bullet wound, when the amputation heals, the arm is still gone. So, the hurt of grief is different from the hurt of other wounds. There is the pain of the severing, and then the relentless pain of the gone-ness. The countless might-have-beens. Those too hurt. Each new remembered one is a new blow on the tender place where the arm was. So, grieving is like and unlike other pain.

There is a paradox in the way God is honored through hope-filled grief. One might think that the only way he could be honored would be to cry less or get over the ache more quickly. That might show that your confidence is in the good that God is and the good that he does. Yes. It might. And some people are wired emotionally to experience God that way. I would not join those who say, “Oh, they are just in denial.”

But there is another way God is honored in our grieving. When we taste the loss so deeply because we loved so deeply and treasured God’s gift — and God in his gift — so passionately that the loss cuts the deeper and the longer, and yet in and through the depths and the lengths of sorrow we never let go of God, and feel him never letting go of us — in that longer sorrow he is also greatly honored, because the length of it reveals the magnitude of our sense of loss for which we do not forsake God. At every moment of the lengthening grief, we turn to him, not away from him. And therefore, the length of it is a way of showing him to be ever present, enduringly sufficient.

“At every moment of the lengthening grief, we turn to him, not away from him.”
So, trust him deeply and let your heart be your guide whether you honor him one way or the other. Everyone is different. Beware of blaming your husband, or he you, for moving into or out of grief at different paces. It is so personal. And what you may find is that the one who seemed to recover more quickly will weep the more deeply in ten years. You just don’t know now, and it is good not to judge.

May God make your grieving a bittersweet experience of communion with Jesus. Matthew tells us that when Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been beheaded, “he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself” (Matthew 14:13). So, he knows what it is to go with you there.

“We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize” (Hebrews 4:15). He was tested in every way as we are — including loss."

~John Piper~

The Clinical Side

We are firm believers that God's word is our ultimate comfort. God's promises and the grace and mercy spoken of in them have carried us these last (almost 4) years since Austin was taken Home.

That being said we also know that there is a clinical side to Austin's death that needs to be dealt with.

When trauma, like the death of a child occurs, the brain is injured. Not in a physical aspect, so to speak, but certain parts of the brain are rewired when trauma occurs.

A broken bone won't simply be healed because our faith is strong enough or we've prayed enough about it. There is almost always the need for a cast and even sometimes surgical intervention to help a bone heal properly.

The same is true for the brain. We often hear that if we believe (have faith) or pray enough about our grief it will go away and we'll be "done" with it.

This is simply not true.

Just as a broken bone requires help from a physician, so an injured brain requires help from a psychologist or psychiatrist.

It has helped me so much to know that what I'm experiencing is not my fault. It's not that I'm just not trying hard enough to get better.

Injury to the brain from a traumatic event is REAL!

You don't know the freedom I feel in knowing that the way I feel isn't my fault. ❤



The following is an excerpt from an article I found. It addresses the struggle so well.

"Part of our culture, especially our clinical culture, would look at somebody who's still thinking about their baby who died 70 years ago, and say there's something wrong with them.

The way I look at that is that we carry our losses with us.
That doesn't mean that we're pathological or that we're doing things wrong. It means that we are connected and related to each other and we carry those relationships with us.

That's just not the way the culture looks at it though. We have such an idea in this culture that grief and sadness are wrong. They get lumped in with the so-called dark emotions, jealousy and anger and fear.

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is 'bad" because it hurts. Anything that's not happiness is an aberration.

Grief is seen as a disease, where we think that a return to happiness is a measure of health. When you think about the things that we say to somebody when we hear that they're having a hard time: We tell them to, "Be strong." or "Lean on your happy memories." We tell them, "They wouldn't want you to be sad." or "You can always have another child/find another partner."

Saying something like, "You're stronger than you think," "They're in a better place now," or "At least you had them for as long as you did," might seem like a comfort. The problem is, there's an implied second half of the sentence in all those familiar lines. The second half of that sentence unintentionally dismisses or diminishes your pain; it erases what is true now in favor of some alternate experience. That ghost-sentence tells you it's not OK to feel how you feel.

Telling people to suck it up, move on, put it behind you, pretend you're happy has created epidemics of addiction, depression, and suicidality. I would even argue that it has created interpersonal violence because if you can't say, "I'm in pain," and have that pain heard and honored and validated and acknowledged, it's not going to go away. It is going to find some other way to speak.

To truly feel comforted by someone, you need feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you--not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away."

Adapted from Refuge in Grief ~ Megan Devine ~

Middle Ground

"Support, true support, can be extremely hard to find. Otherwise intelligent, kind, compassionate people just don’t know what to do in the face of your grief.

It’s not entirely their fault. We don’t talk about the reality of grief in our culture. In fact, our culture seems to wear a massive set of reality-blinders when it comes to grief.

How can any of us learn how to support each other if we can’t talk openly about what grief is?

We’ve got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you’re either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sack cloth, or you’re going to triumph over grief, be transformed and come back even better than you were before.

Two options. On-off. Broken or healed.

It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow, when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.

There’s this whole middle ground between those two extremes (as there is for everything else in life), but we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to talk about grief if we step outside that pervasive cultural model of entirely healed or irrevocably broken.

We don’t know how to talk about living inside grief. Living alongside grief....


....Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief – my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place the doesn’t ask us to deny our grief, and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

What would that middle ground look like for you?

It’s a big question. Your answers will shift and change over time, from the early days of grief through life outside the initial devastation zone.
When we stake out ground in the middle, there’s room for all the experiences of being alive: the good, the horrifying, the beautiful, and the broken. Nothing is left out. Nothing is inherently wrong. What a relief to have more than two options."

Adapted from Megan Devine - Refuge in Grief

Empathy

It means the world to us when you just let us talk, say Austin's name or even cry all over you if we need to. Instead of offering advice or suggestions on what to do instead.

Because. . .

. . .even almost 4 years into this heart-wrenching journey, there are some days, some seasons where the waves of grief threaten to overwhelm us.

It really may mean the difference between you helping us to take a step forward, or pushing us several steps back in our journey.

Being shown empathy is a true and precious gift. ❤

https://stillstandingmag.com/2016/05/05/when-you-feel-like-youve-done-nothing-youve-probably-done-enough/

No "Getting Back to Life"

". . . .When someone talks about the realities of grief to non-grieving people, it’s never too long before someone says, “well, yeah, but eventually you have to get back to life, right? You have to eventually get over it.”

Get back to life.
Have you heard that phrase from people outside of your grief? Even people who truly love and care about you might be pushing you to get back out in to the world, live your life. They may even tell you you have so much to live for.

The thing is, the people who often say these things actually do have a life to go back to. They may be deeply impacted by the death of the one you love, but if their family is intact, if there is no gaping hole in their daily life, they just aren’t going to be affected the same way you are.

I don’t necessarily mean that you had to live with the person you’ve lost in order to be the most impacted by their death. Not at all.

What I mean is that, for many of us, the people we’ve lost were such an integral part of every single day, every single facet of our lives, there really is no “normal life” without them.

There is no part of our universe, our daily lived existence, that they didn’t touch.

There truly is no life to “get back to.”

Eventually, perhaps, new things will begin to grow around the crater that has erupted in the center of your life. The hole itself will remain. I don’t mean that as a downer, either. I mean that a central loss, a loss that shifts the axis of the universe, is not something that simply shrinks over time.

Getting back to life can't always happen inside grief. Instead, we can come to ourselves, to each other, with kindness and respect for what cannot be resumed.

We – you, me, all of us – will not return to the life that was. That’s simply not possible. What we can do is bow to the damaged parts, the holes blown in our lives. We can wonder what parts of ourselves survived the blast. We can come to ourselves, and our irrevocably changed worlds, with kindness and respect.

That’s the real work of grief – to show up with kindness, every day, many times a day. Somehow, if we don’t see it as “fixing” your grief, or “getting back to life,” it makes all that just a little bit easier. . . ."

Adapted from ~ Refuge in Grief - Megan Devine ~

4 Things Christians Should Know About Grief

"Having lost a child and working in pastoral ministry for fifteen years, much of my personal and professional experience has involved coping with loss. I personally found that some of the hardest truths about grief prove to be the most helpful to mourning people in the long run. I wanted to share some of the hard truths, that a good friend would pass on, with the intent of giving you hope in

1. Don’t be discouraged if things get worse before they get better.

My son, Cameron, died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2013. He was a perfectly healthy three-year-old boy who just went to bed one night and never woke up. I figured that the first two weeks would be the worst and that the difficulty would gradually diminish as the weeks progressed. I was wrong.

I found that I was in shock the first month. With each day I began to gain increasing awareness of the immense magnitude of Cam’s death. I found that I actually was sadder in the third through sixth month than I was in the first.

Death is the ultimate expression of the Fall. Its emotional repercussions are immense. In the grief process, if you feel as if you’re getting sadder, you’re not failing or abnormal. You are tasting fully just how awful the Fall is. The pain eventually will start to subside.

2. It’s a godly thing to grieve.

For whatever reason, many Christians have the idea that happiness honors God and sadness constitutes spiritual failure. They think sadness tarnishes their witness. In reality, we see intense expressions of lamentation and grief throughout the Bible. The laments of the Psalms, the expressions of Job, the outrage of Jeremiah, and the questions of Habakkuk provide ample evidence of holy grief before God. Jesus grieves the death of Lazarus. God mourns the disobedience and defiance of Israel (Luke 13: 33-34). There is no shame in mourning your loss with a heart full of sadness.

3. There’s no way around it: if you’re going to get better, you’re going to have to taste the pain.

During the first year after my son died, I allowed myself to grieve. I made space for it and accepted the reality. After the one-year anniversary of his death, I subconsciously decided that I was done with being sad. I proceeded to fill my schedule and life with so much work and ambition that I couldn’t feel much of anything. Busyness functioned like a numbing drug for me until I started to crack.

If your knee is going to heal after a sports injury, you’re going to have to do the painful work of rehab. If you’re going to get stronger, you’re going to have to experience the soreness that comes from work outs. If a broken bone is going to heal, you’re going to have to endure the pain of setting the bone.

The same is true in grief. The way of the cross necessitates that pain precedes healing and restoration. God will give you the grace you need to withstand the tides of sadness. God will provide his presence in the depths of grief. You must allow yourself to feel the sadness and lament. With each tear you cry, you are moving closer to healing.

4. You cannot redeem yourself, but God can give you healing in time.

At times, I felt as if I needed to work a playbook. Go to the counselor. Journal. Talk about my loss. My occasionally rigid approach reflected a belief that I needed to heal myself. If I could take the right steps, then I could make myself less sad.

The healthiest and most helpful place I could ever go was to trust Jesus to heal me. God told Israel in Isaiah, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength” (Is. 30:15). In the passive place of relying on God’s healing grace, we find hope, comfort, and strength. We cannot mend our hearts, but God certainly can. You will need to return continually to waiting patiently and expectantly for him to heal and remediate your wounds. In time, God can heal your heart.

God is a Healer and Redeemer. In all of the sorrow and confusion, our hope in grief resides in the reality that God can restore anything."

Cameron Cole

Precious Memories

Though remembering Austin may bring tears, it doesn't necessarily mean they are bad tears. There are some moments and days where we just need to cry, and that's OK!

A dear friend and fellow loss mom recently told me:

The loss of our child is now part of who we are. It colors EVERY aspect of our life.

Thoughts of Austin are NEVER far from the surface. A constant undercurrent in our every day life. Though he is no longer physically here with us, we still love him dearly, and he is still very much a part of our life through our memories of him.

Just because he is gone, doesn't mean our love for him has stopped. In fact I believe it has grown exponentially.

Remembering Austin truly is the way that we still love him. Not for his sake, because we know he experiences love unfathomable, but for us, for our mama and daddy hearts and brother and sister hearts that have this love for him that needs to be expressed.

We are expressing that love the only way we can, through our precious memories. 💗

Pain Needs Space

We have learned that for us, it is healthy to talk about our grief, to remember Austin in many different ways. . . and that always putting on a "brave face" isn't the best way to go. . . . That stifled grief eventually comes out in the most ugly ways.

We aren't called to constantly put on a mask so that others feel better, but to honor our God in whatever we do. May He grant us the grace to strive towards His glory every moment of every day!

Holding Space