Raw

The thing about grief…about profound soul darkening, life destroying grief is that is scrubs you raw. It exposes your heart. You walk around with no skin on. Every breath of air, every friendship lost, every story of pain, every death reaches to the core. There is no distance, everything burns.

This world is a horrible place. Every single day there are stories, death, torture, pain, anguish, loss. It’s horrible. Before Damon died I was in such denial. I refused to see it and if I was forced to see it I refused to feel it. I can’t do that anymore. I’m held under the black water, absorbing the anguish I know the mother of a dead child in Afghanistan is feeling, the confusion of the fathers holding vigil in the cancer unit, the loneliness of the widow whose family just has no time.

I view the happy denial of most of the world with disdain… fully acknowledging just two years ago I was fully there. I get that it’s crippling to feel it all, to see it all, but I’m so tired of hearing how good life is, how good god is when all you have to do is turn on the news for five minutes to see clear evidence to the contrary.

I’m tired of the chosen few who have had the privilege of growing up protected and loved, who have had the means to have what they need, whose children are growing healthy and happy making the rules as if having survived a crap storm is some how inconvenient to their pleasant illusion. The thing is most of the world is living with some sort of gaping wound. Outside of North America most people are barely surviving. Mothers are watching their children starve. People are lonely. Hell, I know I am. The people who most need relationship are shoved to the periphery because their pain is inconvenient. Quite frankly, this is crap.

Until next time…

loneliness and holidays

The aftershocks of grief roll on.

The damned holiday season… I spend most of Thanksgiving locked away sobbing while my family laughed and talked a floor below. It was the darkest I’ve been in a while. I was swallowed by the black, suffocating. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crushed under the waves.

So far I’ve spent the build up to Christmas vacillating between the urge to create new traditions and the desire for everyone and everything to go to hell. I refuse to put up the tree that Damon pulled down and permanently wonkified in the process. I will not hang stockings and try to decide if I will hand four or five. I wont. I did create a messy little tree of lights on our living room wall. My first born absolutely loves it and the rainbow baby stares at the lights like it’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen so I’m satisfied. There is some satisfaction in doing it differently, because we are different.

I’m terrified of the crash. I’m afraid of what the holiday that was once my favorite is going to do to me this year. I’m still trying to think of how to bring Damon into each ‘celebration.’ I need him there. I need him remembered but I haven’t figure out how.

The pain of isolation intensifies as I walk deeper into a life of grief. The knowledge that only my few friends who grieve their own children don’t grow tired of my weeping is devastating. So many who I thought were life-long friends have drifted away. I know I must be exhausting but it is so painful to feel like a mission rather than a person.  To be abandoned by the people who knew Damon, by the people who stood by his graveside. It feels like losing a piece of him, again.

Until next time…

Once a day...

Once a day the light hits this monitor just right and it lights up his handprints. I refuse to clean it. The pain of seeing his sweet little prints is unbearable but the thought of wiping them away is abhorrent. They are all I have left of him. The little prints here, the little prints on the back door, the little prints on the oven door, all left in stasis.

Yesterday the little rainbow concieded to be entertained by his daddy and I swept into the boy's bathroom on a mission. How do little boy's bathrooms get so completely and utterly disgusting? I started grabbing the hodgpodge of medicine and shampoo bottle scattered all over the counter and dumping them into the top drawer (because, yes, that is how I clean these days). I grabbed a bottle and stopped dead, my heart threatened to clench so hard in my chest it would just stop. They were his prescriptions, there was his name, one bottle, two bottles... what the hell? I haven't touched anything, nothing. All of his things have stayed exactly where they were. His medicine cabinet hasn't even been opened... and there they sat, staring at me, telling me what I'm starting to have to see. I can't run from this forever.

Will and I have discussed Damon's room, decided that it is time to make it rainbow baby's room, then done precisely nothing about it... over and over. I stopped going in there nearly a year ago. I just couldn't... I just couldn't. I refused to close the door. I was afraid I would close it and never open it again. I felt like closing it was somehow denying his existence, something I refuse to do. I love him. I miss him. He was here. He was REAL.

For a long time I would make sure when I left our bedroom I had absolutely everything I could possibly need so that I wouldn't have to pass that horrifyingly empty room again once I had managed to do it once. I spent months avoiding the hall. One trip out of our room in the morning, one in at night, minimize the number of times I'm stabbed through the gut. It's nuts, as if I wouldn't be stabbed a million times, a million other ways...

Every single time I pass his door I touch the doorframe. It's like my way of saying "This affects me. Every single time I pass your door. I notice. I see you standing in your crib excitedly pointing at your Zebra. I see you getting zipped into your footie pajamas by your daddy. I SEE you!!!!" And I do. I see him... always.

I carefully put all of those bottles back into his medicine cabinet. I may very well keep them until the day that I die. I may have a random computer monitor smeared with baby handprints perched somewhere in my living room for always.

He's gone... how the hell can this be real?

Until next time....

Sweet tea and Hard work

Most mornings after I drop Isaiah off at school I swing by McDonalds and get a gigantic sweet tea, because I’ve given up Dr. Pepper…again. Don’t smirk, it might stick this time.  Hush.

Anyway, four or five days a week I see roughly the same people and by in large they are exceedingly pleasant. I have so much respect for these incredibly hard working individuals who manage to smile as they serve everyone else all day, every day. I don’t think I would be quite so easy to get along with.

Am I the only one who somehow got the impression at some point that these type of jobs were somehow dishonorable, that the very people on whose shoulders our country is built are somehow less? I’m not exactly sure when I realized that this was a subconscious belief but when I did I was pretty disgusted with myself.

It seems like there’s an attitude that anyone who isn’t wealthy, or god forbid, needs help is somehow a drain on society. Well, we’ve needed help. We need help. Often it’s really hard to admit. It’s hard to know that we can’t just make it work like everyone else seems to be able to.

I’m frustrated by this. I’m frustrated that it seems that worth in our culture is so centered on money and the perception of perfection. We gasp in shock as life after life crumbles to the ground after years of plastered smiles, perfect houses, and perfectly styled name brand clothes. When are we going to get it? When am I going to get it?

I’d really like it if we would all get real but in the mean time I’m just going to work on me. I’m going to work on identifying my underlying beliefs, reinforcing the ones that are beautiful, and rejecting the ones that are ugly.

People have worth. The sweet lady who grinned like I had made her day when I complemented her fuzzy hat as she handed me my change has worth, big time worth. So do I, so do you, period.

Until next time.

Pain, Isolation, and Adoption

I’ve been in an exceedingly bad place lately. Honestly, it’s not really fair to say I “have been” because quite frankly I’m still so there. I’m hurting and angry and confused and I suppose that is nothing new which makes it that much more exhausting.

I’m lonely and I have to acknowledge that at least part of my isolation is my own doing. I had my first panic attack in months a few weeks ago because I made the mistake of acting like I’m not thoroughly broken. I participated in an activity that any mentally healthy person would think nothing of and it just overwhelmed me. I was stuck in public, going dark, and feeling terrified. I was horrible. It was frustrating. I’m so sick of being shattered. The truth of the matter is that, at least to some extent, I isolate myself. I do this partially out of fear, fear of the panic attacks, fear of having to have that conversation one-more-time, fear of the awkward silences when I just don’t do the let’s-talk-about-nothing portion of the conversation. I also do it to avoid the pain. The pain of never ever fitting. The pain of hearing one more freaking “God is so good!” when the eleventy bagillionth person has their life fit nicely into the American middle class ideal. I think “so what is the reverse? If God is so good when he heals your child, gives you your dreams, protects your husband on his trip to XYZ then what is he to me?” Not good.

I’m lonely and I don’t fit. No one knows how to deal with my reality so they just don’t.

I’ve been in a bad place with everything. I’ve been incredibly overwhelmed and wondering if we should continue Damon’s Dance. The fundraising, the application review, the interviews, the requests for check dispersal… it’s a lot and this year I barely managed. I’ve wondered if we are even helping. I’ve wondered if we are doing any good at all. Quite frankly, I’ve just wanted to quit.

Yesterday I got an email from one of our families with new pictures of their son, awaiting them in Korea. The mom had great news about a fundraiser they just had and the pictures were beautiful. Then, we interviewed a new family. I wanted to just sit and listen to their story. They had that intangible something. They talked a lot about their son’s birth mom. They talked about her with such love, gratitude, and adoration. This perspective is certainly not new to me. Two of my favorite parents in the world honor their son’s birth mom similarly but I don’t think I had really stopped to consider the difficulty of this choice and I was deeply moved to hear this couple speak about this person they now consider a part of their family.

Then today I watched a show that was supposed to be about a weight loss journey. It turned out to be a lot more. The young woman who was the subject was adopted at age two. Her birth mother chose adoption for her because she was homeless and made the agonizing decision that the best choice for this child she loved was to be with someone else.

… can you imagine?

At one point in the show the young woman got to travel to meet her birth mother. She approached her with such love and gratitude. They walked the streets of her birth country and the woman’s birth mother showed her the shack where they use to live. I was so incredibly humbled. I was deeply deeply moved. I was reminded that this is quite simply not about me. Not at all. Not even kind of. This is about them. This is about the babies, the kids, the moms, the dads, the brothers, the sisters. It’s about them.

Life is so hard. Every day is full of pain. I think the only way I’m going to survive is to find a way to focus out. To poor everything out. To give because I want to.

How ironic.

Until next time with pain and love…

Nasty nasty ugliness

I’m so angry and so so so confused.

I completely stopped reading the bible several months ago. I was so sickened by the suffering and horrors of the Hebrew Bible and my complete inability to reconcile the truth of what is plainly written with what I had been taught to believe that I just stopped.

Every time I happen across a sermon on the radio or read an “inspiring uplifting” devotional my stomach turns. It infuriates me. I’m disgusted. Isaiah comes home with stories of the “heroes” of the bible. Sampson for example. Sampson who was a murderous, disrespectful, vile, lying, selfish man who squandered an enormous gift, whose only semi-redeeming act was murder-suicide. Seriously?

How is it that we just conveniently ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths perpetrated directly by the God of the Hebrew Bible. I was in a class that touched on this subject much to the extreme discomfort of the room full of ministers. One of them said “Well, they must have deserved it.” I’m so flushed with rage just at the memory I can barely type. Seriously?

How did I make it through the vast majority of my life as a Christian without ever having the courage to confront the black and white truth of the horror of the Old Testament? Because I just didn’t want to. Because it didn’t jive with my health, wealth, and prosperity gospel.

How is it that we scream about homosexuality but have no problem with divorce? How is it that we are so willing to judge the teenage mother but justify our enormous houses and piles of stuff while people starve to death? I’m just plain pissed.

I’m disgusted with myself and I’m so confused about what is true. I don’t know what I believe anymore. I just don’t.

I know that I’m disgusted with the prosperous west. I’m disgusted that I never realized how much North American Christianity completely fails until I was one of the disenfranchised. Until it was my life that was devastated, destroyed, broken. Until I stopped fitting.  

So much of what people spout simply isn’t biblical. That I know for sure. Most Christians know more about celebrities or sports than they do about the bible. How dare we? How dare we claim to have the answer, sit on our high horse when we don’t even know what damn color the horse is? Seriously?

But that which is biblical often is far from pretty. It can’t be packaged and put on a wall hanging or a shirt. A while back I heard “Life is complicated, God is not.” On a local Christian radio station. I choked on my Dr. Pepper. Is your life really that easy? Have you really confronted that much of the history of your religion that you think your God is simple?! Seriously!?

Have I mentioned that I’m pissed? Cuz I’m pissed. And I just don’t fit. I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back to when I believed life was shiny and happy and good, when I believed I was the apple of this God’s eye, when I believed He was good or gave a crap about me but I can’t. There is nowhere to go but forward. Forward through all of the questions. The anger. The doubt. The nasty nasty ugliness.

I don’t fit in your world anymore…

Until next time…

The Stroller

Ugggghhhhhh!!!

This sucks! This hurts! I miss him so much…

Today I decided Raz and I were going out. I’m restless and stir crazy and quite frankly running hard from a wave of grief and is washing at my heels. The crash is coming and I’m so tired of missing, hurting, raging being ruled by agony. I’m running, just like I always run, because I just don’t know how to stand still and be taken by this kind of pain. I just don’t know how.

I’ve been staring at Damon’s things for nearly a year and a half. I didn’t want to use any of them for Raz. Because it hurts. Because they’re Damon’s. Because… hell I don’t know. I just don’t.

But we just don’t live in that word. We can’t afford to buy a new carseat, a new stroller, a new high chair. Raz has been in Damon’s car seat since he came home from the NICU. I made my peace with that. It wasn’t that hard. Damon hadn’t ridden in that seat in over a year. But today I screwed up my courage and grabbed the stroller. It was filthy. A year and a half of life piled on top. I went after it with my Lysol wipes, determined to hold back the Tsunami of pain welling in my chest. I found myself apologizing over and over. “I’m sorry baby. I’m so sorry.”

Then the gut punch.

I opened the stroller and there in the basket were his diapers. His diapers from our last nearly daily trip to the park to play. Him with his banana in hand and his big brother trotting along beside as I pushed. We were happy. God we were happy.

The river of tears broke through. It felt like something someone would think was poetic as they dripped on the stroller while I cleaned. It wasn’t poetic. It was hell. Just another day in the hell of being the mother of a dead child.

God this hurts…