I've written about 50 blog post in the past months. They all are still so full of anger and denial and self pity, i'm withheld from posting them. I tell myself regularly that I should be past these phases - its time to start looking to our futures and accept Maddie's death. To celebrate whatever small victories and successes we have.
To continue to share my deeper, darker and uglier emotions is likely to just make me sound pathetic and needy and hopeless. And i've felt pathetic and needy and hopeless enough over the past year. Seriously, how much longer can i be completely broken and still trust that anyone wants to be my friend? how much support can I take, without giving anything back, and trust that i'm not using and abusing those that I love the most?
But I am angry and and I am pathetic and I am needy. Between Maddie's diagnosis, her time in the hospital, my nervous breakdown and time in the hospital and now the strains on my family, I am completely broken again. He hasn't said as much, but I assume Luke is fairly close to being completely broken again. And our brokenness will indeed have a deep affect on Dillan.
I appreciate that so many of you still pray for us. Spending this long in the darkness, i've once again come to feel that its impossible that any of this is actually the will of a divine and loving God. If anything, I'm living the midst of the divine retribution. If I lived my life like Job, perhaps I could believe in being refined by the fire. But I am no Job - I do not feel tested to prove my faith or learn of God's love and mercy (as so many of my grieving peers seem to embrace). I feel summarily punished and judged and torn apart.
Luke and I are not having an easy time. Google divorce after infant loss and you'll find a million statistics. 200 word essays that boil down a struggling and falling marriage, a world torn apart, to one or two liners. Just as in having a sick child WHY DOES NO ONE SHARE ANY PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE?
You always post what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that maybe, I'm actually on the verge of insanity. Maybe not. I don't really know. I know I'm not where I expected or thought I'd be 10 months later. How have our beautiful girls been gone for 10 months? I am so angry, so jealous, so sad and so confused. So much more than I was months ago. I'm so tired of trying to find some purpose, some reason etc. If it makes you feel better, I'm certain that my 50 or so unposted blogs probably read pretty close to yours. You aren't alone.
ReplyDeleteHi. Helpless person on the sideline, here. Too far away to mean anything. Just sending love and supportive thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI think the reason no one shares any practible experience is because there isn't any. The loss of a child is beyond cruel and the hole that loss leaves is so incredibly different for everyone, even if that loss happens to be the parents of the same child who walked the same journey.
ReplyDeleteThere is no advice that is going take the pain away, only help you compartementalize it amongst all the other stuff in your life that seems so insignificant. And you have to teach yourself that the small stuff should matter, even if it seems so small compared to what you have experienced.
One of the things that allowed me to laugh again, helped keep my marriage together and kept me from going down that deep dark path was to imagine what I would say to my sons when I finally saw them again.
Would my words be that of a mother who said "look at all the hurt you caused" or would they be words that said "look at all the wonderful things your short little lives brought into this world".
I refused to let any hardships in life be caused by them. If divorce, a mental breakdown was going to happen, it was going to be due to other reasons, not because my sons lived and died.
I don't know if this will help but it one of the more instrumental things that got me through.
Many hugs to you all (Miranda, you too if you check back here).