Five years ago, about now, we were holidaying; the four of us. Now as we consider taking a little break soon there are three. It all feels interminably normal, until the collection of our thoughts turns to who is missing. Like the moment it dawned on our son (when he was 5) that his brother didn’t live and there were instant tears. What he would do for a brother to play with!
It’s like saying goodbye to the person you love who visits for a time, then leaves, and neither of you know when you’ll see each other next, especially if ever. What an incredible void is created; a spiritual vacuum that nothing on this earth can amend. And yet there are the purposes of God in this. These are the depths of love outbound of loss that furrow so deep in sadness they reach down to the other side of the world and out into space and keep going.
Then I think back to 3 years ago. If five years ago was hard, for me personally, three years ago to the day was so much harder. As a person looks back to that 2016 period, the worst year of that person’s life thus far, such a milieu of silent grief, it was made all the starker because the more public grief was over. Something happened in silence at that time that should not have happened. And silent grief in this way is anguish atop abandonment.
Part of him wants to disassociate from that person who was abandoned. And yet another part of him can hardly believe that that person in him got through such a time. That person wore all the responsibility back then. That person reeled out a narrative that cared for the reputations of others even while he torched his own reputation for taking all the responsibility for how things went down. Let the record be straight. That person could be dead tomorrow.
Wanting to dissociate from painful experiences is normal within the existential. The experiences of scarring imprint themselves on our psyches, and we’re left with no reparation other than therapy and time and our own processing in order to make meaning of what shouldn’t have happened.
But a big part of me wants to be back there, at the time before everything went wrong, before we lost our son. A big part of me has moved on, but an equally big part of me laments for what happened, for what took place.
There’s a big part of all of us that laments for a time when we were pushed to the point of despair. We never forget what that pain cost us, but that sense of being pushed beyond your limits, dims with time. But if we’re not careful, if it doesn’t matter to us, we can all too quickly forget what it cost us, the faithfulness of God to get us through those days, and what we hoped for, which is possibly only now coming to pass. Yet, as we cherish what we got through, we’d be back there in a flash; even for a five-minute sojourn to sense with our senses the taste, the sight, the touch, the smell, and the sound of a grief that overcame us. And the bizarre thing is we wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
We know we’ve definitely recovered from our grief when we experience grief that that part of our lives is over. See how a sorrow couched in acceptance is both good and sad at the same time.
It seems absurd to say “what I’d do to be back there, IN the pain,” but the experience has become part of us, what we lost was precious, and there is something sacred that we take from such a time that is a loss when we lose recall of it.
Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
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