I took that thing called "Grief" off my shelf again this evening. It's funny how this always seems to happen on the nights when Tim is gone, and I don't have any work to do. I just sit around, watching TV shows that inevitably contain something that triggers that feeling of melancholy. I think I'm coming to realize that there's been a lot that's happened over the past four years, and now I'm finally finding the time and energy to deal with it.
My thoughts today turned this time to our first baby. I'm finding my thoughts are turning in that direction a bit more lately, probably because we're coming up on four years since we lost our little one. It was interesting to think about how we celebrated Reuben's third birthday today as a family, and how our little angel would have been three years old by now, but that if we hadn't lost that first child, we wouldn't have Reuben now. It's funny, but that thought almost makes it more painful, to know that we couldn't possibly have both. I can't imagine not having Reuben, but I still wish that we could have had a chance to know the one we never will in this life.
And it really sucks that we can't have both.
I think as time goes on, and as life adds more and more grief to my shelf, I'm coming to realize that it's something you can't ever get rid of. Once it's on that shelf, it's there to stay. Sure, with time, it gets easier to put it up there so it's not taking up so much of your life. And day by day, year by year, those griefs become a bit smaller.
But not smaller in importance. Never that. They will always remain on the shelf, never to be forgotten. And even though they get smaller, and we feel like we can sometimes forget they're there, they never really cease to be painful. Those moments when we can draw up the mental stamina to pull them off the shelf and look at them, they still hurt. I don't think there's any way to change that. It is in the very nature of grief to be painful.
But through it all, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows." 2 Cor 1:2-5
1 comment:
Yeah, I find that things sneak up on you and all of a sudden you're remembering past loss and sadness even when it seems that you've moved on from that a long time ago. Times of year do that for me ...
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