When Koralyn was born I had to give up all control of both of my lives. The one at home with my boys and my husband, and the one at the children's hospital with my medically fragile daughter. I couldn't be in control of either situation, one where family and friends stepped in to take care of my home and boys, the other where I had to stand by as doctors and nurses made decisions for my daughter. I look and think back to the weeks before Koralyn was born and nothing I did could have prepared me for the Tsunami that was about to hit my nice tidy shore I had made for myself. I am still picking up the pieces. I still sit on that shore and look around, I see some things coming back together and being made new and yet the destruction from the massive storms and the aftershocks remain. Just losing my daughter was enough to devastate and confuse me. Losing my mom in the midst of our turmoil, and then a year later being told my dad has stage 3 lung cancer has rocked me to my core. I still struggle daily with grief, exhaustion, fear, and anxiety. I am still working through all my grief stages. Some days I feel good. Most days the outside world, my friends, or my kids can't see the struggle I am having internally. I am living my life and trying to live it well, honoring the many gifts God has given me, loving my family and still finding joy in each day. Yet grief and confusion seem to be companions I can't outrun. Just when I think I have some clarity, BAM another confusing thing happens and I am brought to my knees.
That is not to say that I don't have much Joy and much to be thankful for, but some days I yearn to shake off these sackcloth and ashes and dance. In some ways I know I have and will continue to do so. It is also a harsh reality that I will miss my daughter and feel a void in my heart for the rest of my life on this earth. I will never again be the same person I was before that day in the picu when the machine keeping my daughter breathing was unhooked and she took her last breath. I thought, I hoped, I would be further along by now, but I am still sifting through the rubble it seems. My foundation is not gone, but the walls have come down and in order to rebuild I have to clear away this debris and figure out a different set of plans, start from the foundation up. I still pray that God will turn my mourning into dancing and make beauty from my ashes. I have all these pictures in my mind of what they beauty should look like, I keep struggling with my picture and Gods picture, I am afraid.
All this ache is so deep, my wounds are gaping and seeping. My tender heart is still shattered into a thousand pieces. I stand here with it, broken in my hands holding it up to my God asking him to take it and make it beautiful, not for me but for him. Broken is what I was, and what I am. It started that day in December when we heard the words, "I am sorry there is a problem with your baby." I was shattered a little more the day I got the phone call from my sister when she wailed, "its bad Kenda, its really bad, its Mom Kenda, Mom is dead." The last shards were broken, sitting on the edge of my dad's hospital bed, in my sister's house. Using the weight of my body to hold up my Dad as he sat dying, unable to talk, unable to sit under his own weight. All these moments now ingrained in the pieces of my heart and mind. Many of these moments so humbling, beautiful, and devastating all at once. These moments take you to the edge of life and back again. These moments replay in your mind and bring you to your knees.
I am sure many onlookers would speculate that I must feel angry. Angry at life and at this Jesus I believe in. I do have moments of anger, towards these circumstances I find myself in, but mostly the theme of my grief seems to be confusion. I am no Biblical scholar but I think Job was confused in all his affliction too. I think there were moments on his journey where he felt so utterly confused and he cried out to God. He didn't hide his bitter tears or his confusion. I can't hide mine either, at least not from the God who knows me.
When you are grieving, people try to be helpful in their loving advice to you, and like Job's friends, sometimes those words can cut deep to the core of your wound and confuse you even more. In reading through Job again, I read that his friends speculate that he or his children must have done something to deserve all this calamity on their lives. How hurtful those words must have been to Job's hurting heart in those moments. Oh some days I feel like Job, I feel like I carry a sign that says pity me, and rejoice that you are not afflicted as I am afflicted. I feel like the outcast, the forgotten, the leper. I tend to overthink everything and add to my confusion, its a lose, lose situation it seems.
My picture of grief looks something like this: I call it the American Dream, grief version. My baby has died of a pretty rare birth defect, heart defect, congenital heart defect, to be exact. HLHS is its official name. During the almost 4 months of her life, my mom was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident. After a year of grieving, we were told in September of 2013 that our dad had a mass in his lung, later to be told it is aggresive and he has months to live even with treatment. When this news comes, there is pain yet to work through in my relationship with my dad. He comes to Texas to live between my house and his brother's. I have a pregnancy and then a brand new baby boy when he comes a few weeks into December. I am floundering, I am struggling with this role I have been thrust into, of loving, supportive, (confused as heck) daughter to my dad dying of cancer. Mom of 4, 3 to the world outside and any well meaning onlookers at the grocery store, or the restaurant, or the cancer patient waiting room.
Come August of 2014 and my dad has died. We have tried in these past two and a half years to honor all this pain. To honor our Koralyn and my mom and now my dad. It all feels so small to me though. This grieving girl, with so much death in her life, wants something more tangible for all this grief. Something more measurable, more obvious, more BIG. So I sit and struggle with my confusion and my American dream of grief. The one the blogs and facebook and The Today Show tell you about. Why am I still stuck in this small place with my big grief and my ashes and my sackcloth? Where is my mountain peak? When will I leave this valley, this valley of the shadow of death I am stuck in. Where is my book of triumphs? Where is my foundation to benefit those who suffer? Where is my beauty for ashes? This is what I keep asking, what I keep struggling with. So many parents are handed a death certificate and they feel the weight of that thin sheet of paper and they go out and take that pain and make it usable. Make it big. Most days I still feel so small, so stuck, so confused. What is all this death and grief supposed to add up to, is what I keep asking God. In my mundane days of mothering, keeping a home and a family and being a wife, I struggle with all this small and want to exchange it for something big. Like a consolation prize for my grief. This is who I am though. I want everything to fit in a list or in a box. I want everthing to make sense and have a reason and an outcome. I want recognition for all my hard work. I want to yell how unfair it all is.
I have been considering the painful fact that maybe God doesn't want to make big beauty out of my ashes. Maybe he isn't asking me to start a foundation, or adopt an orphan, or write a best selling book about my journey (which, being who I am, I would like any number of those things to fill these gaps that have been left in all this grief. To help make it make more sense in my hurting heart and my confused head) Maybe my beauty for ashes is in all these seemingly small things I do to honor my God, my daughter, my mom and dad. It is in this gift of motherhood and mundane. In Ashers antics and Asa's jokes and Abrams laugh. In the small kindness we show to those who are hurting, and in the kindness that continues to be shown to us.
Last night God used a sweet little red headed girl to show me that the small things can be big, if only to one person. I have been hurting the last couple of days, missing my mom and my sweet Koralyn. Missing the life I would have had being Koralyn's mom, fighting for her and loving her. Being a part of a team of people to make sure she thrives and gets the best care. Missing being a part of the group of parents with children with chds. A group no one wants membership to, but hindsight being 20/20, a group that feels more welcoming and purposeful then this group called Parents of Dead Children.
Last night I didn't want to go through the motions and go be out with people. I wanted to retreat in my grief and have a quiet and introspective moment (which with 3 small boys is impossible unless they leave or I do) Being the person that I am, and a mom to three living children I don't want to disappoint, I trudged through, put on my best I am strong and happy face, and made my way to dinner and then church.
Last week on Wednesday night, I had brought some of the cute Koralyn jars to the classroom I work in every week. The girls all wondered out loud what they were for and talked about how cute they were. So I told them I was collecting tabs from cans for The Ronald Mcdonald House. One girl got very excited and talked about how she already saves the tabs at her house for her Uncle. She told me, very excitedly that she would start saving half for me and bring me some! By this Wednesday, I had forgotten the conversation. When I walked into the classroom last night, this sweet girl, who I had previously taught when she was in first grade, very sweetly and excitedly came up to me with a small ziploc bag holding several red tabs. My heart melted at her kindness. To think she remembered and made the effort to save them and then bring them to me. I hugged her and let her know how grateful I was that she remembered. I don't think she will ever know though, what that small ziploc bag of tabs did for me in my grief. It just meant so much to have one sweet little girl remember my cause and make an effort for it. I felt like God was saying, see Kenda, small things, small kindnesses do matter. They matter to you, they matter to me, they matter to all the hurting and broken people in the world. What seems small to some, may be life giving to the one person who needs it.
I have learned in this grief journey over the past two and a half years that grieving hearts want so badly to be remembered. Those that grieve want to know their grief matters, they want to know it means something and has purpose. Grievers, want to know they aren't alone, that there grief is not wasted. They don't want to be told the time limit is up and they should be over it by now. They want to be met on the lonely road of grief. They want someone, maybe several someones, to take their hand and tell them; its okay to hurt and its okay to be scared and to not have all the answers or have completed all the steps. Because the truth is, we never get over it, we will not, cannot, be the same people we were before. We have to become new and different, but no less meaningful and beautiful people. Don't cringe and turn away from our wounds and our scars. We know you are curious, we would love to tell you how these wounds and scars, while painful have made our souls more beautiful. So next time you have an opportunity to meet someone on the lonely road of grief, even if briefly, take that opportunity. What seems small or insignificant to you or someone else may mean the world to a hurting, grieving person. To a hurting, grieving, world.
My God tells me that those who mourn are blessed. He tells me to take heart and not become discouraged. He tells me to count my suffering Joy. He shows me that he takes what is lowly and nothing to the world and he lifts it up and makes it beautiful. I trust and hope in him. This Jesus who loved the lost, the outcasts, the whores, the lepers and tax collectors. The sick and dying of this world. He got down and dirty with the grief stricken. He met them on the lonely dusty road of grief. The road after his death, where those that followed him thought it was all for naught, they thought their grief and strife was for nothing, that they were forsaken. He came down and walked with them, he listened to their hurts as they told him the story, they didn't know it was him, not for awhile, not on that dusty road anyway. He told them they mattered, their pain mattered that all this grief and ugly mattered. He wept with the hurting next to the grave of their loved one. I have hope that he hears me too, and walks beside me in my grief, and in all my ugliness as well. He listens as I cry out in my pain and wonder in confusion at this path, this plan of his, this story. He calls us to keep going and to bind up one anothers wounds, whenever we encounter the hurting along our path. He calls us to compassion and service. For some, that may look big, for others, it may be small things. A wise woman, a fellow Christ follower once said, "Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love." Mother Teresa
I want to continue on this dusty, broken, grief stricken path, to do as many small things with great love as I can muster. For it is all this great love that has been shown to me in the last two and a half years that has kept me going. Never underestimate the power of your small deeds my friends. Because we all matter and in the eyes of God, none of us are small, we are all magnificent. Its His stage after all, and I have been told that Earth has no sorrow that Heaven can't heal.
