Tension

One thing that is hard is everyone grieves differently. What is comforting to one person is unbearably painful to the next. What one person never questions, another might wrestle with for years. Everyone’s pace through the grief journey is different and varied. Even when we feel stuck in grief, the rear view mirror still shows that our grief is changing with time.

These facts bring tension to all of my relationships. I want to share and experience grief, comfort, and hope with the people who are closest to me and loved Oliver the most, but I risk bringing them additional pain or feeling additional pain myself as we grieve together. Our grief rubs up against each other, sometimes smoothly and comfortingly, but often sharply and discouragingly. In the constantly changing landscape of grief, I never know exactly what to expect from myself, much less from others.

One example that illustrates some of this tension is the lego creations that Oliver left behind. It was summertime, and he and my daughter had been working on a lego city to cover the table we usually kept homeschooling things on during the school year. They were mostly finished when he passed, so we had tons of buildings and vehicles that were his recent creations. For a while they stayed just as they were. Sometimes I walked past the table and smiled, thankful they were left for us to see and remember. Other times seeing them just represented everything I had lost and caused me to weep. Sometimes I sought the table out in order to weep, other times I avoided the table with everything in me. My daughter and husband had their own varied and ever changing responses to these legos. Eventually we had to decide when to start using the table for its intended purpose again, how many lego creations to keep, who would take apart the ones we decided not to keep, and what to do with the ones we kept. We had different opinions on these questions and had to try to navigate finding a solution that worked for all three of us. It's something we still navigate each time we move to a new house or decide to rearrange some furniture. Countless other examples like this exist in our grief journey, some less important, some way more important and far reaching. It remains hard.

The lego city Oliver and Leah made in 
early summer of 2019

A few of Oliver's lego creations that we kept

I feel this tension in sharing on this blog. Some of what I share may resonate with you, and some of it might make you want to throw something! I'll certainly look back some day and roll my eyes at some of the things I shared. I pray that as I share I will not lose sight of how individual and ever changing grief can be. 

I don't have an answer for this tension. Obviously talking to one another should help. But the emotions often get so mixed up it is hard to identify what needs to be communicated. And it is not like anyone knows how to grieve or what they need in a given moment, day, or season. Acknowledging the tension and confusion can help, as can extending grace to yourself and others. Grace to be yourself, to be OK with feeling differently than someone, to change your mind, to not have the answers. 

The sunset we watched with Oliver the night before
he died. Grace given to us. Oh that we could extend
that grace to one another and ourselves better.

It helps to remember that while there is no right way to grieve, feeling the more painful parts of grief is what brings noticeable progress in finding peace. I want to avoid the parts that seem painful to me, to just stick to the things that comfort me in that moment. It is painful, but ultimately I feel better when I:

• tell the moms I meet at our new homeschool co-op about Oliver even though it is awkward and it is hard to get the words out

• hang the old pictures of our family with Oliver alongside new pictures of our family without Oliver and negotiate with my husband how many of each works for both of us (full disclosure, it took more than five months to put photos in our picture frames after our most recent move; like I said, this stuff is hard)

• say aloud to my family, “the reason I am more irritable than usual during the Christmas season is because I still miss Oliver, and I don’t know how to handle those feelings”

Learning to walk into the tension rather than skirt away from the tension brings relief.

I want this blog to be full of the hope we have in Jesus and to speak to all the ways that God has been with me and my family during our grief and loss. I know that means sharing the hard and painful parts. It also means taking risks when what I share could be painful or confusing to someone who reads it. I pray that God would use these hard things to bring us healing and Him glory. Thanks for reading!