Goodbye "WHY"

As a grieving mama, I have asked 'WHY' at least a million times since August 6, 2010.  Why Max?  Why when he was only 18?  Why when he was so talented and had so much to offer the world was he wiped off this earth?  Why are so many people whom I perceive as "less worthy" of life still here tanking their lives by making bad choices when Max was going places and was such a good kid?  Why my family?  Why do other families get to watch their children go off to college, to get married, to have kids and I don't?  WHY, WHY, WHY.  I've asked myself, my friends, my counselor, my grief groups, my pastor, any other pastor who I talked to, and of course, I have demanded an answer from God.  WHY, God, WHY?  I have read the book of Job in the bible, where Job asked the very same questions.  I have been so frustrated that nobody can offer me an answer.  It all feels so deeply UNFAIR, and of course, IT IS unfair for an 18 year old to be killed in such a random event, falling asleep at the wheel of a car in a tired moment and losing HIS LIFE for that one moment.  I have looked at "WHY" frontwards, backwards, sideways, upside down, and inside out.  And most importantly, I have held it as a barrier between God & I - refusing to move forward in my relationship with God until He gave me an answer.  Any freakin' answer would do, just TELL ME WHY.

I could rationalize in my mind that there would be no answer that would satisfy.  Indeed, if God Himself came down from heaven and told me why, would I ever consider it worth the life of my son?  No, no, no, no my heart cried.  Nothing you or He could say would allow me to say "okay, then I get it now, that's why".   Could that be why God is silent on this?

Last week, knowing I was going to be serving on an Emmaus team, knowing I had a ceremony called "Dying Moments" coming in my weekend, God started telling me that I needed to release the demand to know "why".  I had to lay it down and let it go and start rebuilding my relationship with Him or I would never get out of my bed and start living again, ever.  So came the moment in the weekend.  I walked up to that altar and I held up my demand to Him, and laid it there in obedience, and returned to my seat, all the while telling Him how I wasn't sure I was ready to let it go.  And the pastor stood up and shook his finger at the ladies sitting there and forcefully said in a loud voice, "DON'T YOU DARE CRAWL BACK UP TO THAT ALTAR AND PICK IT BACK UP - LEAVE IT HERE".  That was what it took for me to truly release it.  I sat in that pew and bawled my little eyes out - I truly SURRENDERED it, not just laid it down.  I heard God loud and clear.  I got it.  I will not pick it back up.  I left it there, in that chapel, and I will not ask it again. 

Sometimes accepting that there is no answer *IS* the answer.  And I have now turned that over to the Sovereignty of my Lord and am willing to let Him have it.  I will not ask "why" again with regards to Max's death.  God has it.  Thank you Jesus.  I'm sorry it took me so long to get to this point.  Thank you for being so patient with me.  I look forward to learning to be intimate with You again.  Amen.

Changing Filters

The two-year mark was a force to be reckoned with in my mind.  Oh my ... well ... it's been *two years*, "I should" be doing better than I am.  "I should" have things more figured out, right?  Filters.  I need to explain them before I move on.  They are the emotional screens we use to take in information.  So for instance, if I have been wounded by a girlfriend in the past, every girl that gets close to me emotionally, the information I feed through my filter is that I've been wounded once by a girl and dot, dot, dot ... that filter twists around my thought process.  Because now instead of seeing a girl that could potentially be a great friend, I see a girl that may hurt me.  Part of my counseling experience has been learning to "unclog" the unhealthy filters I have in my life.  So if I am aware of that filter and my emotional response, it helps my mind logic its way out of the twisted.  

I had a counseling appointment two weeks ago where my counselor made an observation about my thought process since Max died.  Every *thing* around me and in my head has to go through a "grief" filter.  And that grief filter?  It's the size of a giant car tire that I carry around in my gut.   It's giant.  At first, even important things didn't make it through that filter, like paying bills (who cares if the bills are paid, Max is dead).  But slowly, I've learned that in spite of my monumental loss, it's still important to pay my bills.  But I'm still filtering far too many things through that grief filter, but more now on a search for purpose and meaning.   For instance, I took an extended leave of absence from my career to grieve and take care of myself. So I now look at an activity and think "does it help me grieve or does it help me take care of myself in some way related to grieving"?  If not, then I mentally reject it.  (Hence the suggestion to find something FUN to do in a day that has no purpose a couple of weeks ago if you follow my status updates.)  My filter is SEVERELY clogged since Max died with GRIEF.  She suggested I try to move that giant car tire circle I carry around as my filter from 'grief' to 'life'.  She said to think of it as a circle of sunshine, where grief is a ray ... she is not trying to take it away from me, I get to keep it in every way possible, but it doesn't get to be at the center any more .... "life" is at the center,  "grief" is a strand from "life".  (Easier to see as a visual, sorry I can't draw in some way on my blog).

And I have been so unbelievably STUCK since she gave me this as homework.  To draw out my two circles and figure out what using a "life" filter with "grief" attached to it would look like, what ELSE do I want to let in through my "life" filter?  I have ABSOLUTELY NO FREAKIN' IDEA what I want to put in my life now.  I have no clue.  None.  Nada.  I wasn't avoiding it, I just really did not know what "life" should look like now that my oldest son has been ripped out of it.   Truly I was clueless, lost.  And then I woke up at 2 in the morning and thought about 'The Birdhouse Project' and what I wrote on my foundation piece.  What is there - what do I carry inside of me that nobody and nothing can take away?  I actually had to go back and read my blog about it to see.  I wrote - "my relationship with God, my belief in eternal life through Jesus, my grit & determination, my organizational skills, and music".    So that seems a decent place to start, right?   Something else my counselor said MONTHS ago hit me after I was staring at my 'foundation' ... she had identified a core value I didn't even know I had.  A core value that relates to loss.  So there's another place to dig - core values. 

Why am I up writing this at 2 in the morning?  Because I finally see a way to find some answers to my homework assignment using my foundation and my core values!  Inspiration comes at the strangest most inconvenient times!  I am now excited about my counseling appointment instead of dreading it because I had no idea what to do.  I don't have the answers yet, what will and won't make it through my 'life' filter, but thankfully God shined a big spotlight on the starting point and I can now take the first step.  That's the most important step of all, wouldn't you say?  Because it makes all other steps possible!

Living on the bottom of the ocean

This note may be hard to follow, I will apologize up front.  Picture the ocean from top to bottom.  When Todd & I learned to communicate as a couple from our time in counseling, we learned that most of the communication we had been sharing was "on the top", up where the waves are.  The top of the waves is where "the fluff" of life is, the day to day stuff, the weather, what color socks you are wearing, that kind of thing.  The things with no real consequence.  Fluff.  Then we learned that in order to have better communication, we had to go deeper.  So for instance, if we were fighting over nobody doing the dishes (fluff), going deeper meant identifying what was underneath - was one of us feeling over worked?  Under appreciated?  Going deeper in the water, down where the fish swim, so to speak.  You get the concept now?  A good relationship learns to go deep and keeps a balance between fluff, deeper waters, and all the way to the bottom of the ocean.  The bottom is where the deeper things of life and faith are dealt with.  Life & death matters.  Core values.   Purpose of life kind of things.

The other day, someone commented privately to me that the majority of my status updates on facebook dealt with Max's death for a very long time.  That's true.  I was living on the bottom of the ocean, trying to sort out life and death - literally.  It didn't feel *right* to talk about fluff.  What does fluff matter when my child is dead.  I had to "hide" 90% of my facebook feed because it was FLUFF.  WHO CARES, I would think to myself.  I've heard other grieving parents complain about the same things.  At first, nearly EVERYTHING got pushed up to fluff - even work, school, the checkbook (who cares if the bills are paid, Max is dead ... who cares if Wesley goes to school, Max did and now he's dead ...) - thankfully, these things slowly regain their importance and perspective returns.

In many ways, I am finding that I still live at the bottom of the ocean.  My counselor said that when a tragedy happens in our life, we become very existential, trying to find meaning and purpose in our lives and in our loss.  So if something has no purpose, then why would I waste my time doing it?  Or talking about it, or thinking about it, etc.  Again, what does that matter if Max is dead.  She hears me, understands me, and makes an observation about staying down at that level.  There is not much sunlight down there, it's murky and dark.  And it's very isolated.  Whoa.  She is right about that.

So now she is trying to help me see that it's okay to come up to the shallow waters and have fluff and fun again.  (How ironic, right?)  And I feel like I may never truly find the meaning & purpose behind Max's death.  So am I choosing to stay down there forever just because I cannot find what I am looking for?  Ug!  No wonder they call it "grief WORK".