She said I was an inspiration, said I was strong.
But really all I felt like was a fraud.
Because every morning I get out of bed and it is an act of supernatural will to do so. These simple things - brushing my teeth, putting on socks, making coffee - are impossibly taxing. Each day stretches out before me like a marathon of mundane tasks, each one just as hard as it was in the beginning of this so called "grief process".
It doesn't feel like it is getting any easier, this living after death.
“For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”? The same leg is cut off time after time.”
I have found myself astonished by the vast emptiness over and over; though the expectation is to spiral upwards, I often fear it is the opposite.
How do I learn to walk when "the same leg is cut off time after time"? When the wound is always fresh and bleeding, the amputation always shocking, the loss continually startling?
To function in such a state is not a matter of strength or of will, but a matter of faith. I am not strong, I am not inspirational - I am desperate.
I am desperate to believe that there is more to life than this crippling pain. I am desperate to believe that there is a reason God left me behind here in this forsaken world; that there is a purpose still for me even though I find the simple act of breathing hard. I am desperate to believe that someday I will meet my family again on the shore that never ends.
My brother once said to me, "If Satan is trying to shake my faith by taking dad, he chose the wrong tactic. All he has done is made clear to me that if there is no heaven, no world beyond this one, than there is no point - and I refuse to believe that."
And so do I.
If you have made the mistake of looking at me over the last six months and thinking, "she is so strong". I tell you the truth, it is not so. No strength is in me outside of the God given tenacity to believe that this can't be all there is.
Dear friend, it is in the desperate clinging of bloody, torn up fingers onto the cross that one is able to pull themselves up each day. It is here, embracing the very image of suffering, that we gain access to the aid of a Savior. And it is in His spread-wide arms that we find the faith, the will, to go on.
“we suffer with him [Jesus] in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us... And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. ”