Sweet Boy,
September 29th. One and a half years. Eighteen months. Seventy-eight weeks. I know you well and know that you would tell me to stop being sad. I can no more stop the sadness than I can stop breathing. Do you know what I hate the most about grieving, Tyler? I hate that grieving is all about me. For one and a half years, I have been mired in the most self-focused emotion I’ve ever known.
I wish I could only feel gratitude that your suffering is over and you have eternal joy. I am ashamed to admit it, Tyler, but that gratitude is overwhelmed by my sadness. I am encased – body, mind, and soul – in this terrible sorrow. It’s like being imprisoned in quicksand, yet somehow free to go about daily life, laugh, make plans, all while each movement requires herculean effort against the heaviness and pressure of the quicksand. Managing each waking moment of each day involves fighting not to be swallowed into this vortex of grief – the reality of my life without you.
I’m so weary, Tyler. I feel like I’m failing. Isn’t time supposed to heal? Shouldn’t my spirits be lifted each time I focus on your joy? Instead, I’m so sad for what I’ve lost. I, I, I, me, me, me. I don’t know how to be this person who isn’t others-focused; I really don’t. I’ve lost you and I’ve lost me. There is nothing that happens, nothing that’s said, no thought that crosses my mind, that somehow doesn’t remind me of you. A sentence, a sight, a reflection, triggers pain so deep it takes my breath away. No one around me knows, no one sees, because it’s just a natural part of my existence now.
Words don’t help; time doesn’t help, because nothing can change the reality that you are no longer here, Tyler. We were supposed to have been preparing to celebrate your 17th birthday next month. Your smiling face was supposed to have been featured amidst the vast array of prom photos posted last spring. You were supposed to have cracked a joke on Facebook about the roads no longer being safe the day you got your driver’s license. I was supposed to have shared the photos this summer of you and Dad building Dad’s dream shed together. When back-to-school sales hit the stores, we were supposed to have traversed the aisles looking for the perfect notebook.
I was supposed to have been that mom, earlier this month, whose caption under the grinning young man in the photo said, “Today is my baby’s last first day of school.” And I cry because your “last first day of school” wasn’t your senior year, but your sophomore year. But more than these painfully missed milestones, I was supposed to have woken up each of the past five hundred forty-nine mornings and seen your face. What would you look like now? I want to see you, Tyler. I just want so badly to see you.
And even as I want all that, I know that you have no sorrow for those missed milestones, for all the missed days on this earth. It’s my sorrow, not yours.
But Tyler, my tears do not mean that I don’t still praise God every morning I wake up without you. My persistent sadness doesn’t mean God isn’t there, comforting me. His presence is with me on the days I am handling your loss well as equally as on the days I can’t handle it at all. The same God you loved and served so faithfully, the same God in whose presence you stand today, is with your mom in her sorrow.
I’ve never needed Him the way I started needing him the day we went to the ER two years ago, and every day since. He’s never failed me, Ty, not once. Even though I can’t promise you I won’t be sad, I can promise you that eighteen months later, I’m ok.
I’m changed. I’m resistant to the new me. I don’t want to be the new me. I have to reconcile myself to be me without you. No matter how long this process takes nor how weary I get, I won’t fall into the trap of just being heaven-focused, wandering ineffectually through life until I get to join you. I want to live fruitfully, Tyler. It’s not within my control to stop grieving for you, yet it is within my control to keep living for God. And I guess you know this much better than I do, but our God is amazing. He understands that I can be devastated yet praise Him. That I can be troubled yet have peace. That I can feel lost yet have hope.
Love,
Mom
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:18-31)
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3: 19-23)