Grief for the Generations

Another Kleenex alert....

It seems, every day, I learn something new. In fact, here lately, it seems that "conventional wisdom" keeps getting turned on its head and I'm being forced to approach life from a direction I never saw coming.

This happened recently with my kids.

I've been working SO HARD to protect them from the pain of loss that I forgot to show them I am human. I forgot to give them the opportunity to see someone honestly grieving death. I forgot to allow them, through being a witness to my pain, to be open with their own.

All that changed tonight as I wrote (or, so much more appropriately, God wrote THROUGH me) yesterday's post.

Upon completion of that writing, I started at the top and reread the whole thing, word for word. And about midway through I just started crying buckets.

It was about that time that Hooman walked in the room to ask me a question. There was no way to disguise the tears. There was hardly anyway for me to talk without choking. I had NO CHOICE but to face him with tear-streaked cheeks and a cracking voice and admit my own pain.

And you know what happened? He asked to share my pain. He didn't crumple to the ground in a heap of his own tears. He stood strong for his Mom and asked me to read the very post that was making me weep.

So many times I haven't given credit where it has been due. In the people department, I think I'm especially guilty of this sin. But when your life has been one hurt after another, at the hands of people, you learn to be skittish. Or, at least to use that as your excuse.

The sheltering of my kids is a good example of this. I remember being beyond upset for years after my Grandpa Robbie died. And it seemed that no one around me felt the same pain. There were few tears shed for the man that the adults in my life felt robbed my Grandmother of most of her middle age years.

I needed someone to care that I cared and was so hurt. I needed that sympathetic soul. And, a few years later, I found him in a boy I attended school with, whose Grandfather was dying of cancer. And that was the beginning of a train wreck of unforeseen circumstances in my life.

I don't begrudge those circumstances these days; they made me who I am. However, I can see with 20/20 vision that my longing for someone to understand me led me to make one bad decision after another. For many years.

So, if I can acknowledge that I don't want my boys to go down that same path, then my logical conclusion has to be that I HAVE to grieve with them. I HAVE to bring up the subject of Mom and be ready for the tears and pain and heartache that will spill forth.

And I have to be ready to train them that God is sustaining me, one breath, one moment, one day at a time. That I am stuck with this pain for the rest of my life but that I don't have to try to bury it because God is big enough and strong enough and cares so immensely that I can lay this all at His feet and leave it there WHENEVER I need to.

I don't want my boys making the same, bad decisions I did when I felt no one understood me, save one poor person. I want them to find their comfort in God, their ultimate comforter, healer and listening ear.

So I'm going to keep writing these difficult thoughts. And maybe I'll even post the other 150 I've written since Mom was diagnosed in October 2009. I think it is high time that God decides how He wants to use my writing, instead of me trying to control a ship I am unable to steer.

And I will continue to pray that my boys will fall in God's arms, and mine, when they need to.

Hopefully, with time, we'll find that our emotional needs will lessen. And, as a result of spending so much time with God, and with each other, in our grief, that we have fallen in love with Him and each other all over again.

Wouldn't THAT have made my Momma proud?