Loyalties & forgetfulness

Grief is a physically and emotionally exhausting thing.  By that I mean, there are days when my entire body feels like a big knot. I feel like I’ve been hit by a dump truck and I can say that with confidence because I HAVE been hit by a dump truck! (That was what happened in our 2009 wreck-whole other story!)

If you’ve not experience true emotional grief, then you have no clue what I am describing here. I myself am learning this as I go. Everyone associates grief with tears and depression. It’s so much more than that. It’s staying up all night, crying until your eyes feel like they are so raw they could bleed. It’s feeling like you’ve got weights on your chest. Its looking outside & seeing rain when it’s 90 degrees and sunny! I realize this seems a little strange to describe it this way, but when you’re in this stage of grief…this IS what it’s like. You live in your own tiny world surrounded by nothing but dark clouds, awful feelings and guilt. Well, maybe not everyone experiences guilt, but that is a big struggle for ME in this process. When you come out on this side of burying your children, your relationships with people are different. Your social status changes among your friends. I’ve noticed a lot recently as we hear people talk around the sports fields, or at school, or just around….We are no longer “Isaac and Caleb’s” parents. We are “those are the ones that lost the twins” When we meet people that know our children but don’t necessarily know us, when we introduce ourselves in a conversation, peoples faces change. Another changing relationship is that with your family members. I’ve heard it said a billion times, the top things that will break apart a marriage are money & loss. I can tell you this-In our marriage-we have experienced BOTH of those things, and we are still going strong. We don’t have a fairy tale kind of marriage, I assure you, but no one does. Cris and I are both headstrong people that usually are not willing to budge on our stance. Our stances are not often the same either! =) BUT, that is what makes our marriage interesting. There is never a dull moment in our family. We have suffered through financial hardship, and we have and are still suffering through losing ½ of the children we created together. OUR relationship has changed since June. I look at Cris differently now. I see a man that has worked for the last 10 years to protect and provide for his family. I see a man that has gone through so many trials and has come out a better and stronger man. I see the father of my 4 beautiful sons and a man that I fall in love with again daily. Our relationship has a new level of understanding. It was a new level of emotion. Our hearts have broken together. In our 10 years together, we have experienced more traumatic life events than just about everyone that we know our age. We have experienced deaths, car accidents, financial strains, living situations, moves, job changes, health issues and most recently, death became very real to us as we stood together and buried our 2 of our sons. We are seasoned in grief, happiness, and love. That is a given…

Your relationships with your parents change. You think being a parent makes you realize what your parents went through as young parents, but you’d be wrong. Lose a child, and you become just that much more connected with the love a parent has for a child. I am not insinuating that parents that haven’t experienced this kind of loss don’t love their children; I am just saying that the love for a child grows a little deeper in a situation like this. I know in our family, our parents have been a huge support system through this as they too are dealing with the loss. I feel like a greater respect happens through grief also.

I could get into the rest of the changing relationships, but the only one left for me to discuss @ this point, is the relationship with God. Since I am not feeling very excited about that topic at the moment, I will save that for another day!

Frustration for the day-I wish more people honored Infant Loss & Awareness. I plan to be completely and fully decked out on October 15^th (and the entire month of October for that matter) in Pregnancy and Infant loss & awareness stuff. I understand breast cancer awareness and support the cause 100%, but I sure wish more people supported this cause-because it’s so close to so many hearts-you just don’t even know!