Grief.
It is a word my counselor used at the end of our first session, “I see someone who is grieving.”
2015 was a year of grieving. It was a year I lost my voice and this blog took a bit of a standstill, which had not happened since I started it back 2007.
CS Lewis says of grief in A Grief Observed:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I’m not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering of the stomach, the same restlessness, the yearning. I keep on swallowing.
Other times it feels like being mildly drunk or confused. There is sort of an invisible blanket between the world and me.
I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting yet I want others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another & not me.”
This puts words to what I was feeling. Grief brought on anxiety and the enemy ran with it. I lost who I was as I became a person with no words to type.
I felt like another person as my introverted self who was used to craving moments of a quiet, empty home now felt lost, I didn’t know what to do in the silence.
I was coming out of grief after years of fighting cancer and multiple surgeries and medications and all the loss that it brings. I was embracing what it was to live new.
But then my hardest of hard grief hit, grief over our sweet daughter whose story took an unexpected and abrupt turn and hit extra hard due to her young age.
Her story is her story and will not be told in full here, but illness of her own took over our girl and she was not recognizable to us, or herself. A severity of illness, taking us all by surprise, and into a battle that felt much harder than my previous cancer battle.
Mess with me, I can deal, at least so far. Mess with my precious baby, and I battled hard to stay strong through her battle, but in the end, anxiety sank me.
I wrote about the sinking here, and along with my prolonged anxiety, I found also found myself in a pool of sadness, swimming in grief. Anxiety and depression can often go hand in hand.
I am acquainted with anxiety, but never of that severity & had not experienced it accompanied with depression. Deep sadness was a new experience for me.
Together anxiety and depression are a brutal duet that brought my life music & happiness to a halt. It was survival time. I was a survivor learning what survival really meant.
Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything. A time to weep. A time for grief.
Those months of grieving in 2015 were long and hard. I look back and remember the tears that would just appear sudden and silent, falling down my cheeks anytime I would hear the words “how are you?” My mouth would open but tears would replace words and I would try to answer but mostly kept silent & went inward.
I could not hold the flow back. It was not a sobbing type of tear, but a quiet, constant flow that would just come whenever I would try to speak of my inward pain–which was almost never–unless someone asked those 3 words “how are you?”
The words would be asked and there were the brave that would continue to come toward and were able to get me to talk even while tears flowed. I remember the saltiness of tears tasted when I would open my mouth and speak.
I remember the relief I felt after months passed, medications were found, and I could speak without the saline taste of tears.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens….a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance… Ecclesiastes 3:1,4
I think of the song, the one below:
Turn Turn Turn
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
This summer, 2016, for me, has been one of dancing & laughing, but I will not soon forget what it is to mourn & grieve. I know God bottles our tears & will not waste a single one.
I know there is meaning and purpose in pain when one knows the kindness of their Maker & chooses to turn their tear-stained face to Him.
God and His promises were the only lasting hope I could find while grieving, and it was one that held. I was held.
Are you grieving? Know that Your Maker loves you so very much, and holds you and your tears, too.
Remember: there is a time for everything, and as the world turns so does everything and relief will come as all turns, turns, turns. Remember while in the spinning He’s got the whole world and YOU in His hands.
{Turn, Turn, Turn by The Byrds}
Update: Since writing this post, I have learned that a sweet friend’s cancer has returned & I find myself reading these words I wrote about grief and thinking hers.
Yes, this is a summer of dancing for me, but I still and enter into the spinning grief of others, for we are made to mourn with those who mourn and I do. My heart is so sad for her.
Will you pray for my sweet friend? She has 2 young kids and wants to see them grow up. I won’t share her name here but God knows it and when you speak of her and lift her up to Him. I would be so appreciative if you do.
…………..
More From New Nostalgia:
Severe Anxiety Symptoms – Words From My Journal
“‘Cause I am a sinner ~ If it’s not one thing it’s another ~ Caught up in words ~ Tangled in lies
