A thousand sleepless nights.

So far, the third month after Joel's death has been the hardest...   I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.  Normally you'd being to miss someone a lot more before that feeling would die away.  So perhaps next month, I will miss him even more than I do now.

Joel's death is huge sort of "milestone" in this journey, of course.  Not a milestone I was happy to hit...  But not the start of the grief journey.  By a long shot.  And so, the grief did not start three months ago.  It seems a more continuous journey to me.  Which is why, as I have already said, this doesn't exactly seem as hard as I thought it would be.  Not to take away from how hard it really is.  But because it was already so hard.  And the last month of Joel's life was very, very hard.  I think "the burn" of that month is partly why after he died, I was surprised by how it wasn't harder.

There were still some good memories in that last month...  I can't say it was all bad.  It wasn't how I wanted the last month of Joel's life to be.  But we can't always have what we want.  And I know that there was a trade off.  Because I would have reacted differently to that emergency trip where Joel's lung was full, if the previous month had been perfect.  I think I would have wanted him intubated...  And it would have been much harder to have to let him go...

How is that.  The last month of life was poor enough that it made it easier to let him go...

But still, I miss him in a way that is hard to describe to people who haven't lost a child.  And I find that I grieve, at times, not only the death of my child, but the whole entirety of the last two and a half years.

Here are the words from a song, by Laura Story.  The song is called "Blessings" and I'm sure many of you have heard the song.  A friend put it on her facebook, but I didn't bother listening to it, then one day I heard it, words and all, on the radio.  It's worth listening to, to get the full effect.  But the words say the most.  So I'm putting them up here, well, excerpts of the word, anyway.

We pray for wisdom
Your voice to hear
We cry in anger when we can not feel You near
We doubt Your goodness, We doubt Your love
As if every promise from Your word is not enough.

Cause what if Your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near?
What if the trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

What if my greatest disappointments, or the aching of this life,
is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?

I know a lot of people who carry hurts, hurts from abusive parents, from difficult marriages, all kinds of hurts.  And they pray and surrender it all to God.  But so often that one surrender is not the healing.  We'd sure like it if we could just get the healing, with out taking every little bit of the hurt to God and naming it before Him.   But truly, sometimes doesn't the healing come THROUGH the tears?  It is each tear we cry before God that IS the healing.

And I know that this is so with Joel too.  I must cry every tear, because each tear can bring me to His feet, and into His arms.  God can sew my heart to His, tear by tear by tear.

You know, sometimes a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know He's near.  And Joel's life was just short of a thousand nights long.  About 960 nights, give or take a few.