Sitting in My House, Naming My Peas.

I think that just about every second thought yesterday was about Joel.  I've missed him more in the last couple weeks than ever.  Hope's funeral brought everything back.  I felt like Joel had died that week... except that the week after Joel died didn't even feel like that.

I'm grateful that I don't wake up feeling depressed... yet anyway.  I'm glad that I don't feel hopeless or helpless (two common symptoms of clinical depression).  I am also glad that I can sleep well at night.  And that I don't (usually) feel worthless.

But I am tired a lot, which is a symptom of depression.  Or maybe just grief.  Being sad and missing someone can really take it out of you.  Don't get me wrong, I didn't think that after five months I'd miss my son LESS.  Five months is nothing, a snap of the fingers, a blink of the eye of time.  I just don't think I expected I'd be missing him more and more as time went on.

I put a poem up awhile back, "The Five Stages of Grief."  It's a great poem, and one of the things it says that I have heard in various ways other places, is that grief is a "circular staircase."  C.S. Lewis described it as a journey.  A journey, you don't double back or retrace your footsteps, but the terrain often repeats.  There are deserts and there are mountains.  Each time you go through the desert, it is a different one, there are differences and changes.  But it is still hot, dry, dusty.  Each mountain is different, might be rocky, might be shale, might have trees, might have cliffs.  But you find you are struggling UP.

There are just so very many places to go in grief.  It seems inexhaustible.  Well, I already know that in some ways it is, that my heart will not be done this journey until I find my home in heaven.  There is a comfort in knowing that I've sort of "finished" with certain things, or at least that when I next touch on the topic, there will be less of a sting.  But it is also important to acknowledge that I won't be done with this journey.  So that I can pace myself.  And accept the new reality.

I supposes it wouldn't totally be unlike walking into a kitchen to a mound of peas on a table and being asked to count the peas.  And you do, and all the peas on the table are counted and you push back from the table, only to have your hand taken and be led to the next room, full from top to bottom with peas.  And then you look down the hallway and see a number of doors, and underneath you can see little green bumps...  You might be thinking "that's a heck of a lot of peas to count."  It is. 

But this new house is yours, and the peas only get cleared out as you count em.  Your new life going to be lived with those peas for a long, long time.  You will have to work around them.  You will take breaks, rest, eat meals, sleep with those peas in your environment for a long, long time.  And for a long time those peas will really be "in your face."  Even as you slowly count off living spaces, you'll still be looking at them all around you.  For a long time, it will seem that most of your life is counting those peas.

And as the years go by and the piles lessen, the peas will interfere less and less with the business of living there.  They will be more in the background.  Still, at unexpected times you will open a cupboard or peer under a couch to a surprise mound of em, sitting there.  You'll find a couple rolled into your shoe.  In your laundry.  Years and years later.  Safe to say, you'll never really be totally rid of them. 

Oh my.  I don't even know if that analogy is really a good one.  As I have already said, I want Joel here in my heart.  If the "Men in Black" came by to wipe my memory, I'd bite and claw and kick, I'd fight with all my being to keep my memories.  I WANT to live in this house.  But man, it is a heck of a lot of peas, or tears, or whatever it is.  There are days when I'm fairly sick of peas, is all I'm saying.  I'm somewhat totally tired of counting them.

I hope you are not too tired of HEARING about them...  If you have to count em too, then you know how I feel.  If you don't have to count em, then I hope you are so grateful for that fact, that you don't feel impatient with hearing me talk about it.

Next blog I'm going to list some of the grief "places" I've gone in the last months.  It's not really for you.  It's more for me.  I think there might be something therapeutic in listing it out.  Seeing it all there in print.  Maybe I'll feel a sense of accomplishment, or a sense of relief.  See the roses with the thorns removed.

I suppose that could be another analogy for what is being done.  I'm living in a maze of very thorny rose bushes.  And each day I spend some time cutting the thorns off, so that I may enjoy the roses without the sting.  Every day, pokes and scratches, hands and arms smeared with blood.  But every day there is a bit more "rose memory" that I can grasp without hurting myself.

Well, no analogy is perfect.  They are limited, because they are only ways to explain it, they are not grief itself.  Still, writing about it does something for me.  There is some strength in NAMING things.  A sort of power is lost, or gained... It is hard to explain or define why this is.  But putting words to things has a special, for lack of a better word, magic.  In some special way, acknowledging things takes away some of their potency.  And in a sense, that is what I do in this blog.  I try, as best as I can in my flawed human state, to acknowledge the truth about things.

Jesus said the truth would set us free.  He also said HE was the Truth, capital T,  and I believe that He is the ultimate Truth, that acknowledging Him gives us the ultimate freedom.  But I think that the principle holds up in smaller things too.  It is the un-named sins that hold us still.  If we can not acknowledge them, we can never be rid of them.  It is the pains we never say out loud, even to ourselves, or more importantly, to God, that refuse to heal.  The truth is a powerful thing.  The Truth is a powerful Person.