Seasons

My Beautiful Laynee Grace, how I miss that grin

Today is the seventh day of the month.  Another angelversary for Laynee.  We've lived one quarter of a year without her sunshine.  The days since returning from Florida have been bitterly cold.  As brutal as winter in Illinois can be, grief is much more brutal.  During midwest winter there is a certainty that warmer, more pleasant days are ahead, that spring is just months away.  However, there is no absolute that there is such a thing as springtime in this place known as grief.

While in Florida for the holidays, there were brief moments which felt like reprieve.  In these instances, while I was busy snapping pictures of the kids in the ocean, or watching them open gifts, the pain of losing Laynee was not at the forefront of my mind.  Death, trauma, and loss very briefly took the back seat to present time.  I even dared to entertain the thought, the hope, that perhaps if we survived this first holiday season without her, grief would lose some of it's debilitating power over me.  As we returned to the harsh, cold, winter in our home state and the routine of every day life,  the icy hand of grief has once again wrapped around me.  The powerful grip threatens to consume me and drag me into it's abyss.  Reality of death has pummeled me with renewed force. 

No one ever told me that grief looked so like fear.  Six months ago, these words written by CS Lewis would not have made a bit of sense to me.  Today, I find that those words resonate within me for I am living them.  When I wake each morning there is a clawing, groping sensation inside of me, a feeling much akin to panic.  I cannot help wondering if it is possible to survive one more day without her.  At times the truth sends tingling, chilling sensations throughout my body. There seems to be a physical, driving force pressing upon me, paralyzing me, squelching my ability to accomplish anything outside of existence.  I cease to function as I once did. I can no longer think complex, intellectual thoughts.  I've lost my ability to retain basic information.  Things which once stirred excitement and zeal in me, now leave me with little more than apathy.  Exhaustion has taken up residence in my mind, body and soul.  The simplest of tasks seem insurmountable.  At times, the tsunami of grief seems to have purged me of all that I was and what I had hoped to become.  I feel like one who is lost, wandering aimlessly from one day and into another.  There is no focus, no goal, no direction.  Instinct tells me that I cannot go around this barrier, that I must go directly through the brutality of grief.   

From inside, looking out my window, there is beauty in winter.  The world appears to be silenced by the white blanket of snow.  The plants cease their growing,  the lake appears still and lifeless.   The trees, though heavy with snow, are majestic.  Beneath the dormancy and harshness of winter is growth and life.  Life lies beneath winter's disguise, just as hope lies beneath griefs darkness.  There is comfort in knowing that though the seasons of the year and of the heart may change, though they become brutal and harsh, my God remains on his throne.  ......and He is good.