Spiritside

Conversations through a Door

Last night I had a dream.  In this dream, Lenny was in a room with a closed door.  We had a conversation, and I could hear his voice so loud and clear, just the way I remembered it.  Deep and strong, yet soft.  Always soft.  He was a soft spoken man. 

As we were talking, I knew I wasn't going to be allowed to open the door and see him, which is what my heart really wanted.  None the less we talked about the kids, my sadness at having to live without him.  He even told me that I needed to get the work done on the side of the house this spring.  He talked about current things, but not anything about him.  I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but again the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to prevented me from even going there.  I missed him, as we talked this overwhelming feeling of missing him was always running through me.  But, there was also peace.  He had peace in his voice, and so I felt it too.  When I awoke, I ran to the bedroom door, but of course there was just a closed door with no one and nothing on the other side.  I know it was just a dream. 

There have been a few times when I've dreamed about him, felt him, could swear I've touched him.  These times always come when I am at my worst emotionally.  Though I have complete peace about his salvation, there are times when I miss him with such power that I feel broken.  The last time I had an experience like this (and I know this is going to sound weird and unbelievable) I felt his peace flow through me, something different than I had ever felt before.  It changed the tears I was crying from pain to joy.  After, as I was sitting on my bed, the air was filled with the smell of his cologne.  However freaky, whatever tricks my mind was playing, I don't care.  I needed peace, and it was provided.

Dreaming about a lost loved one is so bitter-sweet.  I mean really bitter-sweet.  Those first few moments when you wake up are just like those early days, when you have to remind yourself that your reality is forever changed before you get out of bed.  I spent many mornings waiting for the truth to establish itself in my brain before going into my kids or hitting the shower.  That feeling happens when I dream of Lenny.  But it's a small price to pay.

No Apologies, Please

I've been struggling with something.  When I posted about my other blog, I mentioned that I was being rather negative, and a few had thought maybe I was not allowing the joy of God to fully restore me.  I felt a bit judged, and for a few posts felt that if I let my hair down, let it all hang out, it would somehow be taken in the wrong vein, judged, or saddest of all somehow paint God in the wrong light. 

I just came back from a site where the topic was suffering.  And there were no apologies made.  Yet God was very much at the heart of the posts I read.  I didn't feel as though I was reading the words of someone who felt sorry for herself, or didn't appreciate the blessings in her life.  And so tonight I post with no apologies.  I'm hurting.  I am missing a vital part of my life, my husband.  I am watching my daughters grow up without the man who loved them so dearly.  This hurts.  I've lost contact with his family, and they haven't responded to my desire to open the doors of communication.  Ouch.  I just went through another holiday season with the mixed emotions of a person who loves the Lord but hates my circumstances.  It was suggested that I was stuck, either in my grief or depression, it doesn't really matter.  The truth is I am stuck.  I've cried more in the last month for my loss than at any other point except the early days.  If I cry for the rest of my life, which I feel I very well could do, so what?  Seriously.  It's not my faith that's wounded at this moment in time it's my heart.  I read and re-read my husband's death certificate.  How does one get past words like "blunt force trauma", "homicide", and in a cruel twist seeing the divorced box checked while we were indeed still happily married.  I waited months for those death certificates to arrive so I could begin to process benefits and insurance, only to have it all void because the wrong box was checked.  And here is something else I know that kills me.  They know that on my husband's flight the passengers were all moved to the back of the plane and told that they were never going to see their loved ones again.  I can't even imagine how my husband absorbed these words.  He loved us so much.  Our kids were the light of his life.  He was, indeed, terrorized.  Why? 

I have moments when I feel like this all just happened yesterday.  Like a hampster in a wheel I run faster and faster and go nowhere.  I want to escape from this.  Pain like this changes the focus of a person's life.  I knew from the minute I saw his flight number in the crawl on the news that day that the focus of our lives would switch to just trying to recover.  Living in recovery is very different from living.

Since his death I've made two major decisions that have been harmful.  These circumstances have added to the burden of life post 9/11 and in my opinion made healing much more complicated that it would have been otherwise, for me and my kids.  Yet I feel trapped in both situations, so there is a hopelessness that also plauges me.  I do trust God in my life, I believe He loves us, but that does not take away the pain I feel.  And I'm exhausted at having to say this.  Pain and faith can inhabit the heart at the same time.  I just don't have the energy any more to apologize for hurting in the middle of all this.

My Heart, a Black Hole, or Missing Lenny Soooooo Much

There are days.  This is one of them.  I miss him.  I miss his smile, his laugh, the mole over his left eye.  He had very broad shoulders, and I miss rubbing them for him after a long bike ride.

I miss his kindness.  His words always edifying.  I miss hearing him with our daughters.  The knowledge that no one will or could ever love those girls the way he did breaks my heart.  I mean, there are no alternatives.  There is a helplessness to this loss for them.  As a mommy all I want is to make things right for them and not being able to change this drives me slowly insane. 

I have been depressed for a few weeks now.  I act at times like I don't know why, but always, always at the bottom of my emotions is the nagging sense of loss.  I can't assimilate it into my life.  I know at some point I should be able to, that's what "healthy" grief does, but four year later I still just miss him.

Grief, Friend or Foe?

There are times when I feel like a shell.  Empty and void of all emotion, joy, and pain.  Then there are the other times, when I feel like I'm going to explode with pain, anger, rage.  There have been times, few and far between, where I think maybe everything will be ok.  But then I have a nightmare, or see a plane and throw up, or remember watching the images of that day on T.V.  My daughter, five at the time, drew.  She filled  page after page of a plane crashing into the towers, with her daddy's face in the window saying "bye-bye".  At the time she didn't understand her daddy's plane hit the Pentegon, and as hard as I tried to protect them from the images, friends and family piling into my home at the time had the TV on non stop.  I was in no shape to stop this for a day or two, but by then the images of planes crashing and burning buildings were seared into the minds and hearts of my daughters. 

I had two deaths to deal with.  One, traumatic, life altering, violent and unexpected.  The other, my mother's, expected, sad, just as traumatic.  (Val, if you read this please know I am writing in a state of prayer and love for you!).  She died of  lung disease.  Not cancer, sort of a combination of emphasyma and asthma.  She was 60, young by todays standards.  Her lungs were blackened and chrystalized.  They had no ability to oxygenate her once beautiful body.  Her mind had started to go as well, but in His grace I was allowed a last lucid conversation with my mother before she died.  She apologized for doing this to me so soon after loosing my husband.  She kept telling me how sorry she was she couldn't be around to help see me threw this awful thing.  I don't know if she even knew her own death would be another awful thing for me.  I really think she thought I would just "get over" loosing her, but always be in a state of grief for Len. 

Grief has since become a daily companion for me.  It is not something I'm done with.  It's there in every day life.  I've read that grief and grief work are what we do to get past, move on, assimilate the loss, accept our new realities.  If that's true then I guess grief is a friend.  It's the friend that forces us to live a life different from the one we wanted, or thought we'd have.  It's the faithful words of a true friend, that wound for now with the hope of making it better later.  It's the one that doesn't allow us to sugar coat our new realities, but holds our eyes wide open with tooth picks until we see.  See that our loved one is truly dead, see that the dreams we once had are no longer a possibility.  See that like it or not death is non-negotiable.  Grief will not be bargained with.  It won't change it's mind.  It is relentless.  It finds me when I want to hide, and is not very nice about it. 

In some ways I tried to out run grief, the process, the work, the pain.  But it's faster, smarter and stronger.  If I ignore it during the day then it comes into my dreams and finds me at night.  If I push it aside until a better time I find myself depressed, unable to function, until I acknowledge it's presence.  I find it a foe at these times.  When I want to pretend for a little while longer that I'm ok, and the next minute tears stream down my cheeks and I can't remember why I'm at the store, or on the road.  Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.  Part of my experience.  Part of the girls experience.  Part of life now.  The same way grief is. 

As the anniversary of my husband's death approaches I imagine I will be visited by this friend a lot more.  9/11 is my January 1.  It is the date I wait for all year long, then once it's gone I start a new year of preparing for the next time it shows up on my calendar.  And in the mean time I try to be hospitable to grief, with the hope that at some point we won't have such a close relationship.

Addictions

Today as I read Susie's post on addiction, (http://sam.typepad.com/sojournministries/), I was overcome with remorse for posting about my situation with my neighbor.  I had thought of hitting the delete button, but I want to be authentic here and so I decided against it.  It's how I was and am feeling, and if it's wrong I'll deal with it.  To be truly honest while I was typing the first two posts I deleted a ton of information because of the nature of their story.  To write it all would fill pages upon pages of activities and consequences that, though would help one to see my point clearer, started to make me feel like a Pharasie.

The ironic thing is that the more his addictions are revealed, and the more they have suffered unbearable, painful consequences, the more judgemental of me they have become.  After reading Susie's post I understand why so much more.  I will add here that this behavior on their part is why their words, tone and attitude is so painful. 

But the Pharasies of Jesus' time  were the ones that He spoke to the harshest.  Yet if one ever realized his sin Jesus was so quick to forgive.  When I taught Sunday School I always loved teaching on Zacharias.  I loved how he felt when Jesus told him to get down from the tree, to prepare to lunch with him.  That is the dignity that Susie speaks of.  Did it negate any of the damage Zacharias had caused?  No.  But from that day forward, after his encounter with Jesus, his life was forever changed and he gave back.   A true encounter with Jesus should lead to humility, shouldn't it?  Zacharias never puffed up and said "look, I'd love to give back what I've taken, but hey, Jesus ate with me today so I must be better then y'all." 

Let he who is without sin......and they dropped their stones.  I guess that's why I struggled so much with their attitude.  Given his sin, her sin, (vanity? caring about appearances to the point of harming her children?  Thinking she's so much better than everyone because her home is pretty or her life looks good, and needing that more than honesty to God?  Dispensing communion elements under false pretenses, again because it made her feel she achieved some status in her church?  I don't even know if any of this is sin or simply irritating to me!) I just can't believe they would treat anyone, not just me or my family, but anyone in such a manner. 

Susie's post offers an option for handling addictions.  It also offers options for how we can handle the addictions we see in others with the example Jesus offers us. 

So I will leave my posts up with the hope that I don't sound like a Pharisee.  I will admit that i struggle with my own addictions.  I will continue to seek His will in how I handle this issue with my neighbors, my anger.  I will remember the dignity Jesus offers.  I will focus on how He handled sin in others, how he never judged harshly but pitied the enslavement.  And Lord willing, I will deal with myself and others with this in mind.

The Pain of it all...

Addiction.  The word that has been the topic of post on both Natala's and Susie's sites lately.  When a topic or post invades my thoughts so deeply I can't help but wonder what deeper lesson I'm to glean from it all.

How hard it is to deal with pain.  How hard to trust that God will walk through the fire, the flood with us and that we are safe dealing with our wounds without the aid of _________(Fill in the blank).  Who would want to?  Who in their rite mind would willingly allow the waves of pain to wash over and engulf ones soul in the name of healing?  Yet how else is healing achieved?  Obviously the Cycle of addictions works in such a manner that at some point the initial catalyst is no longer visible through the fog of destruction.  My mother drank to forget her pain, but at the end of her young life, cut mercilessly short by alcohol and drugs, I wonder if she remembered why she started.  Was it sexual abuse, rejection, low self-esteem?  The answer is yes to all, but no one remembered because so much damage was caused by her drinking that a whole new world of trouble was born.  She herself no longer even knew what to seek healing for, so she drank more.

Yes, we live in such a world that the slightest discomfort is barely tolerable.  I can't be hungry more than a few minutes before I'm eating, even if what I'm eating is not the best for my body.  I'm bored, I spend money for the instant gratification and entertainment factor.  I have the slightest pain, cramp, whatever and I'm looking for something to ease the pain.  I see it in the generation I'm helping to raise.  Every need must be met the minute detected or there is no joy.  And where are we looking for joy?  To empty, shallow sources that set the stage for addiction because they will never satisfy, so we think maybe more will do it.  The amounts become greater.  One order of fries is no longer enough, we super size them.  A glass of wine doesn't relax us enough so we order the bottle instead of the glass.  And stuff.  This is no lie and no dig at the beautiful spirit in my life who does this, but I've been with a dear friend of mine as she spends thousands on a certain brand of jewelry.  But guess what.  It no longer is enough, and now we've been looking at a $65,000.00 ring.  Why?  When did the thousands of other things stop working?  The truth is they never worked, but maybe this new ring will.  But of course it won't, and where does one go from a ring that costs more than the down-payment on my first home?

It feels so hopeless to me at times.  Face the agony, the grief, anger and trust that God in His wisdom will protect us, or numb our senses and never be done with the agony, the grief, and anger.  The obvious choice is to trust.  Yet I know from where I sit tonight I shiver in fright at facing what 9/11 has done to my family.  I escaped this week.  Here I am packing though, and in a few hours I'll be back in the real world where I'll have to walk the talk.  I'll have to face my husband's loss, my overweight child, my older child who has more letters associated with her name than most doctors.  (OCD, ADD, ADHD etc...)  And I'll have to face the damage my own addictions have caused.  My bank account, my overflowing closet, my relatives and friends who no longer love me.  These issues will either cause me to turn to the One, or hide even deeper in the sins that help me forget, at least for a time, that I am a widow with no true family, a single mom who can't keep track of the mistakes I make, and a Christian who, at times, can't fathom why He'd give me the time of day.