Thank you, God for giving me words to write and for letting the sunshine in!
This holiday season was the hardest yet. Somehow, like a potato peeler scraping away one thin layer after another, the numb melted, melts - imperceptibly - catching me off guard - my brain floated amid the twinkling lights and shiny red packaged gifts and hugs and meals and Merry Christmas's and "Silent Nights."
Zach is not here. No Zach gift tags.
No Zach stocking hanging.
A dull pounding, the question persisted: how will I do this year after year after year after year? Future stretched, stretches. I closed my eyes. Dark. Not better. Different. I don't want to take any more steps.
Peter MD is my toilet (his words) - he, the dumping ground for the steaming misery piles which fill me up as my well of strength empties. The grieving body can only take so much. The tank empties; reserves dissolve in the voices of guilt, despair, what if's, why's, bitterness, self-pity - harder and harder to push away, the soul's fortressed walls pummeled, battered, broken, breached.
December's Peter MD appointment was cancelled to benefit another. Like the toxins build when the body backs up, so my soul filled with stench. By the time January rounded the New Year and the Peter MD day came, the rot of depression and grief permeated the air around me to the point I could hardly speak. I made myself sick...the bubbling black a time bomb. NO ONE need hear hopelessness - so sad to my own self I felt straight jacketed by it - words - to let them out - a black tsunami. My soul muscles shivered with the ache of barely holding it back.
Even with Peter lifting the toilet lid, readying for the dump, I could barely let it go. Ugly words splash. If words could draw, their pencil would've sketched Satan. Stuttering, crying, I denied my faith, God, hope, happiness, prayer, the slow dripping of pain easing the pressure. I didn't say it all. I said enough.
As the clocked tocked to "times up," Peter MD, who ( thank you, God for providing him) uttered in his degreed dialect, black and white way, "The Psalms. The Psalms are full of woe, distress, despair, pain, and praise. A thanks, a thanksgiving. If you can't pray anything else, give thanks even for one thing."
Cha-ching! My money's worth ten times ten.
Chinks of light filter into the dark. A slow trudge up thankfulness hill is bringing the sun back to me. Madison is out of town today, the day after Zach's birthday; I'm still in jammies and slippers at 1:08 pm waltzing through piles of dirty to clean to folded laundry, piles of dishwasher clean dishes to loaded dishwasher dirty dishes, to the thoughts of thanks for messes.
Let God let the sunshine in. Life is messy. An earthly body dead is sealed in a box and buried. No more messes. Life is dust bunnies, fender benders, flu bugs, strewn socks and shoes and school books, and a friend's baby boy riding his toy across a hard wood floor littered with a 1000 crayons. And life is pain and grief.
Those messes we march through represent the lives of those we love. Thank you, God, for rubber gloves and dish soap and my very own mess makers. Thank you for holding me and molding me when I am a hopeless mess. Thank you for Peter and his toilet. Grief sucks, but thank you for letting the sunshine in.
Give thanks to Him; bless His name. I will give thanks to the LORD with all my heart. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing. Praise the LORD! Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good. Let those who love Thy salvation say continually, "Let God be magnified."
46 seconds of letting the sunshine in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-4w9gKlR3U
