Butterfly Chronicles Volume 49: Peter MD, Faith, Lies, and Butterflies

"...after the fire a still small voice."

Grief sucks.  Grief, a man chasing the “horizon – round and round they sped.”  Heart holes bigger, not better.  

Peter MD, “expert” and those cited “experts,” I spout shut-up at all of them.  Grief doesn’t live at your address, suicide isn’t your house number.  Until you walk down my street, don’t tell me what NOT to do.  Isolation, says Peter MD and those “experts,” is unhealthy.  Shut-up.  Isolation is a friend, a cloak of armor guarding others from me as much as it protects me from them.  Does anyone REALLY want to hear the craptastic grief talk?  I wouldn’t, couldn’t.  I couldn’t handle it – someone else’s grief.  No funeral homes or gravesides or hearses for me right now, and never would be too soon.

 

Does any audience really want to hear or know what this is like, and the answer is no.

Peter MD, I said, it’s not like you’d be bar-sitting, sipping an aged scotch listening to the aching, seeping sap of grief crap for free…you do it for money;  you wouldn’t do it for free.  Chuckled, he certainly did, that MD Peter.

So, I told him my lies.  Lies maybe I shouldn’t tell here in these words.  The lies are - that on this street -I’m not telling the truly true truth.  Repeating faith words, I have no faith.

MD shoves back and challenges me– the enemy lies he says.

I shoot back, I don’t want to give up my guilt and grief and pain or give it to God or give in to forgiveness, or even give in to believing I’m forgiven.  All I feel is fault and failure.  And I know this is wrong, but I don’t even care.

Lies.  I’ve told out loud what I believe intellectually, but mine is a dead heart without heart conviction.  I don’t know if Truth is true anymore.

Peter interjection (ho hum I think) – Mr. Peter MD, he goes on and on, it’s not a feeling; Faith is not a feeling.  Faith, he says, is doing it, saying it, singing it, worshiping it, living it – especially in the deepest, darkest, most dangerous doubting.

Maybe so, MD.  But in the hidden places of a black heart, I spit at God.  Why?  Why? Not only about Zach, but why’s about all of us.  Why would You do this to anyone – us?  Guilt for Zach, spitting at God for a father alone now, no guy adventuring, a dad’s eyes sad glassed.  A sister who can’t sit in the quiet, calm life, or the missing Zach blankets her all sticky hot.  A sister who seems sure and fine about Zach’s heaven life, but we wait for a day for that dam to break – the grief gush – will it come or will it not – waiting.  There's so much guilt all piled up on top of all those what-if's and why's and why's and what-if's.

Like a heroin addict, I go back and back for the guilt, the why’s, the doubts, basking in the self absorption of pain, rolling like a dog on death, my pride refusing to bow to Truth.  Lies – the lie that I believe in Zach’s where; Lies that any of that Truth stuff is a comfort or peace or a bandage slowing the grief flow.

MD speaks – That’s faith.  When you keep on moving when it doesn’t make sense, or  when you doubt, or when you don’t even believe that you believe, and you keep moving - that’s faith.  It’s doing those things even when you can’t SEE the Truth.

I’m just hard enough, I say, from the younger life of living mistakes – scarred and dirty and living with a life I regret and mistakes that still burn so many years later - I’m just hard enough and hard headed enough to make it - even depressed.  I so get why people don’t make it though. 

 My toes hang over the failure cliff always wishing the jump.  Some days I know I won’t make it.  Whispers.  That Alpha Omega, the I AM whispers:  selfish.  Others need you to make it so they can make it and they'll make it so you can make it.  Don’t rip the beginning scab that I’ll grow over each of you in My time. No jumping.  Lies.  I don’t believe Him, but I keep writing those verses and reading those verses, finding truth even when I don’t believe it’s true, and I don’t jump.

Grief is full of lies.  Enemy lies.  Heart lies.  Faith lies.  God will have to separate the lies and true Truth and Peter MD says faith means we keep going.

And the God who made me and knit me together in the womb keeps whispering. "Stop fighting a fight that's already been won." Keep going.  Keep going.  Keep going.  True Truth in the middle of all those lies. 

Grief sucks.  It’s hard.  It’s almost a year, and I’m counting the last moments of my son’s life and seeing him in them and missing him so hard I’m broken into uncountable pieces; I'm invisible.

It just SUCKS, and He whispers, a still small voice, and He asks me what I am doing here, and I try to remember the Truth.

Butterfly Chronicles Volum 48: Paradise

"...you will be with Me in paradise..."

I write amidst a herd of white butterflies frolicking in the air around me and over the cliff edge to enjoy luscious shades of wavy blue-green aquas.

God's Kauai, one of the most impressively tranquil, breathtaking, peaceful places we've ever been, will hopefully be a repeat destination - and we don't repeat locales...until now.   Including traveling to the Waimea Canyon, hiking the rain forest above the canyon, stumbling down a jungle path to Queen's Bath, washing in the towering waves of Polihale beach, almost drowning while trying to paddle board as the wind unexpectedly tossed Hanalei Bay, listening to wild roosters doodle doooo all over the island, we've, with gleeful abandonment, surfed our time together.

As the sun delicately tip toes under the horizon splashing palest pinks, oranges bursting forth out of the womb of clouds, with a last sigh of day disappearing, sun sleeps and moon rises.  These days' ends float in the quiet of a creeping muscle ached tired moving closer to night rest.  It is in these door closings to day times - the empty heart place filling with stone, heavy and perching, dark as ocean night, over my eyes tear filling.  Uplifted gaze to God's crystal sky suspended chandelier - eyes trying to see the unseen and know the unknowable.  Sad comes hard, quick.

I wouldn't erase the coming here.  We four would just paint the pallet into we five -  filled with that Zach smile, that Zach bursting laughter ,that Zach daring jumping into skyscraper waves and sucking back ocean mouth pounding bodies into sand filling swim suits - tail ends drooping like dirty diapers - clawing our way back to safe shore.

Paradise, Zach's and ours, different places, his perfect, ours as perfect as fallen world can offer, we five live.  We four live forward to his and His paradise where we will be five forever.

So strange the empty space, so full of longing our hearts, so heavy the air not filled - sometimes knowing he is in forever paradise just isn't enough. 

A soul salve, the waves soothe.  Paradise waits. We try to move forward without forgetting what is behind. 

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 47 - Reflections of Happy

Count your blessings,
Name them one by one
Count your blessings,
See what God has done.

Some days are okay – not good really, but not so sad – a break.  I wanted to write this now before the bottom drops out.  Sad’s hot breath curls the hair and tingles the skin on the back of my neck.  It won’t be long, so I want to talk happy today.

I read an article,

 http://redeemercitytocity.com/blog/view.jsp?Blog_param=446, that I really liked.  In it, J.R. Tolken was quoted from his Lord of the Rings series saying that God will make “everything sad come untrue.”  Just wow.  I serve an awesome God.

Listening to Christian radio (KSBJ), which has literally been a lifesaver for the past 10 ½ months, I heard one of my favorite songs this morning – which like so many – made me cry, but made me feel TRUTH – you know the kind that comes from a God so full of love it never ends.

I still believe in Your faithfulness.

I still believe in Your TRUTH.

I still believe in Your holy Word.

Even when I don’t see, I still believe.

Take a listen; skip the ad at the beginning. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4qPceadBMU&feature=related

Through the pain, God.  Just God.  Words sneaking around the walled up parts of my brain whisper, “Somebody always has it worse.  Somebody always has it worse.”  Sickened I feel by that mantra, but truth is truth no matter how hard it hurts.

I was able to share intimately with a grief stricken person recently, and I felt a sense of peace as I shared the slopes up and down I’ve slid on this journey.  It was good to share.  I hope it helped.  

The missing never stops.  Fear reaches out to embrace my hand, my mind, a deadly romancer.  This week, tearless, I’ve seen so many butterflies.  This week - my body licking up the sunlight blanketing the green soccer fields - I watched butterflies rest on branches, opening and closing wings to a beat I couldn’t hear, a beat orchestrated and choreographed by the One.  Wings open.  Close.  Open.  Close.  The door to my heart, open, but closed.  God and Zach visiting me under an oak tree, a ballet of wings under a green umbrella of dancing light.

Mind, heart, reality, past and present still veering in opposites, split, disconnected.

Thank you for visiting so many, many times this week, Zachery.  Thank You, God, for Zachery and for blessings to count.

Count your many blessings – see, SEE, SEE what God has done.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 46: Sad Week - Soul Weak

Dear Zachery,

Daddy, Madison, and I have been reading a series by Gary Paulsen about a young boy names Francis Tuckett.  It's all about his adventures traveling west on the Oregon Trail.  The series begins with Francis being stolen by Indians and ends several books later when he finally reunites with his family.  In reading the final chapters last night, we peeked into the life of Francis's mother and how she, like an angel, floats into Francis's room night after night after his return, just to find the flesh and blood him there, just to make certain he is really home. Standing over him, she strokes his cheek as his breaths heave and ho - a quiet rhythm of sleeping life under her mother fingers.

Like so many things do these days, the stroke of that cheek flooded my vision and I damned those tears so we could walk to the end of Francis's journey.  Heartbroken and thinking about that mother, I wished for a chance to feel your warm life against my palm on your cheek.  The last time I stroked your hair, your shell poised expertly on a bed of satin, your soul already flown to heaven, resting at the throne.  I long for my heart to be resting too, beside you in the presence of the King.

There are days when I'm so overcome by the truth that you are gone, I closet myself and scream into hands pressed against a face streaming tears.   A heart flu I have, and it aches, fevers, exhausts.  Fuzzy thinking, frozen brain unable to organize or recall or remember.  Confused.  Grief - a phantom I can't capture - hissing a fog - clouding sight and senses.

Life looms ahead, a road traveling to a future I can't see, and I want heaven.  I hear life buzzing around me; I shut it out to save my energy for Michael and the girls; I have only barely enough to walk beside them.  Ten months without you; how many years to go?

 Zach, I don't know how God's plan works out this grief, sadness, depression.  But if I don't have faith that He will, this life means nothing.  I hope God can use us someday - to gift His gospel to a dead soul, to stop a child or person or friend from doing what you did, or just to keep walking until He calls us home.

My heart breaks anew every morning and feeds on His mercies - new every morning too.

Zach, I want to stroke your cheek.  I want you to hold my hand.  I want to hear your laughter, your jokes, your wisdom.  I want to see your dog licking a life filled face.  I want to feel your breath on my neck as we hug goodnight.  God is my stairway to joy; I'm just stuck right now.  It's been a week of calling God, God, because I can't pray.  I love you.  The you part of my heart will never heal.  God send your mercies, new every morning.

We're walking toward you day by day, Zach, to fill the hole you've left behind.

I love you my man-child.

Mom

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 45: Onward Christian Soldier

Dear Zach,

A bad and good day blog all combined.  

How I feel today...

Thinking about the retreat for moms who have a child gone to heaven.  I went.  It was too early from your last day with me.  I left early.

Overwhelmed by their truth, I listened to mother after mother say the second year is harder than the first.  I can’t breathe.  Joy.  I need a joy rabbit trail.  Back to the joy of hope and light and God.  Seven months, one year, three years, nine years, their stories still the same of the heart dulled beating ache, pump after pump, pumping.  And so many with stories so much harder than mine.  The fall is a heavy weight to bear alone.  God, deliver.

Grief aches the body, dehydrates, exhausts, wishes for silence.  How does a person explain grief except to say that it wraps like a straight jacket, loosens, snaps back tighter in a spiraling cycle, neverending.  Paralyzing. If the second year is harder, I don’t know how I can walk through that.  So tired.  So sad.  Needing to write it out, running from the keyboard hands, fingers too heavy to lift to the keys.

I can barely pray.  I want to go home.  “This is not where I belong.”

And then there's how I felt days ago...better, finding joy... 

Dear Zach,
Lately, I've wondered if you pray for us from heaven.  Wouldn't that be something - prayers right in the presence of the King of Kings.  It is a comforting thought.  A thought chosen from joy.

I love you.  I miss you. I'm striving for choosing joy in all kinds of ways - from dabbling in expressing joy in art to stepping out of my comfort zone of isolation to venture back into the peopled world - a place where I've chosen the joy of sitting quietly in a corner watching the world go by - trying to listen and enJOY the stage before me.  This small back into people land step is, I hope, to remain small. Every time it exhausts me into tears when it is over - small steps. I don't want to go back to feeling the rush and pulse of a world out of step, running, running, racing toward an ever far away goal of sitting quietly.  God is in the quiet.  To be in the quiet is the street address of communion, an entangling of soul and spirit and Holy Spirit. Quiet.

Taylor is thrust into the brutal reality of a world gone wild - a job, a people without God, a place to flex Bible muscles and stand on the promises of God.  We watch her.  She grows.  I pray His hedge around her.  She misses you and locks her grief in tight where it hides and curls like smoke from under the barred door, seeking to cover and choke her.  She wrestles and learns who she is in You, Lord. Onward Christian soldier.

Madison dreamed about you.  You told her heaven is really cool because you got to meet God; it's a big place where you can swim and play sports, and you can do whatever you want. You are happy in the dream.  She is happy after the dream.  Gunner learns and listens to her "roll-over" and rolls over.  Onward Christian soldier.

Your daddy.  My hero.  I choose the joy of him. The love of my life; my hands still sweat over the him hero making me his princess.   So much weight this man carries with a character grown from that onward Christian soldier marching.  Heart full to brim bursting, I love this man who so loves you, and he has kept us all together - a sinew of unbreakable bond tied gently around us, holding us to his life.  Onward, onward. 

Life pulses by.  So changed.  Unrecognizable. My God knowing this marching of a Christian soldier is wrought with a love and forgiveness beyond our brains' abiltiy to contain it.  And I don't feel forgiven or worthy of forgiveness - and not of anything to do with you, just knowing the me I am and wondering how could He love me the way He must to forgive me.  I want to feel forgiven from born til dead.  I pray for that feeling of knowing His forgiveness gift.  Maybe I will find the security of feeling forgiveness in choosing joy - in choosing Him.

For a long time before you moved home, I asked God to give me a faith like George Mueller.  Is this His way to grow my faith on skinned knees and brokenhearted?  This growing, I do not like, but joy lights twinkle, there for the grabbing, there for the living.  The ache suffocates.  I reach for joy.  Somedays it hides and I'm too weak to seek.

Each day, we march on, Christians soldiers, broken, but seeking joy.

That's how I felt days ago. 

 Today, I don't feel that way today - at all.

Pray for us if God allows, Zach.  Each day is uphill, I guess, on our road home. I need a joy rabbit trail.  I want to go home.  "This is not where I belong."

Mommy

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 44: Operation Choose Joy

Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Charlie Clough, author of Bible Framework and one of the most influential Bible teachers I’ve ever had the privilege of listening to, said it is important to go over and over the Bible stories – the histories of Joseph, Moses, Esther, Ruth, Noah, etc.  Why?  Well, when life hits you with a 5 ton bag of crushed granite, you better have something easy to hold onto – and those simple, true Bible stories show the overwhelming, consistent, and grace focused plan of the Almighty God and serve as an impenetrable defense against whatever this life can heave your way.  I guess the message from Charlie - to KISS (keep it simple stupid) plays out in front of my current window on the world – keep it simple, remember Who God is and what He’s done and how faithful and true and real He is.  Simple.

KISS.  Choose joy.  It sounds so simple.  Just focus on being joyful – clench joy by the teeth, wrap arms, legs, whole body around it and hang on tight.  Exactly.  That’s exactly what I need to do, but let me say flexing that “joy” muscle against the ravages of grief is hard.  But…I’m commencing OPERATION CHOOSE JOY, and if it kills me, I’m gonna hang on to joy as tight as I can, dragging behind it from a rope that slams me knees, elbows, chin, over and over to the ground until I’m just bloody with joy.  Scattered, scarred, and scabbed, I’m hanging on tight to joy.

Enter Chuck E. Cheese.  Chuck spoke and sang and even scared some of the birthday partiers, but our nephew Connor, celebrating his 4^th was at his best and most charming.  Determined to hold on tightly to birthday party joy, I wrestled with memories of another blonde boy riding rides, and pumping games with tokens, and watching game tickets munched by the counting machine.  Wow.  The joy muscle weakened as Zach sad came crashing against the rocking boat of new birthday memories.  I hung on tight to that rope of joy as it dragged me raw skinned across the pebbled ground of new and old memories colliding.  Aching muscles, grip slackens, the joy rope slides through fingers; I hold on; I am tired.

What do I want now?  What do I want now that I am in a place in life I never ever could have imagined?  Joy.  I want joy to be a thread through even the heartache and loss and pain and confusion and pounding Chinese water torture dripping grief.  I want people to see me wearing joy even in the midst of a broken heart.  My favorite show is What Not To Wear – and Michael told me NOT to wear grief and to put on some joy.  He’s a smart man.

Pretend it is better – nope, I won’t do that.  But I’ll slather joy juice on the wounds and soothe them with the gift a grace-FULL God pours on us every day.  And I’ll find a way to mix joy with sadness and keep on living and growing new joy and new memories and walk through the life I have left holding hands with Michael.

I’ll make Connor a birthday breakfast of homemade pancakes and live in the moment of sticky hands and syrup drip drops on the table.  I’ll swim among the Maddie and Kyler sharks diving and leaping and thrusting floats and floaters overboard while bubbles and water walls sweep over my head.  I’ll enjoy the temporary goggle tattoos lining my eyes as I retrieve Connor’s torpedoes, and I’ll hand slam the water each time he throws another grenade my way, and I’ll laugh watching him laugh.  I’ll spy Taylor and Jordan across a lazy river and feel warmed by their smiles at each other.  I’ll hold Michael’s hand.

I’ll smile.  I’ll hug.  I’ll pray – God, why?  But then I’ll just sigh and know I’ll never know, and bloodied and bruised, I’ll hang on tightly to that joy rope, flexing my joy muscle. Someday, maybe the joy rope ride won’t take me down such bumpy trails.  Someday, maybe the holding on tightly to joy will strong those joy muscles right up so they will last longer and joy will weigh more than Zach sadness.  Hard heart break days, tears, and sad will come, but I want to mix in some joy to my life's wardrobe.

So, commence OPERATION CHOOSE JOY, count the every single day butterflies, and let the games begin.  In God, I know I’ve already won.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 43: Trust? Not So Much...

Driving Michael to the airport this morning, those tingling shivers danced up and down the back of my neck.  I struggled to force the panic back to its cave.  In an instant, I was transported back to that night, to that phone call, to Michael in Austin, me screaming Zach is dead.  Our son is dead.

I relive that reality over and over. The rushing down, flying down stairs, fumbling the phone, blindly dialing, having to transport the Zach knowledge over a line traveling the 3 hours away in the course of seconds. Only in a tiny part of my imagination can I gather an inkling of what that phone call did to my husband, Zach’s daddy.  In a soundless, midnight catacomb of shock he gained Houston over those midnight driven miles.  He arrived after all was black bagged  and carted away on a gurney, his boy, zipped up in a black bag, and my dad was there to keep me from falling down and my sister was there and my mom took the girls, but I don't know who was when that night.  So much jumbled and foggy and clashing.  Michael didn’t see.  The girls didn’t see. I am thankful for their not seeing, but the seeing keeps seeping into my brain, and I keep seeing.

Like a sharp whiplash jerk, the trauma unexpectedly convulses hurling me brutally back in time to the exact moment – a reliving.  I’ve been told I have to go through “trauma therapy” to teach my brain that what seems to be the right now reality isn’t real but the past – that’s what happens – every moment is again real, really happening, and my brain does what it did that night, shuddering that destruction through every cell – a shock wave – disbelief, a slashing lightening burst of loss, fear, drowning, a screaming-screaming of no to erase it all away.

I’ve been grouchy this week, and I’m usually guilty of not pinning my feelings onto what is the actual cause of the grouchy.  In unexpected places, the grouch spewed this past week.  This morning, dropping Michael off, I came into the knowing of where those grouches were coming from.  Michael – leaving again.  Being gone. Reachable by a thin cord joining us by only ears. Please God, don’t let anything happen.  Please no calls in the deep dark of night, no screaming.  Please.

It is hard to trust a God who watched our son do what he did.  I understand that only the one needing the knowing of God can find Him – he isn’t found or felt in the words of others, but by what we put into ourselves and our minds and our souls and what we eat of the Word, breathe of the Word, live of the Word.  Trust is hard.  And that’s the truth.  And God is not surprised at my no trust.  Why fake it?

I heard of another mother whose son also exited by his own hand in January.  Even with the knowledge of making it through nine months, I have no words to give her.  No comfort.  No understanding.  Nothing.  Nothing can make it better but God’s sweeping away of the shattered pieces in His timing, His way, His gluing it back together into a person who hasn’t been before – He has to do that, and maybe it won’t ever be all okay so what would I say?

Trust is hard.  Should I tell her that?  Should I tell her that I don’t think it will ever be okay and that just has to be okay because there are the others who are still here.  Can I tell her I want to celebrate Zach's life, but how can I when I can't even look at his pictures?  Do I tell her the focus will shift over time when I don't really know that at all?  I don’t feel capable or strong enough to be needed by anyone, but that is not the road God has me climbing – all days uphill.  They do need me, and those needs are the mile markers on the ever stretching life highway.  They do need me, even though I don’t feel worthy of being needed. God, make me worthy. 

So I travel as Michael travels, and we try to follow the footsteps walked before us by Him, steps recorded in the Word, His love letter to each of us, all of us.  Michael and I breathe and walk and are needed by each other and by our girls, and that helps the being needed grow closer to okay.  Scary this job of momhood – now, after Zach.  Trust…an icy rope I can’t quite quit the slipping from, hands burned and scarred and blistered from the sliding.  And I know He knows, and I found so many butterflies today in the chest of kid keepsakes - butterflies crafted years ago by Madison’s hands.  Butterflies.  Trust.  Someday.  He goes ahead, God does, even when I don’t trust and can’t find trust.  Even then.  And He says trust and sends butterflies.  And somedays, I can say hi Zach when they fly by.