47th Confession

This coming Saturday, four years ago, my daughter looked on the beautiful face of her God, and it took her breath away.

There are wounded places in a person's life which poets say that only time heals. With due respect to poets, that's either a whole lot of time or a whole lot of crap. Either way, it's not something that happens overnight, nor has it really happened in the past few years.

There is a room in my house that I don't go into anymore. There are things I don't think about my child, or other people's children, anymore. There are times of the year that I feel just a little colder. There's a lot fewer things that seem important, and a whole lot of conservative ideas that I've thrown out entirely.There are songs whose lyrics I now identify with a whole lot more closely, and nod a whole lot more.

I suppose that, one of the things that I've heard the most often is, "I can't imagine what it must have been like/must be like to lose a child." Most often, I answer, "I pray you never find out."

There's nothing but numbness and loss for the first week, maybe week and a half. You really don't FEEL anything, be it pain, loss, hurt...There's just this emptiness, kind of like an echo fading. It's fading, and you know you'll never hear that sound again, so you keep listening to it, finding ways to etch it into your memory. Little things, at first: cradling her, because you'll never get to again. Stroking her hair one last time. Holding her and praying - just one more time, silently - that she'll come back.

Then come the "life" things: the somber dismantling of her crib. The getting rid of some of her clothes. The wholesale dumping of the medical supplies. But all the while, still smelling her little baby smell, all through the places where she spent her time: the couch, her room, the hallway, her car seat, the van...

And then, just when you have this whole "getting back to life thing" almost figured out, you look around and realize that other people have either forgotten about it or moved on. And that's the worst shock of all to come to grips with: that life has moved, and you haven't.

All through it, for the first month, there are just these waves of grief and guilt that paralyze you when you're engulfed. Between waves, you can function fairly well, I remember. I remember even getting a bit prickly when feeling okay, thinking, "I'm not a doddering old man, I can really function for a bit." But for every time I felt fine, there were times I wanted to just break down.

And here is the crux of this confession: I probably should have broken down in those times. I probably should have taken some time to truly weep for my loss. I probably should have used a little more down time to process what happened.

But I didn't.

I had a boy to raise who needed his Daddy. I had a house to support. I had a set of vehicles to maintain. I had to keep moving.

And in that moving, there were nights I could feel the emotional granite that was in my core grinding against itself in cracked places; were I to put it another way, it was emotional arthritis.

Maybe another time, we'll explore that. But for now, I think it's time to put this back to sleep, to set this jewel to rest again, and look forward to something a bit more palatable. You've eaten the bitter green salad; now it's time for the meat course, I think.