The older I get, the more I realize I have no idea what I am talking about. Waiiiiiit, what?

Monday, November 29, 2010

Unresolved

I promised myself I'd do this regularly, so here goes nothing. I'm not actually sure what to write about. I read this book a while back called "The Artists Way", which was basically a book about stimulating your creativity. It was a good book and I keep on telling myself I'll re-read it and do all the exercises again. But anyway, the main exercise in that book is what the author calls "Morning Pages". The idea is that if you wait around for creativity to strike, most likely you'll be waiting around a long time. Instead, you keep it going by waking up every morning and before you do ANYTHING else, write 3 pages of whatever comes into your head. You could write "I don't know what to write" for 3 pages and that would be fine. It seems silly at first, but you would be surprised how helpful it is in general because things you think about over and over actually get resolved, it helps you complete your thoughts and ideas and helps you realize what you really think about things that you wonder about in passing. I was reminded of the book after Ellie was born because I found myself looking at websites about grief support and one of the sites had these cards that they sold. The cards all have one question on them relating to the grieving process and the idea is that you take one a week and write about it. It is supposed to help you move forward by helping you resolve these questions on your own. While I did not purchase any of the cards, I think I might have an idea of what questions they might contain. There is one that I'm pretty sure does not exist on these cards and that is the question of "why?". I don't think anyone experiencing any type of loss is able to answer this question to satisfaction. I certainly don't expect to ever find an answer. How could you ever come up with something that would make you feel as though anything like this could  make sense? With that in mind, then you have to be able to move forward with this unresolved question. Its like listening to a song and knowing the last note is beyond the range of human hearing. I think I might be rambling, but that's the point I guess. My brain understands, but my heart struggles to know why this happened, why my sister and her husband have to hurt like this, why our family has to hurt like this, and the answer is, there is no answer. Kerry gave me a book called "Life Touches Life", which was written by a woman whose only child was stillborn. At one point in the book, an older women tells her "All my life, it seems, I have been surrounded by this kind of loss. I don't think there is a worse pain. I have seen how it can twist a woman's soul, and I have seen it melt the walls of a mother's heart, exposing the rarest kind of beauty and grace and compassion". You could understand how losing a child this way could embitter somebody for life, and nobody would blame them for a second. But if you know Kerry, you would expect that rare beauty that this woman spoke of, and that is true.  We always knew Kerry would be an amazing mother, and Ellie has made her even more amazing for her future siblings, but not a day will go by where we won't wish for her to be here with us. And we are sad now, but brighter days are coming, and we will know they are here when we think of Ellie and remember less the heartache, but more so how happy her life made Kerry, Seth and our whole entire family.

This post took a week to finish. I kept thinking I wasn't done, that I had to wrap it up neater at the end, but that's the whole thing about it, the unresolved things that we must learn to live with and learn from.  And that's all I've got for now. 

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Segue

I think, officially, this is my 4th blog. I had one somewhere back in 2003, then there was the myspace blog, which I wrote in pretty frequently from 2004 to 2007, then I tried livejournal on facebook here and there, and now we have this. During the "myspace blog years", I found blogging to be therapeutic and I did it quite often (but, to be fair, I was single, living at home and had a job that could best be described as "leisurely", so it was easier to write more.) Now I am married with a four month old daughter and a full time job that could best be described as "a time management nightmare", so not so much with the blogging.  So much has happened though, that I am trying to promise myself that I will FIND TIME to do this on a regular basis. I guess, it would be helpful, to have a statement of what is going on at the present, simply as a starting point (though I would guess that anyone reading this may already know these things). Four months ago, our daughter Quinn was born. It was an amazing experience. She is an amazing (and feisty) little creature who we are in constant awe of. Exactly three months after she was born, my niece Ellie was born sleeping. It has been an incredibly heartbreaking experience that I almost don't feel right writing about. For as much as I grieve for Ellie, it is but a fraction of what my sister and her husband grieve, and that is incredible. More incredible, is the way they are dealing with all of it, with more grace and courage than I could ever imagine. We are giving them as much love and support as we can, but truly they are leading us through this, whether they realize it or not. And as we are experiencing this, Quinn is growing and changing at an exponential pace (as babies do), so I find myself almost with a split personality. Half of me is heartbroken and grieving, and the other half is experiencing the joy of first time motherhood. This is a concept I struggle to understand, how the greatest joy and the greatest sadness happen at the same time in your heart, and in life in general. The first time I experienced this was when my Grandmother Ellie (who my niece is named after) got sick and died. That happened during the first few months of Jamie and I's relationship, when we were all giddy and falling in love and making lists of names for our future kids. I didn't understand how I could be so happy and so sad all at once, it had never occurred to me this was possible. Up until then, it was one or the other, never both at once. I would guess that this theme will come up a lot here. That and my newfound penchant for putting the salad in the freezer. That's a different story though, I'm sure we'll get there eventually. Till next time...