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.