Sharing Honest Feelings

I am so angry sometimes.  I feel like I want to scream and shout and stomp my feet and throw myself on the ground and pound it with my fists and cry.  I’m angry.  I’m sad.  I’m brokenhearted.  And I’m terribly frustrated about it all.  Why did my son have to go?  Why did the accident happen?  Why couldn’t I have stopped it?

That is a big part of these feelings, I think.  I cannot let go of the thought that I could have, indeed should have prevented his accident.  That somehow I can still do something about it and make things “right”.  I’ve always been a fighter, and I hate injustice.  I will fight to make things just and right, especially when it affects my children.  This seems so unjust, so unfair, so out of order, that it can’t possibly be right.  I try to remind myself that I know where he is and Who has him now, when I feel like this, but lately it doesn’t seem to help much.  I can’t hug him, or hear his voice, or watch him interact with his dad, his siblings, or his nieces and nephew, and it breaks my heart.

I wasn’t ready to let him go.  I’m still not ready to let him go, even though I have no choice in the matter.  My husband is feeling these same things.  He told me this morning that he feels like he has nothing to live for.  Me?, I thought.  I understand what he means.  There is so much in our lives to be thankful for, but these feelings still come.  One of our children’s body is lying in a grave.  Sleeping, the Bible calls it.  I’d prefer he were sleeping in his own bed in his little apartment 45 minutes from my home, rather than in the cemetery he, my husband and my other children played in as children.

Even knowing I will go to where he is someday, I can’t help but feel I WANT HIM HERE.  I don’t like this separation one bit.  All but one of my children have grown up and moved out of our home, but they are all close by and we see or talk to them frequently.  I love that so much.  I can’t see or talk to my middle son.  He left the earth.  He isn’t deployed overseas, like I’d like to imagine he is.  He can’t pick up the phone and call home anymore.  He isn’t even on this planet anymore.  When he was in the Navy, I remember feeling, every time he came home, glad he was on American soil again; thankful he made it home again in one piece.  Now?  He’s not here.  He’s not coming back.  I have a hard time describing how this feels.  Constant agony comes close.

Once or twice Dan or I have said to our counselor, “I give up”, and he responded with, “Yes!”.  To which we both reacted with a resounding “NO”.  Why can’t we give up?  Why can’t we let him go?  He’s gone, but I can’t let him go.  This makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.  It is exhausting fighting this unending, unwinnable fight.  But I can’t let go.  He’s my child.  I can’t stop fighting to save him, to keep him safe, to bring him back home, where it seems he belongs.

I can’t make this right.  And I can’t stop trying to.

But I will continue to put my trust in Him, who does all things well.

“I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.”  Psalm 27:13-14