We are holding together. But we’re missing a part of us that nags. Gretchen looked at us while we sat down for Father’s Day dinner a few months back and sighed, “Well, now we’re four.” And that pretty much sums it up. We are enough and still short all the same.
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| Door County 2009 |
The weekends are the hardest, when there’s more time to think, more space. I think each of us looks for things to close the space down, whether its projects around the house, binge watching Netflix or burying a nose in a book. But we each are striving to find the strength to face that space, that void, and grieve. And laugh. And celebrate our boy. But too often we give in to the distraction. As C.S. Lewis says in A Grief Observed, “They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there s
hivering that get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally dirty and disgusting.”
I am dog-tired.
I don’t know where exactly Griffin is. I know he is not the same boy I knew. Likely he is infinitely wiser than I and more compassionate. The thought both lightens my load and darkens my heart. I wish for him peace, and joy, and the wholeness he was robbed of in his brief time with us on earth. But it stabs me to think he’s changed in any way. I want my son back and if he’s been transformed I am missing it and it gives me all the more to grieve.
I think the more important question to answer is not where Griffin is but where am I? Where he is, is all “all guesswork; I’d better keep my breath to cool my own pooridge.” One cannot be present and distracted in the same moment. So in those daily moments when I come up for air and find myself present, I am confronted with the challenge of finding compassion for myself. How do I release my guilt for my failings. Because I will only be as compassionate with my girls as I am with myself. And God knows they need my compassion, my presence, my heart and my ear.
Sometimes I think I am drowning. Composure only comes in glimpses. Fully formed thoughts only in hindsight. I am swimming in self-pity and if I am being honest, I am using that self-pity as an excuse to avoid “cooling my own pooridge”. My life is a series of distractions interrupted by moments of clarity. In those moments of clarity I plot and plan to stay present, but an e-mail comes, I check Facebook or the New York Times website and I am carried away from my pain, their pain, and am temporarily numbed to the suffering inside and around me.
So, we are holding together. Fitfully, yet hopefully as to know the challenge is the first giant step in transformation. I hope.
