…ago I buried part of me and have been on a journey of grief ever since. I’ve learned a few things on my grief journey. One thing is that grieving is unique to each person and also there is no wrong way to grieve. Before our accident we had been to an Anger and Sexual Abuse Seminar and they talked about grieving the losses associated with abuse and showed us a neat little diagram. I searched google and found one very similar.

It resonated with me then as I felt very much in a valley filled with anger, pain, depression and sadness. I had been on a healing journey from my abuse for years and maybe before I had been encouraged to grieve the losses from abuse but this time the dots started connecting and the diagram made sense and I had my eyes set on getting out of the valley back to meaningful life. Well then our accident happened and I looked at that clip art again but it didn’t help, maybe the way out seemed too hard to climb and I was so tired, so weak. Life simply wasn’t a neat line through the valley of grief. Then I found these diagrams.

And while it felt somewhat more how I experienced grieving, emotions gone wild and crazy and all over the place. But it still didn’t connect with my heart. I just couldn’t climb out of the valley and mostly I think because it didn’t feel like I was really in a valley but I couldn’t put words to what I was feeling. Then this year in school the girls wanted to study about volcanoes and we learned about Mt St. Helens and the volcano that erupted on it. We  saw many different pictures of the beautiful majestic mountain before the volcano erupted. We saw pictures of the eruption, the huge cloud of smoke and debris, the flattened mountain, the destruction. We saw the change in the landscape surrounding the mountain. And that’s when it hit me. That’s what my hearts feels like.

Here’s a picture of beautiful Mt. St. Helens before the volcano.

Here is a picture after the volcano.

See that gaping hole, the flattened landscape, the ugly, the destruction, the chaos. And my heart just connected with that. My life will never be the same. There’s a gaping hole in my heart and the life I knew and loved feels like it’s destroyed, flattened out, never gonna change and most certainly never going to be what it was before.

I will never hear Jennie’s giggle, never see her smile, never feel her hand in mine or get a hug from her. Jana and I have recovered as much as possible from all our injuries barring a miracle. We’ve been told to focus on learning to live life well rather hoping Jana or I will continue getting better. There are continuing losses we are becoming more aware of as life continues and climbing out of the valley of grief seems so totally impossible, mostly I think because it feels like a flattened landscape rather than a deep dark tunnel. My dear husband tells me to live well we must grieve well. And I’m realizing and actually becoming okay with the fact that I won’t get out of the journey of grief; it will always be part of my ongoing story. Because I am living in a world I was not created to live in; we were created for life in a beautiful garden but instead we’re living in a world of brokenness and chaos.  I’m feeling a deep peace in accepting my altered life-scape. I’ve been reading the book A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card which focuses on “learning the lost language of lament”. He takes  us through Job, David, Jeremiah and Jesus’ lives showing how they grieved and lamented. He writes “Lament is the path that takes us to the place where we discover that there is no complete answer to pain and suffering, only Presence. The language of lament gives a meaningful form to our grief by providing a vocabulary for our suffering and then offering it to God as worship. Our questions and complaints will never find individual answers (even as Job’s questions were never fully answered). The only answer is the dangerous, disturbing, comforting Presence, which is the true answer to all our questions and hopes.”

And years later at Mt. St. Helens there is new life and beauty; yes there are still scars and evidence left from the volcano eruption. And while we have scars and still broken places, too, I’m convinced Papa God is doing some beautiful work in my heart and in my family. Admittedly I see a whole lot more mess and ugly than I see beauty but occasionally I see glimpses of beauty. I think most times I’m too close to the mess that I don’t see the beauty, but I’m choosing to keep dancing with Papa God in the altered landscape my life has become and to continue worshiping at the altar of lament.

(the pictures and clip-art I used on this post I found using a google search)