That horrible night in the ER twenty years ago was the loneliest I have ever been. My heart was breaking, part of me wanted it to simply stop beating all together, but although grateful it did not, it was aching with grief. I went to the ER alone, as I did everything during my pregnancy, as Kendall’s Dad was unsure whether he was in or out. And while he was deciding, I was in a sterile, cold and lonely room learning it no longer mattered what he was going to choose because neither of us had a choice any longer. Our son was not going to live to the day he was due to be born.
Heartbreak happened. Emotional shattering happened. Helplessness crept in. But something else also happened, eventually. Healing happened. It still is happening.
Yet prior to healing beginning, pain and grief scattered through my life like broken glass. Hopes and dreams were strewn across the canvas of my life and I had no idea what I could or needed to do to start cleaning them up. But eventually, I began to look at what was there and I realized something. I realized there was stuff on that floor that needed to remain there. And I was the one who got to decide which pieces I left behind. Huh, a moment of power among far too many moments of powerlessness. I get to choose?!? I understood it logically, yet emotionally I had no idea what that meant or how to do it.
I never knew what personal empowerment was. It was taken away from me at a very young age. And here I was, more vulnerable and sad than I had ever been, yet there was this twinkle of hope and power.
So, I started sorting through the shards of pain. Some days, I looked at them from a distance. Other days I got down on my hands and knees, scraping and digging into the piles with both hands. Those days were the toughest. I knew I was making progress yet I was in pain. Those shards were sharp and did some real damage. I felt the pain in my soul and my body. Yet I pushed through.
And on days when I simply could not tolerate looking, feeling or handling the broken remnants of my life, I checked out. But even when the time outs lasted days or weeks, I always came back. I returned to the sorting. I labelled pieces. I gave the pain names and then decided what I was going to do with each piece. Would I toss it? Leave it? Move it? Reduce it? Honor it? Build on it? Create with it? It was exhilarating and exhausting. It was horrible and hard. It was work and worth it. It was my journey and it is a journey that may never end for me. And I am okay with that.
Because you see, while I was sorting and tossing, naming and grouping something amazing happened.
As my focus was on the enormity of the pain, each and every piece was taking new forms and shapes. My focus had been on the ugly and the pain. I was working to heal what I saw as broken and wounded. Yet, without attention the pieces I chose to keep were forming themselves into a whole new creation. The misshapen, unfit, ugly pieces were molding together into a beautiful mosaic that symbolizes my life and me. It has cracks, gaps and bumps. It does not look like anyone else’s portrait or masterpiece. It looks like mine. It looks like me. It is me. I have earned every shade of color and grown into the shapes and sizes laid out before me.
Some days I want to share my art with the world. Other days I can barely imagine another living soul even getting a peek at what I have built from the scraps of grief. But every day, I am grateful for the little boy who brought love into my heart in ways I never imagined possible. So when his too brief life ended, it cracked a place deeper than I ever feared possible, which opened me to potential of beauty and joy I would not have known otherwise. Both exist within me, within many of us. We get no choice in that. But what we can choose, what we must choose, is what beauty we will create from our pain.
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- One Day, It Will Feel Safe To Begin To Peek Out & Explore - February 18, 2019