Let the Sun shine in...

For weeks, even months, after Courtney died, I'd awaken in a darkened room and just lie there (like a bump on a log, Papa would say).  No thoughts (thankfully) pierced the darkness, just the thud of my heartbeat as I listened to my inhale and exhale.  Alive? Guess so.  So??? The rare mornings I mustered the energy from somewhere ( the fortitude of enslaved ancestors?) to sit up and swing my legs to the floor, exhaustion set in.  How long I'd sit there, shoulders hunched inward as if awaiting the next barrage,  I can't remember. I'd sit.

An old wall poster that graced the Office of the President where I once worked, just flashed across the annals of my mind. It pictured a tall, three-legged stool that occupied its center, the focal point, really.  At its very top, the stool communicated "Sometimes I sits and thinks."  At the foot of the stool, it intoned, "And sometimes I just sits."

That pronouncement marked grief-enshrouded, dismal days.  Sometimes, most of the time, I just sat. Sometimes for an hour or two or more.  Oftentimes, I'd alternate between legs swinging,  foot-tapping, or knuckles cracking.  Mostly, though, I sat as still and immovable as a sphinx.  Occasionally stirred from lethargy by a particularly penetrating memory, I relived the pain until it almost took my breath away and tired me to the bone.  Before I realized it, a week or two had come and gone.

Yet, "Everything must change, Nothing stays the same. Everyone will change, No one, no one stays the same."  True that. Time waits on no one. Time and surcease of sorrows are not opposite sides of the same coin.  While it demarcates the passage of days, months, years, and decades, time is not palliative.  It does not take the sting out of death.  Anniversaries, birthdays, and other memory-markers can produce pain past endurance; yet, time can neither soothe nor remove the pain, anguish and myriad emotions death unleashes.

For me, only God, my Creator and Maker,  proved powerful enough to have done it.  No. I will never get over Courtney's death and the loss I'll always carry.  I miss her more each day but missing her no longer paralyzes me.  Even as I type her name, I hurt.   However, the Apostle Paul instructs, "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13, ESV).  

That's it! How the Holy Spirit cleansed the wounds death slashed me with and healed my ropy scar tissue, I do not know.  That's fine; He did what only He can do for me.  I hasten to remind you that  I am not saying that everyone, or even a few readers, experience loss the way I do.  For some, the grieving process happens in a smoother, less stressful way.  That's alright, too! Perhaps others of you feel time has been the great healer.  I'm good with that.   One size does NOT fit all.  Grief work is peculiar work, as different and identifiable as fingerprints.

I  believe "Winter turns to spring, A wounded heart will heal.  Oh but never much too soon, No one and nothing goes unchanged.  The young become the old, And mysteries do unfold.  For that's the way of time.  No one and nothing stays the same.  Rain comes from the clouds, Sun lights up the sky.  Hummingbirds do fly."