I'm Back, Again!

Today's blog marks the second round of announcing, "I'm back!" 

I'd started "Notes From a Broken Heart," mid-year, five years after Courtney, the younger of my two daughters, died suddenly on a second Sunday in April.  Although she didn't know it then, my dear friend Sherry, assumed life-saving guardianship to my just-about-drowned soul. Her "jacket" turned into lessons in "How to Write Blogs," as this clueless, drowning, Mama (that would be me) was sinking for the third time.

Unannounced and unexpected, Sherry rang my doorbell about a month after Courtney died.  Sherry and had known each other for some time before Courrtney's abrupt (for me) departure to Heaven.  In fact, Courtney and Sherry had met when both visited me at the same time.   My mother, a Southerner,  would say they were "nodding" acquaintances.

After Courtney died, I'd resigned myself just to make it through each endless day, only then to summon the courage to make it through the night. I had my hands full.  Zombie-like, I met each dawn in a fitful state and usually spent much of each morning completing basic hygienic things like brushing my teeth, showering, and dressing.  Whew!

That day,  Sherry discombobulated my routine: She showed up announced, and rang my doorbell. When I opened it, she marched inside and upstairs to my office without an invitation.  

"You can do with it what you want," Sherry said, referring to the upcoming tutorial.  "But at least you'll know the "ABCs" of blogging. Oh! 

She left me with pages full of blogging "how-tos" about two hours later, freed of the responsibility of snatching me off the cliffhanger of my grief.

I tried my hand at blogging a couple of months later.   By then, I could get through my morning ablutions around lunchtime, although I rarely ate. "Why not," I asked the computer screen one day. "I'm not sure if I remember much about Sherry's lessons; and really, I still can't see the sense of blogging."

But I fired up the computer. anyway  Effortlessly, words poured from my fingertips so fast that I could barely record them.  Hmm.  Ann, my former sister-in-law, introduced the inaugural blog.  She'd died one month before Courtney, and I'd block all memory of the devastating event. Still, I wrote about the shock grief can sometimes produce that goes unnoticed until something triggers it. Barely out of her teens when we met, Ann carried the genes of a gourmet chef. I waxed eloquently about her talent, and when I finished the blog I simply filed it away.  Sharing would come much later.

It took a while and a razor-sharpening insight to realize how pervasively grief had ensconced itself in my life.  Relatives who had died decades earlier, like (Grand) Mama, marched across memory's forgotten hills, valleys, and vales.  A relentless march of inspection and introspection followed.  I remembered the nurse who greeted my sister, Elna, and me at the hospital elevator the early morning Daddy went to Heaven, with the eulogy, "Your Dad was a grand old man." 

I relived the anguish of discovering Philip, my firstborn grandson, dead of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) at 22 months.   I recalled the hollowness I felt when Walter and Jimmy, my older brothers died, both without warning. Death's finality became surreal when Mother died after a battle with a scourge that always seemed to win. 

Oh, yes,  I carried scars from innumerable losses of love, adversity, hopes, and dreams. Consequently, I cherished the solace that comes with silence and the growth that springs from surrender.

Little did I realize what was happening.  I didn't know until my Physician Assistant confronted me on a routine visit with, "What's happened to you!" It seems I had virtually stopped eating.  My P.A. had me hospitalized, I guess, for some type of eating disorder.  I came to understand, after being in the hospital for eight days and with months of therapy after, that I'd decided to die.  

Subconsciously, living without Courtney had become unbearable. So, I decided to end it by starving myself to death.  In as polite a way as possible, I had to get out of here!.  Of course, I didn't realize on a conscious level the impact of my decision.  I just wanted the pain to end.   Yet, I survived! And thrived! I celebrated my return to sanity by declaring, "I'm back!" ferociously, almost feverishly.  Notes From a Broken Heart became the proof of the pudding.  

Published by Amazon, the first launch of the book in 2023 seemed perfect!  Except that it wasn't.  A few weeks later, I made the painful decision to recall Notes for a major rehaul.  It took almost a year of starts, stops, and sputtering,.  It reminded me of learning to drive a VW.  There were no shortcuts; I couldn't just go from first to third gears.  No way.  

So, I stopped blogging until Notes From a Broken Heart could' be relaunched.  Hallelujah, it now has been relaunched!

More than anything, I praise and thank God for the lessons He taught me, softly but gently, as I made changes to the manuscript a second time. Readers of the first publication assure me that the errors are minor to unnoticeable.  However, I pride myself on my training as a high school English teacher, although not as much as an almost incorrigible perfectionist. (Not to worry, though because I'm working on silencing the "Sirens Song" dangers of perfectionism).

 Humility stands as the beacon of light that illuminates me as I'm learning "not to lean not on my own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5).  God has rewarded me with knowledge, discernment, and yes, wisdom, However, as (Grand) Mama would intone, "It just about wore me out!"

I thank each and every one of you who continued to read the blogs I'd written over the past years, as well as those of you who may have stumbled across me during this time, or to those whom I may have been recommended. "God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform," sums up this second sabbatical succinctly. Thank you!