Girl in the Ground

My friend grieves. Not death, but we mourn for so much more. There doesn't need to be a body in a grave. I told her that I would beseech the Lord on her behalf, that I would pray the words she cannot find. Because I have been there. Because there was a season in my life where the only thing I could pray was, "Oh God!" In the numbness, in the stabbing heart pain, in the days and weeks where it felt like there wasn't enough oxygen in the air, beloveds lifted me up.

I started thinking about her then. Thinking about grief always makes me remember her. Really, she is with me almost always. In the sweet smile of a two year old running chubby legged through a store, she is there. In flower pink dresses hanging on a rack, she is there. In her name, every single time I hear it--which is always--she is there. Whenever I see those four letters together in print, she is there. That name, the one we'd chosen for a daughter nearly twelve years ago, is simultaneously a melody to my ears and a deadly dose of kryptonite.

Grief comes like a foamy swell I somehow wasn't expecting. My stomach sinks the way it does when you go up, up, up and over the peak of a wave, sliding down its backside. This agony does not exist from the pain of having loved and lost. It comes from never having been granted the privilege to have known at all.

I think of my girl in the ground. Spiritually, I know that she is the lucky one--to have shot straight to heaven like an arrow of light. But in this oft-wrecked mama heart, when I get to forgetting that this world is not our home, I imagine a life for her and there is sorrow that she missed it.

I have not yet been where she has gone. This world is all I know. And so, in the twinkling of Christmas lights on a tree filled with memories--she's missing this. In the wiggling of toes in warm, salty sand--she's missing this. In the sticky fingers of pancake morning--she's missing this. I think of how she will always be with me, getting older every year and missing all of it. Slumber parties and graduations, a wedding and the chance to have her own little girl one day. She's missing this.

And I'm missing her. 

A kindergartner came to my class. Tears streaked his face and I asked the reason. "I miss my sister," he mumbled through silent sobs.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"She's in Heaven," he wailed. When I could, I pulled him aside.

"When did she die?" I gently asked, pulling him in closer.

"For two days she lived, is all. She is seven now. I could never meet her, ever. And I miss her." He was destroyed, this boy who was born after his sister went to Jesus. With two dozen kindergartners staring at me, I fought back tears.

"My little girl went to Heaven. She's almost three. Maybe your sister is playing with my daughter. What do you think?" He wiped tears and nodded. We moved on. As much as one ever moves on from gutting grief.

I could never meet her, ever.

There is peace in knowing where she is. But there is anguish in knowing where she is not. It catches me, unguarded. It's in the mourning moments of others when I most remember every detail of my unraveling. There were minutes and hours when I tried to invent ways to follow the clock back to her beating heart. I failed. Eventually, the fifth stage of grief overtook.

Still, there are flashes in time where acceptance eludes me. I hear someone say her name--a common name, an unavoidable one--and I'm instantly dreaming of the life she might have had. Then, she is with me. Her soft, bouncy curls press against my face as she snuggles in close. Somehow, these many years later, I find it possible to exist, for a split second or two, in that very first stage of grief.

Denial.

For in those few seconds, I can pretend that my girl is not in the ground.