Since You've Been Gone

This time of year is hard for me. I try to pretend it isn't. I hope for the year when it just comes and then goes and I look back and realize I forgot to be sad. But that year is not yet. Instead, I count the days until the day. I think about how one split second took me from eager anticipation to destruction. That moment where the what-might-be's turned into might-have-beens*. I wish I'd been doing something extraordinary, something I'd never do again, something that wouldn't forever remind me of the phone call. I wasn't. I was sitting on my bed, my laptop open on my legs. Exactly as I am now. Three years later.

God has blessed us so extravagantly in the years since. I never could have dreamed that I'd be loving my girl's biological brother, but here we are. I did somehow think that would soften the blow of grief but it did not, really. In many ways, it just makes me want her more. To be here with him. With all of us.

I guess time numbs the pain. The days fade into years and that is both comforting and devastating. I wonder of the time when her grave is bare and no one stops by to clean the dirt off and leave a toy or flower. I know that day will come--when we are all old and senile-- but it is not now. It is not yet. For now, her impact continues to shake us all. 

I think often of the 24 inch casket beneath the grass. I think of all that she would be by now. And on this day I relive it all. The crushing weight of sadness. The broken heart that I'm beginning to understand will never beat exactly right again. The feeling of her body in my arms just the one time. The flowers. The journey. The enduring love I have for a child I never saw with my own eyes.

This post, about her beautiful service, is one of my favorites. It reminds me of the outpouring of love we had and of the beautiful way my God said, "I am El Roi, the God who sees."

*Some Other Me from the Broadway musical If/Then by Tom Kitt