This is how you walk on...

Our 2nd Annual Paint the Street Design 2017... Ethan struggled for weeks on a design.  I'd prompt him with ideas, themes, or a message to convey.  He can draw graffiti like nobody's business.  "Think of a word that has power, that's BIG," I said.  He came up with "Hope".  It was a true collaboration (as was last year)...he drew the word and I added the crack with the sprout.  It truly encompasses the season we're in. 
There's a popular choice award won by voters choosing their favorite square.  Last year voting was free and we promoted it for fun and came in somewhere around 6th place.  This year it cost a dollar a vote, so we didn't promote voting on Social Media, then I happened to see that we were tied for the win on the Art Association facebook page.  People were voting for us!  AND...WE WON!!!  Such joy in the day taking time out to do something creative together as a family, to break out of the daily grind.  To win was icing on the cake.  We all NEED hope.  There is BIG power in the word... It is absolutely how we keep walking. 

Grace

This is such an excellent read...
Learning to be a Gracious Griever - Still Standing Magazine
 

Relationships are messy, I was so very messy in my deep grief and I could either shut out well meaning people and leave a sea of broken relationships or I could learn to be gracious, inviting messy relationships, laying my expectations for others down, and experience healing in unexpected ways.

A month after my first daughter died, my husband and I walked into our church, and a young not even twenty something girl approached me. As she began to speak I knew the conversation would not go well.
“Lindsey!” she said with excitement in her voice as if she had just discovered something profound she just had to share with me.

I stood there and braced my weary, sad self as she proceeded to say “I was thinking the other day why God only allowed Sophie to live for 10 hours.” Oh no, I thought in my heart. I should have stopped her then, but I let her go on.

So many people can’t comprehend grief or loss and must figure out why something has happened to comfort their own questioning heart, where the answer surely doesn’t comfort the grieving heart. 

Often there are no answers. But she proceeded to tell me her answer for my loss, waiting in anticipation of how I would internalize her “comforting” words.  I was not comforted and I responded with less than gracious words. It was not one of my finer moments and it wasn’t the first or last time I was less than gracious.

I wish I had been more gracious and I’ll tell you why.
I have lost 2 children, and part of my journey to healing has been learning to be a gracious griever. My lack of graciousness has often left me in isolation, anger and deeper hurt. But learning to be gracious has opened my heart to healing relationships and released me from anger and resentment.
 But what does it mean to be a gracious griever?

Grace simply put is an undeserved gift. Its when we give something another does not deserve or receive something that we do not deserve. 

And graciousness is how we demonstrate grace to others. But why would we learn to become gracious in our grief?

1. Graciousness leads to forgiveness

I could not let every ill timed reply, or ill spoken words create bitterness inside of me and cause me to hold a grudge or shut that person out who I felt had no idea what they were talking about. Holding onto anger or bitterness has more often left me stuck and not moving forward in my grief. When I have chosen to be gracious I have been able to forgive even the harshest words, and it is I who have experienced greater freedom to move forward in my healing.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and realize that prisoner was you” –Lewis B. Smedes

2. Graciousness reminds us of our own need for grace

When grief crashed into my world it was easy to forget that just a year earlier I hardly understood how to step into the grieving heart. I know I have said my fair share of ill timed and ill spoken words, even now. It was so easy when grief arrived to set expectations on others that they “should” all of a sudden know what to say or not say.
I needed to remember that as people extended grace to me as I tried to enter into their losses (when I didn’t understand what loss was like) so I could extend grace to others. Goodness, I would sit across from my husband, grieving the loss of our daughters and neither one of us would know what to say or what the other needed.

In the depth of my own grief where unfiltered words and thoughts and pain could come out of me, I began to recognize my need for others to extend grace to me, to not grow bitter at my words, to not shut me out but to be present with me in my pain.
It wasn’t an excuse to unleash but when we have close friends who can extend grace to us in those moments it becomes a safe place for healing. I needed grace in my grief as much as I needed to extend grace. It wasn’t one sided.

3. Graciousness can speak truth in love

When I have had a posture of graciousness, choosing to believe the best in others even when their words may sting I have been able to more kindly correct and share how their words have affected me. Most of the time people aren’t intending to be hurtful, they really do want to enter in, but just don’t know how. We can help them when we are gracious.
If I could do it all over with the girl who approached me at church, I would have wanted to share with her how I’m thankful she moved towards me but often a grieving person just needs to hear I’m sorry and sometimes there are no answers to the “why”, I wonder if a sweet relationship could have developed if I had been more gracious.

As time has gone on, I have been able to more gently tell others how their words affect me and that in turn more times than not has invited authentic relationship as each of us learn how to enter into each other’s stories.

4. Graciousness invites relationship

My best friend had a baby girl just a little over a month after my second daughter passed away. And in the midst of my deep grief, I had a difficult time entering into her journey of adjusting to life with a second baby in the way I would have wanted. And as she adjusted to having a new baby she didn’t have the energy to enter into my grief in the way she wanted.
We had honest and hard conversations and were able to grieve together how we wished we could have been there for each other in ways that we just weren’t able at the time. Choosing to enter into the messiness that surfaced in our season of loss and gain allowed a relationship that could have easily been broken to become stronger and sweeter. And while not every relationship may unfold this way, we may be surprised at the ones that do when we choose to be gracious.

Relationships are messy, I was so very messy and I could either shut out well meaning people and leave a sea of broken relationships or I could learn to be gracious, inviting messy relationships, laying my expectations for others down, and experience healing in unexpected ways.

It is easy to be a bitter, grudge holding, angry griever. It is challenging to be a gracious griever. But could it be that while learning to be a gracious griever may open us up to the risk of being wounded, it could also open us up to sweeter relationships, to deeper love, greater hope and healing?

Giving in to a new normal...

 

My favorite go to blog during this grief journey has been StillStandingMag.com and this was a letter contributed by another loss Mom and it spoke to me enough to share.  The collateral damage of grief is pain on top of pain...the loss of a best friend and the reminders of the good times are almost daily.  To be a friend to a Mom of a loss takes courage, patience, grace, love and empathy... you never know what the day will bring.  To walk WITH another during the joys and pains is true friendship.  It's hard to accept when a person you were once so close to isn't capable anymore and in the same breath you can't blame them.  Had our joy & sorrows been reversed, I wouldn't have walked away. 

Dear Friend,
It’s been awhile since I’ve contacted you. I was busy. Busy surviving. Busy grieving.

I have been more focused on my journey and me than anyone else’s. I had to. For my own and my family’s sake. Otherwise I might no longer be around.
My child has died and even if/though this is months or even years ago, my memory is as fresh as if it was yesterday. For the outside world it has become a story, the story people tell each other at the shop about the woman who lost her baby. But even those conversations have started to die as the news is no longer headline worthy. In the best of cases, it has become a memory. A fading memory.
I might seem better from the outside and in comparison to the first weeks and months I am… Or so it seems. And then grief rolls over me like the unexpected wave that catches me from behind. These were the moments I didn’t recognise myself. The moments I was the crazy ‘new normal’ woman loudly cursing every detail about her life, wishing death upon her to end this pain. This however usually happened (not so) quietly behind closed doors. They have become less frequent… By not contacting you, you were spared those moments. You wouldn’t have liked them. I didn’t and still don’t. You might have been so shocked by your ‘new normal’ friend that you never contacted her again.

It has been a hard road to get used to the ‘new normal’ me, which honestly is nothing like the normal me you and I knew. Ask the husband, the rock – who knows how he managed to not walk out the door. I’ve kept the ‘new normal’ inside a lot because you see, she has no (or little) social grace. I prefer to spend time with her by my own, not that she is pleasurable company but she just doesn’t fit in my life pre-loss. It was my way to save whatever face was left.
I haven’t just been a crappy ‘new normal’ friend I’ve also been crappy ‘new normal’ mother, wife, sister, daughter, human being. Once I’ve realised that I actually had to merge with the ‘new normal’ myself, I struggled with this truth. She or rather I had to relearn what it means to live, to treat people, to care for myself, to be in relationship, to be a responsible human being, to treat things and people respectfully… Most of all myself.
The ‘new normal’ doesn’t have energy nor desire to be pleasing as I was before. I’ve given up on returning to or getting back the self that used to be me – I’ve given in on being ‘new normal’. Resistance is exhausting and fruitless. The more honest and straight-forward I’ve noticed the ‘new normal’ was and is, the less socially digestible I’ve found myself to be. A simple ‘starting-a-conversation’ question like “and how many children do you have?” make the ‘new normal’ a party killer. And for those who know the story, I can imagine them rolling their eyes and thinking: “Here we go again…”
The sad truth is I’ve become quite used to the fact that my friends prefer to stay away from ‘new normal’ and I can sort of understand their potential motivation. As much as the ‘new normal’ has needed to talk about it she/I might have also strained your ears and overused your capacity to listen. I myself would prefer the ‘new normal’ would be able to tell a different life story.

Now I want to be a good new normal friend.
The new normal good friend is honest, real and authentic.
When I integrate the new normal…
I will call or contact you when I truly feel like it.

I will tell it like it is.
I will always mention all my children, dead or alive.
I will learn to love myself, life and what I’ve come here for.
I will appreciate your patience, love and care.
I will be human, fallible and imperfect.
And I’ll hope to meet you in your humanness too.

-Nathalie Himmelrich