Loss

I read this. Go read it.  Sarah Bessey can speak to the heart like few others.
It struck me.  Deeply.  And I've been stumbling around trying to put my finger on it.  Sadness isn't something many people are comfortable with.  We put it away.  Keep it hidden.  Talk about in past tense.  It's something we went through, but few get to sit with us in the moments.  In the darkness.  My mom has also been in hospice care like Sarah's mother-in-law.  My mom has had experience with death and she has a gift.  She can sit in the sadness with people.  She has been in the deepest, darkest places herself.  She knows death.  She sat with my brother as he passed.  She cared for my grandpa at home as he passed.  I have learned so much from watching her do this for people so well.

After I read Sarah's post, loss is what I keep circling around.  The deep sadnesses we encounter in our lives are rooted in loss. Sometimes those losses are public and known and sometimes the losses are private.
Some losses are obvious, like a death, and we grieve and people expect us to grieve and they see us grieve. That kind of loss is traumatic and painful and life shaping.  But, possibly, no less life- shaping are the quiet losses we may battle. They are less recognizable.  The loss of hopes and dreams.  The loss of a relationship.  The loss of an ideal.  The loss of what we thought was real or true. Maybe we had expectations of ourselves and we fell short.  Maybe someone else fell short of our expectations of them.  Disappointments, failures, which are losses, essentially, are scattered far and wide and recognizing how we process loss can give us a window into ourselves.
I had a particularly difficult month awhile back.  It stirred up in me a kind of darkness I had never felt. Much of it was off the radar of people I interacted with.  It was quiet and private, but no less life-shaping.  There was loss there.  And there was sadness.
It made me evaluate much.  Chad and I had to muddle through some murky days.  Days that hurt and conversations that dragged on and interactions that had to be worked through.  It felt very dark some days.
What surprised me some, is in what was entirely unrelated as far as circumstances, is how much it turned my thoughts to the time around when my brother, Luke, died. To date what I would consider my hardest loss.  I say the time around, because the actual loss of Luke has been worked through, I think.  I couldn't escape that.  It is still difficult at times, but it is not something I had put away for another time.   Oddly enough, some of the things I said and did during this recent stretch, I could trace to emotions I had had during the months Chad was on deployment and Luke passed away.
I had packed many, many emotions from those months safely away in some compartment, not to be opened. I left them there because so much was out of my control.  I left them there because I didn't see the good in revisiting them.  I had and still have a rock solid marriage. It's miraculous by all accounts.  I felt by pulling those emotions out, I would damage what was built. 
I have circled around them occasionally. I've talked about it before in vague, past tense forms.  Say things like, "Yeah, it was hard," without really engaging the depths of how I felt during those months.  Many know the story of those months.  Chad left 10 days after Autumn was born. Luke and my parents headed to CA to await a transplant.  I spent a month in NE caring for my younger siblings.  Luke got a transplant.  He lived for a month.  Chad flies home from deployment.  Funeral.  Chad leaves again.  It's a narrative told many times.  
It was in the darkness, in the nights alone, though, that that time shaped me for better or for worse.  I can see how some of those emotions get exposed when relationships get stressed.  An "I can do this on my own" armor that got me through those months without Chad goes up.  I don't disengage from the relationship and I'll even fight for it, but mentally, I'm ready to go it alone if it comes to that.  "I'll be alright." I say to myself.  "I did it before and I can do it again."
Truth is I don't know what to do with all that.  I recognize it.  I see those emotions all packed up, but where do they go?  What I've come to realize is they don't need to go anywhere.  I just need to sit with them sometimes.  Let the sadness that I pushed away settle for a time.  I needed Chad to sit with me in them.  To know I felt them then and feel them now. The feeling of being abandoned during the hardest times creeps in and tells me lies. The feelings of having to operate solo take over and I have to remind myself I'm not going it alone anymore.  I don't have to manage emotions that way anymore.  And even more, I have been reminded yet again that there are incredible, gifted people in my life that can and will sit with me in sadness and loss.  They are good with it.  They are powerful allies to have.

Loss shapes us as humans, but some let it define them. They become a victim of their losses.  They see life as a string of losses. Some pack loss away and it is merely a blip on the radar of life. They carry it light and barely touch on the sadness.  I spent several years after Luke died being "the girl who lost her brother."  That's how I thought of myself and I imagined that's how people saw me, when in fact, I have no idea if they did.  Somewhere along the line, I decided I didn't want that label anymore.  I was tired of being defined by loss.  Any loss.  My perspective shifted.  I was reminded again and again that it is in our weaknesses(losses) that we're given strength.  I was never truly alone.  God always sits with us in the darkness.  He puts people in our paths to show us light and lift us up.  He did that years ago and He continues to do it today.  I have been reminded again that my gains have been and will always be greater than any loss because as Sarah Bessey put it, it's in the sadness that the gospel lives despite how hard it is to grasp at times.  Sadness will come, but we don't have to wish them away or ignore them.  We can be sad and remember we still have mercies and grace and joy and abundant love at every turn from a God who will sit in the darkness with us until we can see the Light.