The Oddity of Grief

Have I ever mentioned that I'm odd?

I figured so.

I have been reading a lot of blogs recently that I sometimes wonder why I read. Blogs by women who have lost children either at or shortly following their births. Most of them are older stories, but one was just this week. The depth of this woman's faith astounds me. I spent so much of my life overwhelmed by my own ignorant anger at God. I can't imagine, four days after saying goodbye to my child, thanking the Father for His blessings of time with her. I can imagine it now, years later, but right there in the depths of grief....

As I sit at my desk at work, an hour and a half after I should've gone home, to my empty house, I am crying uncontrollably as I grieve the losses shared with so many women. It's been ages for me, you'd think I'd be done mourning. October 4, 1996 and March 18, 2000. I feel I have to cling to those dates because it really is all I have to remember of my two precious babies. And yet, I still feel, when reading those blogs, that I shouldn't be so sad. My story's so different. I didn't carry either child to term. I never saw their bodies, their faces, smelled their hair. They were with me such a short time.

Probably that stems from guilt I refuse to let go of. That the first of my children was sent to Heaven by my own hand.

And I know better. I know that my bad decision doesn't negate my grief. I know that the loss of my second child wasn't punishment for the first. I know that my Father has forgiven me. Yet I weep. I weep for what could have been.

I weep for the women who know my pain. Who know my pain on what is probably a far grander scale. They held their precious babies in their arms. Then had to say goodbye. I so wish I could lessen their pain.

My life is full of children, literally full. And yet my arms are empty. Never has my chest known the feeling of the infants whose heads should've laid there. My eyes never beheld tiny versions of myself. My ears never heard the sounds of their 'belly laughs' or shrieks of pain from a skinned knee. And my heart aches at the absence of it all. At the emptiness.

I don't know that the longing will ever go away. It seems unnatural to me to be a 32 year old woman with no living children. Since a young girl I couldn't wait to be a mother.

Questions no one can answer. So whilst I know the Lord has a plan, and I know for a fact and believe that with all that I am that His will for me is so much better than anything I could dream up for myself, still, tonight, I weep.