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Responses (sorted by date)
laynEpoo: thanks Mike (9/1/13)
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Grief is one of those many faceted things that is kind of hard to define because it's a process that has a starting point, a middle and no end.
I used to think that grief was an intense period of sadness that one experienced during a loss. I did in fact experience that aspect of grief to be sure, 12 years ago today when cops showed up at our door with a grief councilor to inform us that my brother was killed in a car accident. That aspect of grief is very real but the fatal flaw in my thinking was believing that I would experience that part of grief for a time and that grief would then end.
Most of what we experience is long, dull, mind numbingly constant and the very opposite of dramatic. It's lack of drama is so pronounced and yet I cannot think of a word to best describe it. It involves going through the day to day of life while at the same time trying to reconstruct a puzzle with more than a few of the pieces gone.
It never quite looks right does it?
Yet we have to get on with the business of living. Which we do though never quite in the same way.
I have believed wrongly in the past that I don't grieve well but at my therapist appointment today I was assured that I was actually really good at grieving. In fact the things that I sometimes secretly and sometimes not so secretly wish for, to be able to move through life unaffected by the sadness and the gravity of the loss I've experienced, would indicate that I wouldn't be grieving well. To go through life without the sting of the emotion would be no life at all but sometimes the emotions are entirely too intense and I don't feel that I express them with any kind of proper social filter.
I guess that makes me a bonafide expert on grief but there are no medals or Nobel prizes
to be awarded for this. There is only the mind numbing constant day to day getting on with life without some of the people that I most loved.
Even now, 12 years later it aches like an infected tooth that you cannot help but touch with your tongue. I'd ask for Novocain but that would just make me fiddle with it more. What I realy want, what I long for is the one thing that cannot be provided. It is that longing that pushes me toward the cross. Jesus longed for this world to be fixed without his having to die an excruciating death, he longed for the curse to never have happened, he longed for a people who would love him freely and without hesitation but that was the one thing that this world would not, could not provide.
Have you ever wanted something so bad that it killed you? God did.
Because he died in the place I should have occupied I hope, and believe, and trust that someday I'll see my brother again. I hope, and believe, and trust that this life isn't all there is, that the things that get so violently cut short by the brokenness of this earth can begin again, and this time sin will have no hold on the outcome.
I miss my brother. | 
