Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth;
Keep watch over the door of my lips.
Psalm
141:3
Well-meaning comments, uttered in an
attempt to make us laugh; words uttered that tried to make us look too soon to
the future; verbal sentiments spoken too hastily to try to patch our wounded
hearts. Like a former student of mine who exuberantly offered her ‘positive’
philosophy: “Well, at least you survived! You’re young; you can always have more
babies!” Could I? That was yet-to-be-determined. Besides, I didn’t want another
baby right then; I wanted my baby.
The one in which we’d invested more than five difficult, harrowing months—and
lost.
All
of these words, uttered to make things better, only succeeded in deepening our
pain and confusing our hearts.
Then there was my father, who bluntly asked me after I answered his phone call in an exhausted,
less-than-convivial manner: “What are you so pissed off about?” Squeezing my
eyes shut, dropping onto my bed and practically gasping for breath, I sucked my
breath in to control my disgust and responded, “I don’t know if I’m mad at anything; I guess I’m just not
very happy with life right now.”
Normally
I used humor as a salve for my emotional wounds, and managed to use sarcasm
and facetious retorts in the hospital with Dr. Gordon and the nurses, but mirth
had long-since exited my bag of coping skills. While I knew my parents loved
and grieved helplessly for me and didn’t know how to properly express their
pain and frustration, I found it necessary to abruptly end the conversation to
avoid screaming.
Then
there were the well-meaning people who told me to call if I needed anything.
That sounds nice enough, doesn’t it? But there was a problem: What did I need,
and how would I know when I needed it? How could I call someone at two o’clock
in the morning—when sleep became a phenomenon and insomnia a reliable event—and
ask them to talk to me, or just listen to me rattle mindlessly to them? How
could I phone them in the quiet loneliness of an afternoon and ask them to come
over to just sit with me? No conversation. Just keep me company; just sit with
me and hold my hand. Did they really understand what taking them up on their
offer might entail? Were they truly willing to drop everything to fulfill an
off-handed and polite verbal obligation to a suffering friend?
To
me a phone call to ask someone for help seemed like an intrusion, taking
advantage of a situation I should have been strong enough to handle. I was
genuinely afraid of burdening someone, and uncomfortable taking advantage of
what might have been an otherwise sincere offer. Just who was sincere and who
was being polite? It was a threatening thought to even make the phone call to
find out. My fear and pride often kept me silent and alone; a “pull
yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality continued to handicap my healing. So,
I just nodded and responded politely, “I will.”
Then Chris shocked my senses when, to better cope with his agony, he convinced himself that something
must have been physically wrong with Victoria. He began repeatedly stating that, if
she had lived, we would have suffered a lifetime of medical complications
stemming from her premature birth. In his opinion, we had “gotten off easy,”
and he began offering this new opinion to almost everyone with whom we
discussed the loss.
How
could he think we’d gotten off easy? Just who had gotten off easy? I remembered
a very traumatic four days before Victoria’s death, followed by weeks of
physical pain and recovery. Not only did my heart and soul suffer, but my body
labored in round-the-clock recovery. And I believed I would have taken Victoria alive—any way
she would have been presented to me—even if that were no more realistic than
his assessment. With mounting resentment I found it necessary to excuse myself
from group conversations to avoid railing against what I perceived to be insensitivity. If I confronted or contradicted him, I risked shattering the fragile, protective veneer he had methodically encased around
his broken heart.
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NEXT WEEK: Just what should you say to a grieving parent, and what don’t you say…?
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Thanks for
joining me.
Until next week!
Blessings,
Andrea
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