cold & hot grief

this place is hot. a blessed home, but hot. 

I recently confessed to a friend that when I was growing up, I ascribed personalities to numbers and associated with them based on their attributes. Thankfully, she didn’t think I was crazy, but when I told my husband just now – he thought I was positively nutso. My brain is a strange combination of tactile ideas and metaphors and that’s what comes out. Somewhere in there, emotions have colors and textures and numbers – well, they have whole life stories. (just in case you’re wondering – six is a dowdy housewife, seven is her handsome husband, and eight is a sultry temptress trying to split them up)

 So of course all my emotions have descriptions that are a little looney tooney. When I was struggling with depression, all I could think about was the dull, pinching sensation that overwhelmed my heart all day. The dull, achy, overall feeling of despair and hopelessness – broken up by the sudden spurts of intense anxiety.

And I’m not sure how I imagined a miscarriage to feel, but it shocked me to my core. And I mean, literally, it shocked me. Looking at the eerily still ultrasound screen, I lost my breath and I’m not sure I got it back for two days. I went numb. I drove by my husband’s work like six times before I actually turned on the right road. It was on a Thursday and that night I went out with friends, still numb and tearless. Friday, I lived a dull and pretty lifeless day. And Saturday it hit. I broke away to write for a few hours and I let that sharp knife of feeling just slide right across my heart. I cried my little eyes out right in the middle of Starbucks and didn’t stop for two days.

That night after the kids were in bed, I put on a movie since Nick had a little work to do and I just sat there weeping and pretending to watch the movie. Wrapped up in a blanket, sniffling and howling, all wrapped up in my cold grief. I don’t know why it felt cold, but it did. The Lord was there, wrapping me up and I felt like all I could scream in my head was SAD. I’M SO, SO SAD. It was like a sharp, cold, uncomplicated cut. Anyone could look at me and see it. Anyone could feel how cold it was.

But so quickly it became warm and sticky and muggy. Maybe it was the waiting to actually lose the baby. Maybe it was the necessity to still live and care for children and be in society. Maybe it was just because it is so stinking hot in South Carolina. But I wanted the cold back. I wanted the space and the time and the permission to wrap up in a blanket and by comforted. By people, by the Lord, by time. But hot, sticky, muggy sadness says, “get over it”, “you need closure”, and “you weren’t that far along were you?!”.

So I took the moments of cold and I ran with them.  I still grab them when I see them. The operating room of my d&c, my persistent best friend who calls and tells me she misses my baby too, the baby blanket waiting for me on my bed at night to bury my face into. The cold moments declare that I need warmth, that comfort is ok. And the one thing I'll say is that the Lord used the cold to kind of give me joy. I already think back on those times with thankfulness, and almost longing, rather than bitterness. 

I don’t feel like I have anything new or wise to say about grief. No neat way to tie it up and put a spin on it. Cold, hot. It all hurts.

But I feel certain that the Lord is there and He comforts it all.  

Keep crying out to Him.