"Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have—life itself." ~Walter Anderson
I have dealt with grief, and that haunting sense of emptiness for the last two years. And though I have known the strongest of emotions, still, nothing ever prepared me for grief… with its heart-wrenching pain.I was inconsolable. And I refused to be comforted, but instead I took refuge in my own tears. I moaned and wept through sleepless nights for a year.
On the outside I managed to appear like I had it together, but on the inside I was devastated. I realized how deeply my life has been anchored on my mother’s as her passing away emptied me of any sense of hope. Grief blinded me to hope… but only because I could not find a reason to hope at such a desolate time in my life. All the sympathies and kind words were but a shot of morphine —it numbed the pain for a while, but it never stopped the hurting.
Describing the exact same ordeal in his book, A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis wrote, “I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
Though I have not found my way out of "the dip" completely, not yet, I'm fighting harder still. My personal loss has taught me to treasure all I have in life right now.
Every one of us will have a time of grief. Because it's part of the deal, of being "human". But we can find rest. It only comes from the One who is larger than life itself —our Creator— and we just have to let Him have His way through it.
You see, pain is never permanent. It too shall pass.
