Here, but Not Here~

I used to tell God (that is after He started allowing troubling things to happen in my life) that if anything I was going through would enable me to one day help someone else, bring it on! Growing up with an alcoholic father with a bad temper, getting a divorce, finding out my daughter was addicted to heroin-all of that. I was ready to take one for the team, so to speak. But not this. Not learning to love the baby inside my now-sober daughter's growing belly, only to become so in love with him that the mere thought of how much fun I would have as a Nana made my heart swell and my feelings leak out my eyes. Not the seeing him struggle to survive in, then out of the NICU, then after multiple procedures, only to lose him early one morning to an unseen bacteria that clouded his already compromised lung. Not that. I don't want to have to learn how to deal with that type of grief. I don't want to tell others "It will get better", "Time will heal you" and all of those other contrite things I hear. Because don't believe them. Right now, I can hardly see past my tears and feel outside of my terribly broken heart. I KNOW people survive this, and I am in no way the first to experience it, but honestly, I feel otherwise sometimes. So, if I don't wish you a Facebook "Happy Birthday", congratulate you on your graduation/engagement/divorce/new job/ so on and so forth, or I don't comment on your new baby/grandbaby/or animal baby, or I generally just seem to have vanished..............I hope you somehow try to understand. If not, I can't change that for you. All I can say, is I am here, on the sidelines of life, lurking in the shadows trying to cope with having the wind knocked out of me, crying in my room while my daughter cries in hers-my tears for my loss and also for not being able to take hers away. I am here, silently wishing I felt some sort of joy for others as they have happy days, fun times and make new memories-I don't begrudge anyone those experiences, truly I don't. But my family, well we aren't really sure how to go on, and get those happy feelings back. We are working on it, and will one day rejoin a new normal.

Rhonda~