Reading the article below evoked a lot of feelings in me yesterday.
Feelings of sadness, admiration, compassion, grief... It put me in touch with my own truth about death, having lost a child too. Losing someone you love may violently shove you into a dark passage...you feel alone....you're forced to face your fear of abandonment...but after awhile, being alone is warm and comforting.
To grieve a loss means to surrender. Your heart physically feels like it's breaking...but maybe it's really just expanding...old walls of protection are crumbling...you become more vulnerable.
There's something about grief that makes you feel more alive than you've ever been...you go deeper emotionally than you ever have...you find new strength...you find new purpose...pain transforms you...you emerge from the tunnel different than you were....life will never the same...you will never be the same...plastic parts of your life fall away.
Faith gives you glimpses of hope...you move forward...your life isn't over like you thought it would be...you find the courage to begin again.
You then, have a responsibility to take the lessons you've learned about love and letting go and pay them forward...help someone else...comfort them...change lives...serve.
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Lessons of Lily, Sarah, and Grace
For those of you who haven’t heard this unspeakably tragic story, Madonna lost her daughters and her parents in a house fire on Christmas morning. As the fire fighters pulled her away she said to them, “my whole life is in there.”
I can say I have never heard anything of which I was more certain that that. Those five people were her life. She was limitlessly committed to them, her life revolved around them. She would have died for them.
We went to the funeral yesterday, pre-judging her by the expectations we would have of ourselves in those same circumstances. That simply to breathe would no longer be possible. That existence itself would be more than we could bear. We expected to find a broken woman.
Instead we found a woman whose strength filled a church of well over a thousand people, and who left me with a personal reference point that is unshakable.
That life is an opportunity. A chance. An unimaginable gift.
And we should treat it that way. Every day...
from the mother's eulogy
Lily, Grace, and Sarah are not here with us today and they won’t be here tomorrow and I am trying to come to terms with this.. But I feel very strongly and the reason why I wanted to speak to you today is to let you know who my girls were.. my little girls are not gone from us entirely because my girls are in my heart they’re right here and this is where they live now.. And I want you to remember my girls... they were my little girl tribe...
I have been asked a million times, ”how can you do this, how are you talking, how are you surviving?” Because when I used to hear about people losing a child, or if a child got very, very sick, I would say, “I could never survive that. I could never live through that, I could never, ever, ever live through losing my babies.” But here I am.
I was a daughter and a mother, and I still intend to be both, so I can make my girls proud and carry them forward in love. This love, I am realizing, is to be my children’s legacies because they left the world at such tender ages that all they left behind was love.
And I think and I pray and I hope that it is all of our great responsibility to spread that love. And for me, God does not call on us just to love because that is too easy. He also calls on us to be of service. Service to our friends, our families to those we know and those we don’t.
So the message I want to share today, on behalf of Lily and Sarah and Grace, is that we can talk all day long about love, but love without service is not enough...
FYI- I wanted to give the person who wrote this article credit for sharing this remarkable story, but I couldn't locate their name.
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There are other kinds of loss besides death. There's the loss of a dream, a relationship, a job, your health... Going through the grieving process is the only way to make peace with your loss. Shoving your feelings down will keep you stuck. Grief...letting go... surrendering...moves us forward...have faith...beautiful new possibilities waiting for you for your arrival.
