Happy 22nd, Gracie dearest. I miss you so.

Today I can’t help wondering if anyone misses you as much as I do, or if that lump in the throat rises as easily in anyone else. But then again, I don’t know why that should matter since I’ve always guarded my grief so jealously. Wish you were here.

Because even now as I study for finals you are under, over, and in between every line that I read and every word that I translate as much as I try to focus. I can’t help thinking about you. When I think about next semester I know that things need to change, that I need to shape up, that things need to be less dramatic or something, but I just can’t imagine that happening. How did I become this person that couldn’t let go? Tim said:

“No one is asking you to let go of your grief on a time table because it will happen when you are ready and only God knows that time. However, I am asking that you look at the pain in your life and then look to God with the knowledge that you can be made whole… God knows the agony in your soul and He will do something about it.”

But I can hardly imagine a time when I won’t look back on something, regret my disregard, and simply need to zone out in a fit of fury, sadness, loss, and just… miss you. I can’t ever imagine a time when my grief will cease and when I will no longer be hung up on the past. I don’t want it to shape me. I don’t want it to have had a “purpose”.

“The memories will be what you choose them to be; they can either fit your suffering or help dispel it.”

As much as I agree with that, Tim, how can I just choose that they be one thing or the other? How can I make such emphatic decisions when I can’t even take care of myself from one day to the next?

So many firsts are coming up… first finals season without you to vent to, first winter break without you to visit, first Christmas without you, first New Years where I won’t be texting “Happy Birthday!” to you. As I think about all of these things, I just have one wish – to have you back. More than I need anything else, I just want to have you back.

Missing you still.

Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”

(Jonah 4:6-9)

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…”

(John 6: 60-69)

And to quote one of my favorite people in the world:

“Never have I ever questioned God as much as I have in the past three months. And never have I ever needed as big a wake up call as I do now.”

There are a few things I’ve learned about myself in this process. Among them, that I cope by sleeping. I love to sleep because those are the only blissful hours I have anymore. Hours where I wish I were lucid in forgetfulness. I sleep, hoping that when I wake up everything will have been a troubling dream. And then I wake and it’s never so.

Another thing, that I’m terribly afraid of people’s expectations of me. In my, perhaps skewed, perception of things, I suppose that people expect me to have moved somewhere in my grief in the last eight weeks. I haven’t moved anywhere. Every weekend, there comes this point where I feel just as though it happened yesterday and my thoughts and emotions are as raw and as broken as they were then. I struggle with the very same questions about God’s purpose and goodness. I cry just as hard as I did that day that, Bommy, I called you outside of Uris. So, to answer all of your questions about “how you’re doing with Grace”, I’m not. I’m not going anywhere. These past eight weeks have been the longest eight weeks of my life, but if you expect that eight weeks is long enough for me to show some signs of improving, know that I’m not.

But then here, a little bit of hope for those of you who have followed my blog:

I went to Jeremy’s house in Mountain Creek over my Fall Break. On Sunday we went to Jeremy’s church and I had had the crappiest night and morning, so much so that I had to walk out in the middle of worship. I felt guilty for leaving when it wasn’t my church so I went back for the sermon. After the sermon, we got ready to take communion but I, in my state of rebelliousness, had to seriously consider whether or not I could take communion that day. As I sat there thinking about God and whether or not I really believed in him, I began to feel that, in my innermost being, this God that I have believed in all my life is undeniably real, even in my suffering and in this wordy sentence. I’ve never been one to need concrete evidence of God and I still am not. Needless to say, I took the bread and the cup that day.

Excerpt from A Grief Observed, CS Lewis:

“At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy – our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once – like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

By now I have pretty much quoted every passage of this book that seems to speak straight out of my heart. I keep expecting someone to tell me to stop feeding my “bad” emotions (I guess I would tell someone if I saw them going through this), but then I’d retort that it’s really only when I feel them that I feel like myself at all.

I read the Bible this week for the first time in a long time, with any real expectations or longing.

There have been times in these past six weeks where I haven’t carried my Bible with me out of a sort of defiance. But most of the time I feel like having it in my bag is safe. I don’t take it out of my bag, but it’s there. That one time this week I started reading John; I told myself I needed to remind myself who Jesus was. I didn’t read anything revelatory but it was in those few minutes that I coveted His comfort that I felt the Lord hiding me in his word. In that moment alone, and never again since then, I knew that the Bible is true and that God is God.

Excerpt from A Grief Observed, CS Lewis:

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

Still missing you daily.