This image floored me. How could something as complex as the grief of having a child ripped away weeks before his 15th birthday be conveyed so astutely?
We still live. We laugh. We experience. We enjoy. We plan. We teach. We minister. We love and are loved. And the entire time, there’s this giant abyss in the center of everything.
The idea that it will ‘get better’ doesn’t compute. We learn to function around the chasm and with it. Sometimes, it gets totally in the way.
I could take this statute and cover the hole with a shirt. Maybe add a sparkly necklace and fix my hair. You might forget. Someone who never met me might never know. But it doesn’t fill the abyss. You just don’t see it anymore. But I still feel it.
God help me, I feel it all the time.
A friend reckoned it to a radio always playing in the background. You don’t hear it when you’re busy, when you’re talking, when you’re laughing. Then when you still, when you settle, when you suddenly realize it’s still playing, it’s all you can hear.
This is the kind of grief that comes with such a violent and unexpected death. This is the kind of grief that comes when it was too soon, when it never should have been. This is the hole in ‘our’ world where in a perfect world, there would be no hole.
This is our grief.
