Have you ever enjoyed feeling pain? I do sometimes. No, not the physical sort of pain that self mutilators enjoy when cutting their arms with razor blades and things like that. I’m talking about emotional pain. Before you think I’m a freak- let me explain.
Sometimes in life things happen that break my heart. As sad as those things are and as much as I wish I could change them, the pain they bring is welcomed in my life. An example of this is my dad’s death. Am I glad he’s gone? No, of course not. But in my little mixed up heart, that pain and sadness is a sort of comfort because logic tells me if I hated him, I wouldn’t miss him. It tells me that though I was affected negatively by many of his choices, I was also impacted positively. That pain I feel when I think about him is something I can treasure, in a way, and be thankful for because it forces me to remember he wasn’t all bad. It tells me there is something there to miss. It’s a joyous sort of pain that I don’t mind having around.
On the flip side is the sort of pain that I want to get as far away from as possible. I’m pretty good at it, I must admit. While I can hide those pains deep down inside and not think or feel a whole lot in regards to them, I know they are there. Distancing is not the same as erasing. I know this because it never seems to take much to bring those heartaches to the surface where I feel them all over again.
I recently read the book, The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans. If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend you do so. It’s a short book and a very easy read. I think I finished it in about an hour and a half. It’s a wonderful story meant to touch lives, but I doubt it is meant to evoke the kind of sadness that it did in my heart.
Near the end of the story is a scene where a man recaps an event from earlier in his life as he and his childhood friend played hide and seek in a cemetery. They stumble upon something that reached deep into my heart, finding a place that felt as raw and mangled as an old rag doll. The excerpt is as follows:
“I ran up through there,” he said pointing to a clump of thick-stumped evergreens, “then up behind the mausoleum. There, as I crouched behind a tombstone, I heard the wailing. Even muffled in the snow it was heart-wrenching. I looked up over the stone. There was a statue of an angel about three feet high with outstretched wings. It was new at the time and freshly whitewashed. On the ground before it knelt a woman, her face buried in the snow. She was sobbing as if her heart were breaking. She clawed at the frozen ground as if it held her from something she wanted desperately- more than anything. It was snowing that day and my friend, following my tracks, soon caught up to me. I motioned to him to be quiet. For more than a half hour we sat there shivering and watching in silence as the snow completely enveloped her. Finally she was silent, stood up, and walked away. I’ll never forget the pain in her face.”
Suddenly this woman in the book, Mary is her name, was so real to me. She was real because the grief she was feeling was real in my own heart. The futile desperation she was enveloped by was something I had experienced.
I very vividly remember holding my little Benjamin Ryan in my hands after he was born. A miscarriage, just like the others I had. Even though he was so tiny and under developed and there was no possible way he ever had a shot at living, I held him. I held him for a long time just willing him to not be gone. But he was.
My babies never lived on the earth and are not buried in it. But just as Mary became silent, stood up, and walked away, I do the same thing. We all do, I think. That’s how grief works. You grieve, then stand up and walk away. It’s a cycle that may or may not get easier as time goes on. For some people in some circumstances, it does. For me, it seems that it doesn’t, and that’s okay.
Sometimes I am just caught off guard by the brokenness that exists deep within me. I could never forget the events that cause the ache in my heart, but sometimes I forget the pain. Most of the time, I can talk about my miscarriages like they were a simple math equation or a weather forecast. More infrequently, something reaches the very depth and core of my losses, bringing me wailing to my knees. After a time, I become silent, stand up, and walk away.
I think there is a specific purpose to this sort of cycle. I think God designed it. I am not saying God destined this sort of sadness in our lives. I believe He has given us the strength to silence, stand up, and walk away. I also believe He allows us to revisit the heart ache whether we really want to or not. His desire is that in the moments, weeks, months, or years after we walk away, and before we find ourselves on our knees again, we be used for His glory. That we would take that hurt and use it to reach others that are hurting in the same way. To share the hope we have and help others be able to silence, stand up, and walk away.
