Fellow Travellers

The Mourner's Club

There's a club called by many names.  Club members can be called mourners, parents of angels, widows and widowers, and countless other names.  It's a group of people who get it, who have felt some of the deepest emotional pain there is to feel, and who understand what it's like.  This kind of pain is not a normal level of pain.  Everyone has lost something, and most people have lost someone.  But not every loss results in agony like this.  It's a pain that changes one's life, that tears a hole in one's heart and leaves it bleeding on the floor. Those in that club feel like outsiders, aliens in groups wherein they stand alone.  Those who have never felt that kind of pain have a hard time knowing what to say and what not to say to club members.

Those in the club appreciate the empathy found among fellow travellers of those dark roads, but we would never wish club membership on anyone because the dues are too high.  Once one has joined that club, we often find it surprising how many fellow travellers there are.  We run into them in the grocery store, in our church groups, online, everywhere.  We suddenly discover we are not alone.

Jesus Christ: 

There is one Traveller who can bring understanding, empathy, and healing to all of us.  He has suffered greater levels of pain than we could ever imagine, and all for love, all so He could understand what we suffer.  He has taken upon himself all of our pains, not just our sins.  He chose to become a fellow traveller, so He could heal us and help us through the worse of our agony.  Our hearts don't have to stay broken.  The wound does not have to continue to bleed.  We will never be what we once were, but we are somehow stronger than we were before because He has walked with us, strengthened us, taught us how to strengthen and love others.  At one point or another, most people on this earth will join this club.  We can choose to either wallow in the pain, focusing on our isolation, or we can seek the healing offered by the Fellow Traveller who loves us all more than words can say.  We can choose to be weighed down or lifted up by our pain, crushed or refined.  He is there for us.  But it is up to us whether or not to reach out, to pray, to bring his Spirit in our lives and be healed.

Emotional Scabs

They say time heals all wounds, but I would beg to differ.  This doesn’t always work.  I’d say time allows scabbing to form.  Time allows the heart to hurt less because it forms a natural bandage, a protective mechanism.  But the scabby heart, in my experience, isn’t as resilient or healed as one would like.  Scabbing helps with the immediate pain.  It means the mourner has come up with ways of not looking at, feeling, pondering the cause of the pain.  Scabbing means there’s a bridge to emotionally walk over the wound but scabbing is not healing.  There’s still a painful hole, a raw wound under that scar.  All it takes is a nudge, a bump, a thought, or a trigger, and the scab comes off.  The pain is still there, just as raw as ever.  I met up with friends recently, fellow mourners with fresh wounds of their own.  One had lost her husband and one her father, all in much more recent history.  Every time I spoke, the tears came.  The pain seemed to be there and real and visceral, just beneath that scabby surface, for all of us to one degree or another. 

For me, a healed heart is one that can look at pictures of the one that was lost and cherish the memories rather than continue to hurt.  Some people come to this state quickly and without a lot of fanfare.  They have the faith to know their loved one is happier, healthier, better off somehow than they were here.  The people with this kind of faith can immediately point to the belief that they will be with their loved one again.  These people can smile in peace and can continue to feel joy even just after loss.  I would find a short-lived peace, the buffer from the worst of the pain that came with feeling the Holy Ghost and people’s prayers.  But the pain was still very real and very present just beneath the surface. 

Granted, what seems to be perfect and instant healing may be an illusion, what we as outsiders see.  It may be for a while, they, too, had the raw then scabbed hearts that mourn behind closed doors.  Or it may also be they truly experienced such instantaneous healing, with the power of the atonement, the power of the Lord who overcame pain, sin, and death to heal all wounds and to buffer our pains and our hurts.   

As an outsider, it’s hard to say what’s really going on under the surface with other people.  The LDS father of a little girl who died in the Sandy Hook shooting immediately extended his forgiveness and displayed what appeared to be a healed, joyous heart.  I don’t think I could do that.  Six years after my baby died, I’m still feeling only partially healed under the scabs.  Maybe to an outsider, I look like I’m healed and happy.  I have my moments when I feel healed.  I feel happy.  I am able to function and sometimes even look at the pictures and cherish the moments.  But so many times, just thinking about her or hearing about her or seeing my picture brings tears to my eyes.  I know we will be together again.  I know my angel is here with me as often as she can be.  I know these things to be true.  And maybe I’ll just have to cherish that I no longer [very often] become so incapacitated with hysterical sobbing that I can’t function, can’t think, only feel a gushing hole where my heart used to be.  I can enjoy those days when I don’t ponder [very deeply] the pain of miscarriage after miscarriage with no rainbow baby in sight.  I can feel [at least for the moment] healed and whole. 

But I also know I’ll never be the same person I was before.  That’s not how healing works.  It is not a reset button to days of innocence before the emotional firestorm came.  It’s a new, older, empathetic self that forms in the place of the innocent.  It’s someone who understands these things CAN happen to me, but that I can survive it.  It’s a stronger heart that forms under the scabs.  The moments of intense and searing pain still happen, but I don’t have to be consumed by them.  I can cherish those times of peace and joy and enjoy the moments with the children I can still hold.  I have been healed to some extent.  But that doesn’t mean I got over it.  One never gets over it.  One just gets through it the best one can and prays for healing that can even---eventually with faith and the power of God--come.  

Mourning with Children that Mourn

When my baby died, my remaining children struggled in their own way.  It's easy for a mother or father to forget they're not alone in their pain.  But children feel it, too.  They were fairly young at the time.  My boy had a hard time sleeping or staying asleep.  He was afraid of sleeping in his own bed. We had to get him a new one.  My girl didn't want to talk about it, but she was hurting.  She'd had a really strong bond with Alamanda.  She told us her sister was coming before we knew we were pregnant.  She knew details of the accident that took Alamanda that we didn't tell her because her angel sister did.  We got them into a counselor.  Time went on.  My boy doesn't like to talk about death but seems mostly fine.  He's more distressed when I talk about it because I'm distressed.  He tries to comfort me by bringing me water or hugging me.  

My girl, however, still aches.  But she really really doesn't want to talk about it, even though she still struggles through any story or movie in which there is a separation or death.  I learned a few techniques about how to help her from experts and from looking at this website.  I learned from experts that one can have children draw how mourning feels and talk about their drawings.  In general, I learned the power of a child's art to help them through.  We're looking at other options to help her.  

The point is that children need permission to mourn, too.  Children need to know it's okay to hurt inside.  It's okay to talk about, write about, draw about their pain.  It's okay to pray together and ask for peace and healing. Every child is different.  And parents aren't always equipped to know what to do.  It's okay for parents to consult with those who know more, to reach out for help.   We need to help them know we're aware of them, that we acknowledge their emotions, and that their emotions matter as much as an adult's does.  Healing can come for them as much as it can come for adults.  

Tears of Hope

I listened to the LDS broadcast of General Conference over the weekend.  Every time they spoke of death, I cried.  It still hurts.  Missing my babies will hurt until we are together [physically again.]   I cry from my own loss, and I cry from empathy for others who have lost.

But they were good tears because with such a spiritual feast, I'm reminded that there is hope, that my angels are very much with me, watching over me, and looking forward to our reunion one day.  The second to last talk of the conference by Elder Johnson especially hit home.  He spoke of his daughter who left behind her young family when she died of cancer.  He spoke of hope and love.  He focused on the atonement, that the Lord suffered and died to overcome and understand our sin, death, and pain as well.  Because of the atonement, there is hope.  There is life after death.  We will all be resurrected and live again. Those of us who have lost will hold our loved ones again.

My boy was at a loss, how to comfort me when I started to cry.  But he did the right thing in just hugging me.  Because they were good tears, healing tears, tears of hope.  There are times, often when I'm not feeling spiritually strong, that surviving one day without those I have lost is too much.  But there are times when I am strengthened by the Spirit.  The Spirit can give any of us love, comfort, and hope if we seek it.  We can know this life is not the end, that there is hope to be together again.  We just need to seek the Father of all in prayer, and we can know it, feel it, understand there is hope not just for people in general but for us, for me, for you.  Sometimes, it's good to cry.