a Brave Mourning

A letter of blessing

Dear Andrew.

You don’t know me, but I know you.

I was at your son’s funeral with a friend that knew your wife.

I screamed and wailed and wept with you.

I’ve never heard grief as deep as yours.

I heard you before I saw you -

your screaming, your wailing, your weeping.

I never knew it was okay to grieve like that.

Your grief opened up something inside of me,

some kind of pain deep and honest and pure.

I screamed and wailed and wept for your son.

I screamed and wailed and wept for me.

I’ve read your blog and wept.

Words seem cheap.

Thank you seems cheap.

It all seems cheap, when I can’t give you the one thing I want to give you:

your beautiful son, back in your arms.

It’s not fair,

I want to scream about it.

How could this happen?

How could death happen to someone so beautiful and innocent and pure?

You were not meant to go through this.

Your wife was not meant to go through this.

I don’t know how you hold it, all this grief.

I don’t know how you live.

But thank you, however cheap it may seem, for continuing to live.

I don’t mean it in that cheap, bullshit way.

I mean it from everything inside of me.

Thank you, because sometimes I can’t imagine living with such pain and darkness.

But you do, and it gives me courage.

It calls me deeper into my own pain and sorrow and darkness and grief.

I feel your son with me in moments, in tears and sunlight and rainbow prisms and beauty.

It is a moment, inexplicable, when his name comes into my mind: BRAVE.

And I know that he is here.

And the purity of this beautiful, glorious moment makes me weep, feel deeply, reach out and touch his beautiful baby hand.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Christy.

It’s not fair that your son had to die, but he lives on, even in the hearts of people he never even knew.

I know it’s not comfort - it could never be comfort.

But I hope it is truth, a deep truth that you carry with you.

You’re beautiful.

Brave is beautiful.

Thank you.

“I could feel our emptiness” Christy said, as we hung up our Skype conversation with some dear friends. Their 3 kids so alive, so full of vigor and imagination. Our house, our bodies so eeriely silent. Our computer screen was too still.

Our weekly hikes as a family are not what they are suppose to be, and we feel our poverty with every trip. We feel our empty, our constant looking for signs of our boy as he may be trying to reach us.

Our poverty faces us, greets us by name.

Our friends children grow strong as ours grow weak.

Delight in each parents eyes, only our pain can stare back.

We are empty now, yes we are poor.

I feel it now more than ever before.

I want something back that I can and will never be able to attain. I got to hold him and be with him for 12 hours, the most stunning, heartbreaking, glorious 12 hours of life.

Oh how rich and poor I am.

(As I write that last paragraph, I surprised myself by how rich I felt.) That for 12 hours I got to kiss him, I got to hold his strong little Brave body.

Again the tension, again failed language, again the complexies of the human heart, to feel both seemingly opposite emotions simultaneously.

Yes, this is the madness, the absolute foolishness of grief!

What a strange feeling, to sign our first literary contract.

I have been writing regularly for a decade, starting many books dreams and left them all halfway finished any merely a dream. But now tragically now, my first published book will be on lamenting my son’s death.

No celebration. No bright lights or a fancy book tour. No the book is on my son’s death. It will accompany other mournings, offering permission to those who or bound by social norms of grief. The Church runs from it. Offers cheap answers and a hallow faith systems that cannot hold both beauty and death, the world of Psychology mostly misses the mark as well, the DSM IV (a psychologist bible) speaks the regularity of mourning being 3 months! 3 months is the healthy norm. I guess I need to be reevaluated for another disorder because it has been 8 months and I am still broken, and I assume this brokeness will be for lifetime, for I will miss my son for a lifetime.

I damn this book, and I bless this book.

The written words of this upcoming book and blog have continued to sustain me, and my hope is that will sustain others who know the horror and confusion of a life of grief.

We continue appreciate the encouaging emails and letters we have recieved and continually consider it a joy that Brave’s legacy continues to spread.

Thank you.

I continue to brace myself, as few find the courage to speak of my son.

8 months after and my neck is still stiff. The clinching, the grasping, the foolishness, the silence. It is still so fresh, the ground so alive with eating his little body.

As time so freakishly passes, my longing grows, my friend’s safe distance still stings, and I am forgetting my boys sweet smell.

“No one can bring my boy back”, and no one tries.

I am lonely, I am scared.

Carrying this burden, instead of carrying my son, is an evil I wish on no one and yet my lonliness, my darkness wishes on all, so alas I do not feel as if I am the only one in the forest.

As I daily stare Satan in the face and spit, as I parade on broken glass, curse all.

If I hear one more “God is Good!” or “He knows what he is doing.” The ignorance of these cliches burns, as I hold my sons picture up to their hallow theologies, it all breaks down, their idea of God crumbles in light of his beauty.

My world is now too full, my theology must be that of snake skin, to continue to shed, to move, to mold, my idea of God must meet a darker, fuller world.

Yes there and only there can I find rest.

My entire life I have heard the message of “God forgiving our sins, through His Son, atoned by His blood.”

But until now, until the gruesome death of my son have I become increasingly aware of my own need to forgive God. Maybe at the end of the day this truth is just as important as allowing God to forgive me. Both lend to seperation, a distancing of trust, and a gentle suspicion.

My anger towards God burns blue. The places of desire still yearn, yet Her silence grows louder with each passing day.

How do I begin to forgive God? Was She powerless to save my boy? Did She choose not too? My questions ignite, the lack of answer is the only answer. How do I forgive God?

Most days the soft, warm place in my heart (the God place) is harder and much colder now. My intimacy with the Creator is similiar to that of an abuser. I still want love, I yearn for touch, for stillness in my heart, a purpose from an all mighty, omnipresent caring God, yet when I come close I get hurt. When I run ignorantly towards, I get carlessly smacked, uncherished, unloved and marked.

Yet I still want God so deeply, so closely, and don’t know if I can handle if She does show up.

An abusive absent father, a submissive and silent mother, left to fend for self at the age of 8, creating a sense of fight and defesiveness that still lives strong in my chest. Orphaned- lost, found, lost and found, to lost and Orphaned.

I need mercy, I can no longer fight, I surrender.

God come

Come to my House of Mourning. 

Smell my tears, touch my blood, drink my poison that will be your death and resurrection. 

Scream with me, die with me

Come to my House of Mourning.