Grief is no hoax

It's a special pain, when someone denies your grief. When they assume - like the assholes they are - that they know how you feel, that they went through it along with you so they must be included in your circle.

Unless you have lost a child - unless there is an urn or a headstone or an obituary or a death certificate - you don't know shit. And that's the truth. Your loss - a parent, a spouse, a dog - is not comparable. Until you put a child in the ground - and I so sincerely hope you never do - you are not in this circle. Pretending you are is disrespectful to me and to my child. It is dismissive of my grief and the lifelong journey I will take going through my grief.

End of story.

Denying my children's lives - their personhood, their existence, their importance - is an even greater grievance. They lived. They have names and they have souls and I feel their spirits. They are my children and they are a part of me.

So when I read this article in the Washington Post about a professor who made it his personal mission to deny the lives  and deaths of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, my heart skipped a beat. I cannot imagine my reaction - and it would be physical and immediate and hell would rain down, I promise you - if someone came to me and questioned my children in this manner.

It makes me sick - truly sick - because it is proof that we are living in the worst part of the history of our humanity. To deny these parents the right to grieve, publicly, privately, extensively - to mourn their children without political consequences - is unimaginable to me. It is unforgivable.

I know that when I can't cling to my children, I cling to their memory. I cling to my grief. It keeps me on this earth. It keeps my heart right.

Damn any person who would take that small comfort from a grieving parent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/01/13/the-father-of-a-boy-killed-at-sandy-hook-gets-death-threats-from-people-who-say-the-shooting-was-a-hoax/

Writing and feelings are inconvenient

It's true. Writing my thoughts here is inconvenient. My feelings - about mostly everything - are also irrationally inconvenient. I love and hate both. So there.

When you go through profound loss - especially the loss of a child or children - it's like you gain magnetism. Other people's grief finds you and sticks to you like a magnet. I gather up their stories - this child in hospice, this mother in her grief journey, a husband blogging about losing his wife to cancer. I read their blog posts and I cry for them. I know how they feel - or even more importantly - how they will feel in the coming weeks and months and years. I want to tell them that it will get better, that they will find peace or something that feels like peace. But I can't lie to these kindred souls. It won't get better. It will persist. You will be changed. You can't go back.

Increasingly, my from-afar interactions with these strangers is via Facebook, where they post snippets of their feelings frequently and more publicly that I ever could. I read about their chemo treatments and physical wounds that won't heal, their genetic woes and surgeries and complications. I read about funerals and obituaries, some obviously posted via phones. Thousands of people follow these stories along with me and like and comment and share.

Would it be easier, would I post more often if writing were shorter, my platform more conveniently available? Would more people read my words? Would my story be more impactful?

In the end, I don't care. I write a thousand blog posts in my head and never find the time to put them here. And if one, or two or none read these words, then I'm OK with that, too. I don't care if my story impacts others. I don't really care if it helps others. I don't know if people read this and cry for me. I don't care if they don't.

And I'm certainly not sure if this is another level of hell in the middle of the many levels of hell that I've already experienced. Another stop on the Grief Train. Another bag of mixed emotions - to care enough to read from another's feelings and to be so callous as to shrug off the need for others to care about mine.

So no emotional Facebook posts from me. I'll wallow in this little slice of obscurity and enjoy it, thank you very much.