Unimaginable

We all imagine it.  As parents, we fear something happening to our kids, and always there is the sinking, nebulous fear of losing them.  We fear it…but we don’t truly imagine it could ever be so.  It’s an impossible thought.  We love them and pour our hearts and world into them.  We pray for them, trusting there is some magic efficacy in the fervency and frequency of our prayers.  We believe we can keep them safe…certainly, at the very least we can keep them alive.

Because life without them is utterly unimaginable.

Until it happens.  Most people see their children grow to adulthood and pass themselves from this world long before their children do.  But some don’t.  A surprisingly large number of us don’t.  A number that most prefer not to think about, and I can’t blame them.  Because it’s unimaginable.  The reality is just too much to fathom.  Too painful.  Unthinkable.

The truth is, this reality is unimaginable.  There is nothing that compares to it.  There is no other grief, I am often told, with this potency and pervasiveness.  Others claim a kinship…but can they really know unless—please, no—they truly do know?  Unless they too bear the weight of membership in this nightmarish club.

I have known debilitating grief—grief that suffocated and dropped me to my knees, broken and despairing.  But this?  This grief is thick and complex.  It is the spiderweb of Shelob’s lair, layered and heavy and impenetrable.  It is mud in the veins and a stone in the gut.  Its tendrils sweep up from beneath the floorboards and down through the rafters to trip and block and strangle and pierce in fathomless, unrelenting strikes.  To know one’s child is gone forever from this plane…even when one lives this truth it is impossible to grasp.

And yet life is still here to be lived.  Love is still here to be shared.  Joy makes itself known in pockets and around corners.  These truths live as well.

And the great lesson of my life to date has been that every great loss brings with it even greater gifts and blessings.  The door closed knocks down a wall.  Every pain, every disappointment, every heartbreak has birthed something new…something undreamed of…something precious and good.  It becomes holy ground from which something sacred grows.

Is such a gift possible now?  From this wrenching pain will gifts come…blessings unfold?

And is my son’s life really the price to be paid so that I may grow?  Can I bear that weight as well?

Unimaginable.