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What I Learned in Hindsight that Might Help You

~ by BJ Jensen

Hindsight is a good teacher.  If I had to relive those first special dates over again since Jay died in 1995 (I pray I will not ever have to), I would approach them differently, utilizing some of the following bits of wisdom gleaned over time:

I would not expect everyone to remember Jay’s birth date or death date like I do.

I see now how I set myself up for feeling more disappointment or failure.  Those dates cannot possible mean as much to other people as they do to his own mother.  It is not fair on my part to expect that.

I would voice my thoughts or concerns that jay’s birthday or “birth into heaven” date was coming up and that I was feeling fragile or sad or lonely.

It has not been fair of me to want people to “read my mind” and guess why I’m blue.  Personally, I don’t know any mind readers, and don’t think I will ever know any.  It would have been more appropriate for me to tell those I wanted to share my heart with.  I would have saved me more grief when they didn’t remember.

I would have planned special things for those special days instead of thinking that I should sit at home by myself and cry.

A walk on Jay’s favorite beach at sunset with a friend, or a picnic at Jay’s favorite park with some of his friends would have helped me remember some of the good times instead of focusing on the bad.

I would have done something nice for someone who was feeling lonely or sad or didn’t have a friend – a trip out to lunch or to a movie.

I would have focused more on the good memories instead of the hurtful ones. 

When I focused on what I didn’t have, it produced unhappiness and discontent.  When I focused on what I did have, it produced gratitude.

I would have realized it was okay for me to cry and it was okay to desire to have Jay back, even though it held me captive in selfishness. 

It was okay – but only for a time.  I then had to make a truly hard decision to focus on helping others less fortunate.  The more time I spent focused inwardly on myself and the loss of our son, the more I seemed to spiral downward into the pit of self-pity and despair.  I had already spent too much time there and hated the darkness.  I now know I would have helped myself recover sooner and with less stress if I had spent more time focused outwardly.

I would have joined a support group sooner.

I would not have isolated myself from the very ones who wanted to help me.  My family of origin had taught me to segregate myself from others when I was sad.  However, I now believe we are made for community and for helping each other through the tough times.

We try to honor our son’s life by doing the best we can with the rest of our lives. We sometimes ask ourselves the question, “Would our choices and decisions in our lives today make Jay proud of us?”

We treasure memories of Jay and allow ourselves to reminisce, get nostalgic, and be thankful for the time we had with him, even though it wasn’t long enough. Whatever time we had with our departed child would never have been long enough.

Surviving special dates the first few years after the death of your child may seem like an impossible task. In some ways it’s like climbing a steep mountain or navigating on a churning ocean. But it can be done. So many others have had to climb that mountain or traverse those treacherous waters and are stronger for having made it to the far shore. We want to encourage you and give you hope that it can be done. That small tender shoot of hope will grow when nurtured and fertilized.

 

This was taken by permission from the book Finding Hope After the Devastating Loss of Beloved Children by Dr. Doug and BJ Jensen. Click here to find it on Amazon. (This is an affiliate link. GPS Hope will get a small percentage of your purchase by using it.)

 

Doug and BJ Jensen, are International Speakers, award-winning Dramatists, Signing Artists, Song Writers, Drama Writers, and Authors of 16 books. Dr. Jensen earned his PhD in Biblical Studies in the area of Biblical Counseling.  BJ is the Director of the world traveling LOVE IN MOTION Signing Choir and is a writer of 8 stories found in seven of the CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL books. You can contact them at Jensen2@san.rr.com or on their Facebook page: Bj Jensen San Diego.

We would like to send you a PDF of Thirty Ways to Bring Ourselves Comfort and Take Care of Ourselves. Please let us know below where to send it. (You will also join over 1000 other parents who receive a Weekly Word of Hope.)

Expressions of Hope is provided by Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope). The founders, Dave and Laura Diehl, travel full time in their Hope Mobile (a 38-foot motor home) to be more easily available for speaking and ministry requests, and bringing intimate weekend retreats to bereaved parents. Laura is also a singer/songwriter and the author of multiple award-winning books.

If you would like more information about bringing Dave and Laura to you for an event, please send an email to office@gpshope.org.

If you are interested in bringing GPS Hope to your area for a weekend retreat click here.

 

 

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Deep Grief Leaves Deep Scars

When we are deeply wounded, a scar is left behind. That happens both physically and emotionally.

When I was around three years old, my dad took my sister and me on a bike ride around the neighborhood at my grandma’s house. We had done it before. My sister was sitting behind him, and I was sitting in front of my dad as he was pedaling the bicycle. This one time, when he turned the wheel, I didn’t spread my legs far enough and got my ankle caught in the bike spokes. It took out a chunk of my ankle, and I ended up with a staph infection.

It took me out of commission for quite some time, and I didn’t get to play in the water that summer. I had to sit on the edge of the pool with my injured ankle wrapped in a plastic bread wrapper to make sure it stayed dry. We have a picture of me dangling my non-injured leg in the water while watching my sister and cousins splash around having fun.

I recovered, but I still have a scar on my ankle and always will.

At age forty-eight, my husband, Dave, ended up having quadruple bypass surgery. Recovery took a long time, and over ten years later he still has some effects from it and is on certain medications for the rest of his life. He also has a permanent scar, reminding us what he went through.

If you have been connected to GPS Hope for very long, you know that my daughter, Becca, had her leg amputated when she was only three years old because of bone cancer. (She died at age twenty-nine due to long-term heart damage from one of the chemo drugs given to her at that time.) Obviously, she had a scar on her stump from the amputation.

Becca’s missing leg can be a good illustration for to us, as bereaved parents. Having our child die is like having an amputation; a part of our very being has been cut off from us. The wound is severe, but it will eventually heal, but there will always be a scar, reminding us that a part of our very being is missing.

But the comparisons don’t stop at the scar of the injury.

Did having a staph infection in my ankle keep me from ever riding a bike or swimming again? No way! I loved riding a bike, especially as a kid (although I recently switched to enjoying riding my mini Segway) and I love to swim and be in the water, especially in warm places with beautiful beaches.

Did having quadruple bypass surgery keep Dave from permanently doing things like holding and playing with his grandchildren, or starting new adventures like selling our house and learning how to drive a 38-foot motor home that we now live in? Nope!

Did having an amputation keep Becca from running and playing with the other children? No, it definitely did not! It may have slowed her down and caused her to adapt to how she ran and how she played, but it didn’t stop her.

When these horrible things happen, including something as terrible as the death of our child, does it mean our life is over, and we will never be able to live a full life again? No, it doesn’t.

We need time to go through a “recovery” process (for lack of a better word) and need time to learn how to function with our child no longer here, but it doesn’t mean we will never be able to function again.

  • We will go through times when everyone around us is splashing and playing while we are unable to participate because of our wounds.
  • We will go through times when we can’t function and have to wait for more healing.
  • We will go through times when we have to adjust the way we do things.
  • We will forever bear the scar of our tragedies.
  • We will always have things that trigger reminders.

But we are not permanently injured to the point of being out of commission for the rest of our lives.

Our lives will never be the same. We will never be the same. But within that, we can make sure the tragedies in our lives are not wasted by leaving us incapacitated. And that includes the tragedy of the death of our child.

We can allow God’s love to wash over us, to heal us, and to take this change in us and use it against the enemy who brought death into this world.

And just think, all of our scars will disappear someday, both the physical ones and the emotional ones, when we join our children in that place where there is no more pain, no more sorrow, and all of our tears will be wiped away.

But until then, we need to remember…

Wounds heal so that we can continue living. Yes, our scar reminds us of what happened, of who was cut off from us, but it also reminds us that our life isn’t over. There is still more living to do, if not for yourself, then at least for those who love you and still need you in their lives, and for your child who is no longer here.

We can (and need to) learn to live with our scars in a way that honors our son or daughter, not in spite of our child’s death, but because of his or her life.

 

Are you looking for glimpses of hope in the suffocating darkness of grief after the death of your child? Join over 1,000 other parents who get a word of hope delivered directly to them every week. (You can easily unsubscribe when you no longer need the encouragement.)

Expressions of Hope is written by author, speaker and singer Laura Diehl. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope). Dave and Laura travel full time in their Hope Mobile (a 38-foot motor home) to be more easily available for speaking and ministry requests, including being invited to hold one-day GPS Hope & Healing conferences.

 

If you would like more information about Laura as a speaker for your next event or want more information on hosting a GPS Hope & Healing conference, click here.

 

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Is There Such a Thing as Grief Recovery?

Several years ago, in my searching for how to deal with my grief from the death of my oldest daughter, I came across an article called “Grief Recovery.” As I started reading it, I discovered it was for any kind of loss including jobs, moving, pet loss, death, divorce or any kind of breakup, starting school, etc.

It talked about how recovery is when we can have memories without the pain. I had a hard time reading it without getting angry. It is just impossible to compare grieving the death of a child to all these other things. I’m not saying those things are not painful and that there is not a level of grief involved, but this article was basically saying after you grieve the right way, you can move on with life and put the past behind you.

I might be able to move forward, but it isn’t by putting the death of Becca behind me! She will always be in front of me. Our children are our legacy. They are supposed to keep going when we leave this earth. Even if she isn’t with me anymore, I can’t leave her in my past and go on without her.

Even if we wanted to do so, the things that trigger us and remind us of our loss can come unexpectedly out of nowhere and bring back the memory, accompanied by unwanted pain once again.

I am a parent who took a lot of trips to the grave site for probably a year or more. One day while I was there, the med-flight helicopter flew over me. I totally lost it and found myself sobbing uncontrollably. Later, I wrote on Facebook about what had happened, and a friend told me it was a sign of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I guess it made sense.

The last year and a half of Becca’s life she had around a dozen ambulance rides, because of her heart issues. For many, many months after Becca passed, whenever I heard an ambulance I would freeze in panic and my mind would immediately question, “Where is Becca?” And of course, there was always the realization of where she was, and the siren I was hearing was definitely not for her.

The first year of special dates is always difficult for anyone who has lost a loved one, but for a parent who has a child missing it can be almost unbearable. For us, Thanksgiving came first and brought with it the memory of how the year before, Becca had insisted on hosting the family, even though she was wheelchair bound. Then came Christmas, Becca’s favorite holiday, and then the pain of the first time she was not there to celebrate her birthday, and so on. Eventually it came around to the one-year anniversary of her death.

Everyone grieves differently, and I wanted to be sensitive to that. Some of the family wanted to get together and celebrate her life, and others didn’t want anything to do with that. I was torn, and to be honest I don’t even remember what ended up happening that first year for her birthday or the anniversary of her death.

The part I do remember, though, is a precious memory I now share with Becca’s daughter. That first year, my granddaughter asked what we were doing for her mom’s birthday. Knowing how some of the family did not want to do anything, I suggested I come to her school for lunch on that day and bring birthday cupcakes for the two of us. She was thrilled, and we continued doing it for a few years (until she hit Middle School).

What I wasn’t expecting was to have the second year be harder than the first! I see two reasons for this. First, I braced myself for those one-year markers. I knew they were going to be hard, so I tried to prepare myself for them mentally and emotionally. The second year it was more like I was caught off guard. I’ve been through this before; it should be better this year, I thought, so all of a sudden, those dates were here, and they just hit me like a brick wall.

Second, I was still in such a fog of unbelief the first year. So as the fog started to lift that second year, the loss was hitting me with full force. By the third year, it was more like a painful acceptance, trying to figure out how to live this new life without my daughter.

I feel like I need to say this to the parents who are still in deep grief. Do not look at any dates to see where I or others were emotionally in our grieving process and use it as some sort of a timeline to force on yourself. We are all on our own individual timeline and need to go through the process at our own speed. Yes, there are some “patterns” (for lack of a better word) that some of us seem to fall into, but don’t expect yourself to fit into that. Give yourself grace to walk your own necessary path. As long as you are putting one foot in front of the other, you will get there.

Grief recovery for a bereaved parent? No, not really. Yes, it is possible to get to the point where we can have memories without the pain. It happens gradually, but for the rest of our lives there will be times where the pain returns, because all we have are the memories of our child. The goal is to have that happen less and less, but it is naïve to think we will get to the point where we no longer feel pain within the memories and therefore have “recovered,” as the article I read suggested.

Like someone with an amputation, (which Becca had her leg amputated at three years old) we will never fully recover. But we can eventually learn how to live around it, adapting our life to that part of us missing.

If you don’t think it’s possible, that’s okay. Most of us thought the same thing, which is why we and others are here. We want to be that hope and light to you, like someone was to us.  So make sure you stay connected to those who are further down this path, who will always validate your painful loss, and share your memories, whether they come with tears, or a smile.

Do you find it hard to find ways to find comfort in grieving the death of your child? We would be happy to send you our list of thirty suggestions to bring ourselves comfort. Just submit your name and email address below.

 

Expressions of Hope is written by author, speaker and singer Laura Diehl. She and her husband, Dave, are the founders of Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (GPS Hope). Dave and Laura travel full time in their Hope Mobile (a 38-foot motor home) to be more easily available for speaking and ministry requests, including being invited to hold one-day GPS Hope & Healing conferences.

Laura is a national keynote speaker and has also been a workshop speaker for events such as The Compassionate Friends and Bereaved Parents USA national conferences, along with being a guest on radio shows, podcasts and other media channels such as webinars with Open to Hope.

 

If you would like more information about Laura as a speaker for your next event or want more information on hosting a GPS Hope & Healing conference, click here.

 

GPS Hope exists to walk with grieving parents through the suffocating darkness of child-loss, guiding them to a place of hope, light and purpose.
 We also support families, friends and coworkers who want to know how to support these parents both short and long-term.

 

 

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