Stop The Clock

Stop The clock, new years with loss of a child, missing your child

The last of the tiny sands of time from 2017 are silently slipping through the hour glass as I write this. I have always loved hour glasses, admiring them in a pensive sort of way.  I’m captured by the curves of the slender glass, the hypnotizing flow of the sands, but especially their fragility. Knowing the glass could crack and shatter at the slightest disturbance, the sands of time set adrift to an arbitrary future after such simple predictability.  I can relate to an hour-glass. That has been my experience.

The passage of time for us is so littered with contradictions it can boggle the mind some days. So celebrated and so dreaded.  Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations- treasured like never before because we’ve been shown the frailty of each second. Yet dreaded because the passage of each day in time is so often hard-won.

We’ll enter New Years Eve with a lot of emotion.  Our hearts still so full and raw from an unquestionably painful Christmas. Needing this endless season to Just. End. Already. Some emotion will be from the pressure and expectations of celebration and toasts to a “Happy New Year”. We know now what the coming year will be filled with. Happiness, hopefully. Pain, longing, sorrow- absolutely. The smiling and laugher will be authentic for a while and then it won’t be. Our role will be taken over by our trusty counterpart, our pretender, our mask. It will remind us of how different we are from everyone else in the room. We’ll feel that seperation from everyone we know and love. That sense of looking out from within an inconcievable life we don’t want to be a part of.

Stop the Clock. Please.

I’m not ready to change the number of this year. 2015….2016….2017….I don’t think I did this last one very well-worse even. How can it be time for another? I don’t think I’ve moved the needle. I’m still here, my boots buried in the clay, waiting for relief that I don’t think is coming. Waiting to “do this” better, braver, more effectively…

less broken.

Stop the clock. Please.

I’m here in ‘my’ life without my child. If another year comes, it’s coming without him. If another year comes, I am leaving another one behind and I fear his life will become smaller and smaller in a world that keeps turning without him. Another year between now and when he was here. The last time I held him and layed beside him for a bedtime story gets further and further away. I don’t want him farther from me in any manner of speaking. I need him closer, nearer, adjoining me. I don’t want more time between us, please! That distance is getting wider and wider. Will his memory fade from here and the people who knew him? Will his memory become such a wisp in time it floats off, unremebered by anyone  but us?

It’s so hard when few understand this measure of agony and the dichotomy of the passage of time when you’ve lost a child. Each day is a day further from them, yet closer to them. We hate the distance yet crave the movement of time towards them. Towards our own end and our eternal beginning.

Stop the clock. Please.

I need to catch up. I’m running behind the world and I’m tiring. I’m running so hard and getting nowhere. I need to breathe. I’m never where I think I should be. Where other’s think I should be. There will be birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and graduations coming. I don’t want to be the ‘now’ me, I want to celebrate with abandon, I want to smile and laugh with complete authenticity and not suffer the pangs of guilt and shame for doing so. I want to live without this core of sadness and endless tears.

stop the clock, where is God? Finding God in sorrow

Stop the clock. Please.

There is someone I need desperately. Someone I keep reaching for but can’t find. I know He is there, but where? How much longer will it take? For His peace to settle on my heart, for His joy to bubble within my soul? Will I ever feel trust instead of abandonment? Does it ever truly come for us?

How many billions of grains of sand must slide through the hourglass before I can feel in my heart what I’ve known in my head?

Stop the clock.

 

 

 

 

 

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream,

to be-to be and oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this

and a Holy thing, a Holy thing to love.

For your life has lived in me,

your laugh once lifted me,

your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.

‘Tis a human thing-love, a holy thing,

to love what death has touched.

-Yahuda HaLevi

For another post on New Years click here.

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About Jennifer

I am a mother first and foremost. I am also a mother who lost a child, suddenly and tragically. Like other bereaved Mothers, I am trying to find my way back, and writing and creativity is a huge part of that. I hope by documenting my climb out of this, that my walk, my struggles, my failings, my faith, my honesty, and my choice to live-in every sense of the word, will help someone else do the same.

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