Love

 Love,

    Time stands still some days. I feel like I'm doing all that I can to force the breath to move in and out of my lungs. I feel exhausted and conflicted and all over the map. I feel like every feeling is completely out of control so I exercise myself to the point of exhaustion, and I micromanage the things that I can in the juvenile hope that control will make me feel safe. Control will numb the sorrow.

    Did I mention that some days I wrap myself up in your clothes so that I don't feel like you're so far away? Some days I bury my face in your things hanging up in the closet and shut my eyes so tightly so that I can pretend you're standing there filling them. Some days I long for the physical presence of you that my arms, chest, and body physically aches. Dramatic, I know, but also true.

    We get on the phone and I can't find any words to say because how do I describe the storm in my spirit without making you feel guilty? How do I express how desperately I want you to be here without having to dive in to consequences and choices and decisions that have been intentionally made?

    From the moment I met you, the time spent without you feels like a vacuum of darkness. It feels like all of the best parts of me disappear and I'm left trying to figure out how to keep on truckin'. It's why I ran away the first time you deployed because this love that you've brought to my heart was so overwhelming and agonizing that it was easier to numb myself and shut it down. Except numbing ourselves to hurt always means numbing ourselves to joy.

    I am working on intentionally sitting in the aches that I want to avoid. Grounding myself in the pain so that I don't lose out on any of the sun drops of joy that abound. Looking at your face flooded my heart with so much light today. Feeling the butterflies in my stomach, the longing in my chest, and the many emotions that you wear on your face is a pleasure. Even if we aren't saying any words, sitting silently looking at each other through a phone camera while our children talk about driving, and dating, and college, and all of the things that are such big experiences, all I could do was smile. 

    Look at what we've made. Two broken-family kids, scared to pieces, desperate for the comfort that only the other can bring. We have four human beings who are utterly fantastic, and somehow we get to be a part of that. I look at them and I see you. I see the way you wear your emotions on your sleeve, the way you force yourself to do so.many.things that your heart doesn't want to. I see your endurance and your strength. I see the resilience of a man a million times stronger than I am, capable of holding me up while I learn how to put myself back together, and vulnerable enough to let me do the same for him. I see the way you carry patience like a warrior, understanding that God will make everything okay, even when nothing feels okay.

    You take my breath away. I am now, and have been since I met you, completely in awe of you, utterly yours. You have taught me what it is to feel, to stop numbing myself from the hurts and the harms, and I struggle to remember that when you're gone.

    Right now I'm wrapped up in your sweatshirt, looking at your picture, sitting in the joy and the sadness, the grief and the elation, that has come over the years. I can't wait until you're home.

Update.

 America,

It's been two months since America sent my favorite human being away. I don't think I would say I'm doing well. Times like these do not allow for wellness. One does not feel "well" when embarking on a marathon. Instead, the mind shifts to survival, endurance, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other... It's a constant fight to feel anything at all. There is so much pretending when one's husband is away. Our children need me to be "me." My husband needs me to keep everything running smoothly. My friends and family need me to fill the roles they've grown accustomed to. So I smile, I make a joke, I listen, I pretend. No one really wants to hear about the heartache, and even if they did, I don't know that I could muster up the energy or the confidence to define it. 

I am not disintegrating, but in every single moment of my day there is a hollowness that can not be erased or shared. There is no person on this earth who can help me process like he can. No one who understands what it's like to be in my head and my heart. There is no one who grasps the complicated set of feelings that I share regarding our daughter becoming an adult, our son's blindness and epilepsy, my own health issues, our other childrens' needs, our grief, our losses, our successes. He has seen me curled up in the fetal position screaming at God that HE CAN NOT TAKE THIS CHILD AWAY FROM ME and shutting down as my son lost his mind hours after my father died because of medication. He has seen me skinny and morbidly obese and every variation in between. He has held my hand while I cried and cried and he knows without any need for explanation that Mass is my safe place. Except he is also my safe place...

America, I miss him. I hope you understand that there are real families aching and sobbing this Father's Day away. I hope you grasp, when you read or talk about Ukraine or Russia or Europe, or anything war at all, that there is a real human being, with a real spouse, real children, real parents, on the other end of the grand statements of what we need to do. I hope you measure the cost and are willing for it to be you, your spouse, your child, your actual self. I don't pretend to know any answers, and I would not be so presumptive to think my voice holds any relevance on the subject of necessary (or unnecessary wars), I just ask for you to reflect on the ache, the cost, the hardship. It is more difficult than words could ever say. It hurts more than I could ever begin to describe to you. This year I will have celebrated our eighteenth anniversary, my fortieth birthday, our daughter's eighteenth birthday, our triplets' sixteenth birthdays, sicknesses, dog illnesses, major life transitions, all without him. That sucks.

Everything has a cost. Some days paying it really freaking sucks.

CSM Gagnon

It's been 10 days since you left this world. Ten days your wife and children have grieved your absence. Ten days that this jokester, this gal who always has something to say, has been silent. Someone asked me to write a few words about you and I was struck by my inability to do it. I was rendered silent by my inability to define what it is that you and your wife mean to me. I still struggle to speak about you in past tense.

On Sunday, I went to Mass angry. I hope that you can relate to occasionally carrying a heavy bag of emotions to our Savior. When Father held up the Body of Christ, the image of you seeing it all in front of you, in real time, in heaven, rendered me speechless. It was crystal clear. And I sobbed. I sobbed so heavy and so hard. I sobbed because I was so happy for you to be there. I sobbed because I am so sad that your family has to miss you. I sobbed because I can only imagine the experience, and wait for my own. I sobbed because I found myself pouring out requests. Pray for Matthew. Pray for me to be faithful. Pray for Love. Pray for my Dad...

You asked me why he was better and you were dying, once. I remember standing in the hallway after CWOC. You were pacing back and forth and we ended up talking. I love our talks. What a treat it was to hear what was going through your mind. Anyway, on Sunday, I suppose that I understood why you had to go first: so you could pray for us. I find bizarre comfort in the knowledge that you understand that better than us all.

My dear friend, you and your bride are our family. You are our great friends. You welcomed us in this vast universe that is the military and you sheltered us with laughs, wisdom, advice, encouragement, support. I will miss seeing your Ranger hat and pin. I will miss your laugh. I will miss how you never stopped asking questions, no matter how silly you thought they sounded. I will miss how you made everyone who encountered you feel simultaneously like the most awesome person in the room, and driven to be a better version of themselves. I will miss how you made my son feel ever so slightly a part of the organization for which is holds such high regard. I will miss you teasing me about being embarrassed to kiss my husband at the giving of the peace in Mass (and I will think of you laughing in heaven each time it comes). I will miss going to lunch and talking about everything under the sun. I will miss how desperately you sought to understand God's Love and Mercy in all moments. I will miss your honesty about your faults with me, and your drive to be better. I will miss teasing you about running when you should be resting. I will miss the expression of awe and wonder our Savior brought over you with each new discovery.

Thank you for allowing me and my family to be a part of your life. Thank you for sharing a tiny piece of your big heart with us all. You will never be forgotten. I know I join so many others when I say: I look forward to seeing you again, in the physical presence of our King.

Answers

America,

He asked him to sacrifice his child. It's a horrible, ugly, agonizing thought. Who would ask that of a parent? Who would ask someone to give away their only son?

It's a thought too painful to fathom. Yet it is something that I understand for the first time in my life in a more tangible way than ever before. He asked me to sacrifice my child. He asked me to give up minutes, moments, snuggles, memories, experiences, etc. He asked me to lay it all down and turn around and walk away, and to find peace in His plan. His plan that I couldn't understand, and I couldn't grasp, but I knew was better than what I could hope for.

In the biblical narrative of what God asked of Abraham and Sara, we don't read about the tears. We don't read about the emotional agony behind the steps of trusting God. We don't read about the sleepless nights or the emotional exhaustion. We only read about the actions of faith. His faith was credited to him as righteousness.

My son was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa. As a result of this my only son is going blind. For some unknown reason, his vision is disappearing very rapidly (a reality that surprises his opthalmologists). In a period of 9 months, he went from no longer needing to see an opthalmologist to being legally blind at night and having lost a significant portion of his peripheral vision. In the past three months, his field of vision has continued to decline at an alarming rate and he can no longer see the color purple.

I am a homeschooling parent. How does one homeschool a child who can not see? I'm not so naive to think I can figure everything out on a whim, and my son is so smart! He deserves the best possible education he can get. Because of this, and a LOT of narrative in between that I won't bore you with here, we had no option but to look at a residential school for the blind.

I can go on and on about the hurdles that had to be overcome in regards to this residential school. I can't tell you how intensely I sobbed when the door was even opened to him. I cried so hard I couldn't even breathe, and I think my sister's (who was on the other end of the phone) quiet tears and prayers and hugs from miles and miles away, helped me to get myself back together so I could leave my room and keep on parenting that day.

There have been months and weeks of gathering medical records, evaluations, documents, and then the final "test" of summer camp (this was a camp connected with the school, where they would evaluate my son's ability to attend). If you're unsure about my emotional state, click back to my previous post. You'll see that I was a complete mess. Sacrifices, even ones taken with complete faith, are not without agony. Let me say that again. I had to lay down my dream of everything for my son. I had to let go of what I hoped would be, let go of homeschooling him, and pendulum swing to the opposite end of homeschooling, and grasp an empty bed, an empty room, an empty chair at the dinner table, and more for my ten year old child. I had to let all of this go, and walk.by.faith.

He came home from camp and we were torn about what to do. We decided to trust in God's plan, made known to us by whether or not he was accepted in to the school. If he was accepted, he would go. If not, that was our sign that something else was in store.

It's amazing to me how devoid of agony things can appear, when we are no longer waiting for answers. I'm incapable of sharing with you how broken my heart was. I can't even begin to say the oceans of tears I have cried. The idea of my son's empty bed... even now sends me into sobs.

My spiritual director advised me to pray a novena. For my non-Catholic readers, a novena is a specific prayer prayed in increments of nine. It could be nine times in a row, or over nine days, or some other multiple of nine. I am on day six of that novena. The school called me today to give us the news. My son was accepted. But...

For the sake of comic relief, I could let that "but" linger here. I could write about how my dog is currently pestering me for attention, or my children are asking me about eight thousand variations that they would like to add to their dinner. But I'm sure you'd like to know what the "but" was. Yes? No?

The "but" is that we have to be resident's of a state that we are not resident's of. The school reached out to the state's board of education to see if there was a possibility to waive that requirement with my son. This is a testament to the passion for helping visually impaired children that this school has. Their support, encouragement, and helpfulness goes beyond what I could have ever hoped for or imagined. They even went so far as to call the nearest military installation to see if it would be possible to have my soldier transferred there so that my son could attend (or to see if there was anything else that could be done). Unfortunately, there is not. The door is wide open for my son's attendance, if and when, we sell our house and move. So basically? He can't go. At least not in a few weeks when school begins.

I wish I could tell you the joy I feel over the clear answer. I am so excited to see what God has in store for my son and our family this year. The waiting is over, the answer has come. I was asked to be willing to let him go. I was challenged to examine Whom I really trusted. I was forced to put my money where my mouth was, and in this moment, I have been spared the agony of having to actually do it. We went all the way, as far as we could go. The door has closed, at least for now.

In the past couple of weeks, we have been blessed with options for continuing to homeschool my son.
At summer camp, we met another family who homeschools their visually impaired child. The school recommended several adaptive technological devices to continue my son's education at home (they knew that there was a chance he might be unable to attend. They created a packet of resources and recommendations that are specific to each child they evaluated at camp. Just another way that they are amazing!).

Today, we have a lot of decisions to make about what's ahead. Today, I don't know what tomorrow will look like. Today, I am so so thankful that the waiting is over and the answer is here. Today, I can't even begin to define the joy of knowing that in a few weeks I don't have to drop off my child and drive home without him.

I'll take it.

Grigio and tonight

America,

It's ten o'clock at night and the empty bed is screaming at me. The echo of the silence is pounding so loud in my head that it aches more powerfully than I can say. My brain is shouting How the hell are you going to do this in six weeks!?!?! And my heart is saying Calm down. You don't know yet... It's what's best for him. It is, what's "best" for him. I'm so mad about that I can barely see straight.

If only this camp was just that. If only it wasn't a trial or a glimpse of what's ahead. If only it wasn't an examination and a potential acceptance to this school that will build so many opportunities and options for him. If only all of these fantastic things that it offers didn't come at the cost of my whole heart ripping into five million pieces and then being blown across the south. If only...

It's easy to sit there and see how pathetic I am. Boarding school is not that serious. Blindness isn't as bad as other things. The blessings abound. That's true. It's so true that I hate every single second of it and I find immense comfort in the goodness of it all. But the "but" is so loud it's still screaming at me in the form of his empty bed, and the pounding echo of a him-shaped-hole in my house. And in this moment, this ten o'clock hour, I hate RP! I hate how much it's hurting me. I hate all that it's ripping away from me. I hate that my heart is so focused in this moment, on the cost to myself. I hate that I can't fix it. I can't medicate it, or research it, or therapy it, or health-food it. I hate that there is no cure and no solution and no option and I want to scream a thousand curse words, and run a billion miles, and eat nothing, and eat everything, and pray, and cry, and ache because that's all my heart feels at ten o'clock tonight. I hate that I had to laser focus my brain on any possible subject it could latch on to, while my nervous little boy hugged me a hundred times and said I love you mommy! repeatedly because he was afraid. I smiled, and laughed, and said positive words, by the grace of God, because he needed it. I hate that tonight I can't stop crying, when I hate crying.

How the hell am I going to do this in six weeks?

I don't know how to do this. I don't know what this looks like. I don't know what this looks like so much that I can't even imagine it. How do I go from begging to not home school, to loving home schooling, to boarding school? How do I comfort myself, let alone the two other human beings who have been as intricately connected to him as I have, from the beginning of their existence? What do you say to your daughters who ache because they want him here, because they feel the pounding and screaming and aching of the him-shaped-hole that you do?

There's nothing to say. That's the truth of it. There aren't words, and there aren't hugs, or laughs or anythings that can do anything at all. This disease just is. And tonight I hate it. Damn it, I wasn't supposed to have to do this so soon. And I hate RP for making me do it eight years early. I hate it for taking away the time I assumed I would have.

There's a him shaped hole, and his empty bed is screaming at me, and I'm sobbing at ten o'clock tonight.

Grace

If you're anything like me, grace seems like an abstract, impossible notion to effectively give in the realm of parenting. I mean, what does that look like? We have to walk this complicated, intricate balance of how to pour out grace on our children, all the while maintaining a lesson of life: there are consequences for your actions.

I don't by any means, claim to have the "know-how" when it comes to parenting. I'm just like everyone else, doing the best that I can. That being said, I feel like today my heart had a little lightbulb moment when it comes to grace.

My daughter asked me if she could make dinner. She has been reading a book about meals that people eat in different countries and asked if she could try one of them. There was an easy smoothie recipe (that supposedly hails from Australia), and she asked if that could be our dinner. I said sure! and we proceeded to make the smoothies together. We washed and cut up apples, mango, bananas, limes, and threw in some blueberries for good measure. Lolli was tasked with getting the blender out (yes, I'm one of "those people" who store the small appliances they don't routinely use in a cupboard). She started to move it to the counter and dropped it. Then she picked it up and dropped it again (maybe she wasn't certain if it broke on the first drop? hehe). Slippery fingers? I'm not certain. I was busy cutting up apples.

Let me allow you to glimpse into the mind of mothers. We are constantly cleaning up messes. Our things are dropped, broken, spilled on, stained, destroyed. It's almost like children see something that parents love and they immediately have a robot-like need to destroy it. Because of this, mother's don't always handle broken things with grace. Sure, there are those freak-of-nature-June-Cleavers (who I am convinced are really sociopaths, hence their ability to show no angry emotions when their children destroy things) that say all of the perfect things, but for the majority of Mom's in the world the response is generally something like: WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?!?! AAAAHHHH! YOU DROPPED IT! IT'S BROKEN! YOU DON'T HAVE ANY SHOES! SOMEBODY GET ME SOME SHOES!!!! AND THE BROOM! And then we proceed to angrily, frustratedly, perhaps silently (but usually this is that scary angry mom silence...), clean up the mess that our children have made.

On this day, I did not overreact. I said Is it broken? She said I don't think so. Dad investigated and it was. So I said Maybe Daddy will go to Walmart and get a new one and then we can finish making our smoothies. Grace. Grace poured out. And maybe that's what parental grace is supposed to be. It's not "letting it slide in grace" when our children behave like criminals (and let's be honest, children really basically behave like criminals almost daily: violence-hitting, biting, scratching, stealing-grabbing whatever toy they want when they want it, lying under oath-if I have to explain this one to you then you clearly do NOT have children, and on and on), but rather giving grace when the accidents come. Maybe grace is having the self control to recognize the things out of our children's control, and not behaving in a life-long-emotionally-detrimental way. Maybe grace looks like going to Walmart to get a new blender. Maybe grace is not being pissed when they spill (and mash) blueberries into your brand new couch. Maybe it's allowing them the freedom to destroy, fall apart, and then being the platform from which they can put things back together again.

So today I had a glimpse into how grace should show up in my home a whole lot more.

Jake

They handed me a blue collar before they brought him out and turned him over to me. He was abandoned by a family who moved and "couldn't" take him with them. He was huge and gentle and energetic. Blue became Jake, but we always kept that dog collar from the very first day.

The furry four legged love of my life is dying. As I write this to you I can't stop sobbing, reminiscing, aching. It's an ache that there's little comfort for. The agony of knowing when the right "time" is, is really being selfless enough to let him go...

The justification process for keeping him alive is really non existent now. He isn't really eating well. He falls quite frequently now. His eyes... his eyes beg me for mercy. I yelled at him for giving me that look. I yelled at him for dying. I yelled at him because I don't want this.

We've set "goodbye" dates and passed them. We've made plans and ignored them. We've argued against ourselves about whether or not we should give him "one more day to perk up". We've looked at the events of the day and tried to decide whether or not we should push it because we have something going on. We've ignored, ignored, ignored the inevitable.

How do you know when it's time? I can't tell you how many people have said "you just know". Well, no I don't. Because what I "know" and what I'm allowing myself to "know" are not in sync. A grieving mind is a powerful tool at seeing only what it wants to see. A selfish heart is completely able to ignore how rapidly he breathes, how little he eats, how often his legs fall out from under him, how much he shakes. A selfish heart can ignore all of that or can mentally look for the one. thing that he still "enjoys" and say that's reason enough to make him endure all of this agony. And I have one hell of a selfish heart. Because I don't want to say goodbye. I don't want to take him to a clinic where they'll give him a shot and I'll walk out with his blue collar and no him. I don't want to walk into my house and not see his brown furry face. I don't want to sleep and not hear him snoring away. I don't want to sit on my couch and not have him irritating me by laying on my feet, or half on my lap.

You know the end is here when the conversations about him are all past tense.
Remember how he used to pull weeds in the yard? And he would carry them over to the rocks because he didn't want them in the grass? Remember?
Remember how he used to pick up all of the tiny pieces of trash on the floor so that the triplets wouldn't put it in their mouth?
Remember how he saved my sanity and figured out what Bruni needed when she was a baby? Remember how he rescued me from near hysteria over the endless crying? Remember?
Remember that time when he decided he wanted to be held and jumped into my lap and then had this sort of consciousness that he was massive and probably shouldn't be sitting there? But he just resigned himself to what he'd already done and decided to "roll with it" and how funny that was? Remember?
Remember how he NEVER let anyone touch the babies or Lolli, but he did it in the most gentle, unobtrusive way, so that people never realized what he was actually doing? He ALWAYS put himself between a "stranger" and our children. People thought he was just friendly, or annoying, but we knew it was really about safety?
Remember how he would kick out my giant teddy bear when Chief was deployed and slip himself in its place? He HATES that teddy bear!
Remember his last hurrah of destruction where he ate the Tucks pads? Still wonder if that was the first or final act in that day of household terror.
Remember when he fell in love with that stuffed animal bird? How he would carry it around like his puppy and love on it endlessly? Remember how he dug out the brand new one he didn't even know existed (we didn't show it to him), directly out of a pile of bags without touching ANYTHING ELSE?
Remember how he would always either spoon me, or force me to spoon him, and how the process was so slow and gradual that you'd never even know it was happening until you woke up in that scenario with him happy as can be.
Remember how he was every time it rained and he wouldn't leave the porch to go to the bathroom because of his passionate hatred of water, but if there was snow... if there was snow he was the happiest dog on the planet. He would bolt out and run around like a crazy dog, rolling, diving, jumping in the frozen water.
Remember the first time he experienced a vacuum? That thing was the devil and he was certain it had to be immediately destroyed.
Remember how he was during and after his first bath? Yikes!
Remember how he hates all small dogs with a passion, but you get him around a puppy and he becomes father of the year. He would take on this goal of protection, instruction, and leadership that was absolutely beautiful to watch.
Remember how mad he was at me when I dropped him off at the Kennel overnight because we were moving and I didn't want him getting out? How he wouldn't even acknowledge my existence for two days? 
Remember when he picked Foofi up off of the ground and launched her with his nose?
Remember when Foofi would jump up on his back like he was a step stool to reach something she couldn't reach under normal circumstances?
Remember the time he dragged a Husky and a Doberman across the yard while they struggled fiercely against him?
Remember how panicked he would get every time suitcases came out, or boxes were being packed, or anything "going away" was involved? Until he realized that when we left, we brought him too and then he started to enjoy it.
Remember how when Chief left for his gazillionth deployment he would sit and lick away my tears, and hold my hand with his paw until I felt comforted. Remember how he would wrap his big furry arms around me while I slept, as if he took on this charge of physical and mental protection of me, in Chief's absence. 
Remember all of the personal, and beautiful things that he has shared with each of us, igniting this magical bond between himself and humanity, that can't be shared?

He has etched his very essence into my soul. He was our first family pet. I told Chief that I believed him to be a guardian angel sent to help us. He really was the only being that could soothe our daughter when she was little. He was the one who understood what she needed when we could not. He is the one who brought me, and the rest of my family, endless hours of comfort, laughter, and love. So please bare with me as I will myself to let him go. Please pour out grace, kindness, and mercy on my devastated heart. Please pray for my children, and my heart, as we say goodbye. Our children have asked to be present as he goes off to heaven.

He came into my life with a blue collar. And short of my memories, it's about to be all that I'll have left to hold. My God, this hurts.

Edited: Jake went to heaven today. He laid in my lap as I kissed him over and over again while he left this earth. The sobs are heavy and the pain is great, but he is worth every bit of it. He went to sleep hearing over and over again "I love you so much!" By the grace of God, I was able to love him enough to finally let him go...