Life often presents us with troubles. From a very young age, we struggle through difficulty and fear. Moments we don’t want to face or deal with and most of the time we have an “out.” We have an option to hide in a place that is safe whether that’s with a parent or excusing ourselves to head home and be alone or be with friends. We have a choice to find protection from pain or discomfort.
Losing a child doesn’t give me this kind of comfort. I can’t hide from it, I can’t find a safe place or a reprieve from the pain. That place doesn’t exist. I can actively find ways to distract myself but inevitably, my mind runs back to memory. My mind wants to think about her. It wants to remember, to never forget her voice and what it was like to have her around. I can’t explain how painful it is to realize that I’m forgetting what it was like to have Madison in my life. Her pictures are starting to become stills. Just moments in her past, not memories. She’s captured in this split second of existence that I know continued at the time, but for me, it’s over. I have moments after that. I have videos and photos, but they end and don’t continue. Everything has an end, and Brian and I have the vivid memory of her end. It runs through our minds all the time. We don’t have recordings of it but we’ll never forget it. The last time she spoke to us, touched us, hugged us, and called us by name. Both Brian and I have texts from her the day before we lost her. He has a voice memo that says, “I love you, daddy,” and I have a text of her heartbeat she sent with iMessage. There is no after. We don’t have any more memories, only our minds and what we were able to capture on our devices. All the years, the moments from when I first saw her face until I kissed her forehead goodbye. It seems like a lot, but it’s never enough.
I have nowhere to hide from this pain. It’s around me every second of the day and some days I just wish it would leave me, but it won’t. I have to learn to accept it as a part of who I am now and I can’t tell you how much I don’t want that. I’ve fought it several times until I allowed it to rest in my heart and breathe through it, allowing it to hold a mirror up in front of my face and force me to look. It’s how grief takes hold of you. It isn’t cruel, it’s like a close friend telling you the hard truth that you need to hear. It’s telling me to stand up straight, keep moving, never stop showing up and doing the next thing. It’s God showing me that life can and will continue and that He’s there every step of the way no matter how hard I kick and scream for Him to just leave me alone.
So much of life is realizing that you can’t hide from the hard things. Life is a mosaic of experiences both beautiful and horrifying. In the end, I hope I can present my detailed mosaic to my Savior and see the beauty in all of it.