Momma tapped into a new resource, a new community today. It is one I've been avoiding, and still haven't fully embraced. The Bereaved Parents of the USA.
Maybe it's my final shred of denial. Bereaved Parents? No, that's not for me. Those parents have lost older children. Or, children to suicide. Or, children to tragic accidents. But, not a toddler who was rapidly growing into a little boy, who went to bed healthy and never woke up. Those parents haven't lost MY little boy. They can't understand my level of loss, grief, desperation. They didn't know my Peanut.
The Bereaved Parents of the USA's Winter Newsletter showed up in Momma's inbox this afternoon. Strangely, I couldn't wait to read it. And, once I started, I read it cover to cover, non-stop. Poems, and stories, book reviews and helpful hints for "surviving the holidays." Thoughts and commentary that echo my own questions. My own concerns. These authors, these parents...they are...just like me.
So, maybe our losses are different in terms of the details. But the journey. The long, arduous journey we have all been on is remarkably similar.
Peanut, I am thankful for these other parents who are willing to share their hearts, their grief and their learnings. In sharing, they help people like your Momma figure out how to persevere.
For those who read this blog in the midst of their own grief journey, I share the Letter From The Editor. It is short and beautiful:
Eyn Chaya Kazo!
Bereaved parents are strange creatures. We are different, in some fundamental way, from people who have not shared our experience. Although we appear normal, perform the daily tasks expected of us, and seem to fit in the society in which we live we know it is a sham. We know the design of our lives no longer fits a regular pattern. Others do not understand and do not believe that the changes to our core selves are real and that this new type of creature we feel we have become actually exists.
In October [2011] Israeli scientist Daniel Shectman won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He had revealed that certain crystals do not link up in the symmetrical pattern that nature demanded. Quasicrystals, he called them, line up in a non-repeating fashion that was previously thought impossible. “Eyn chaya kazo!” he exclaimed, in his native Hebrew, upon first seeing this phenomenon, “There can be no such creature!” For many years the scientific community refused to believe quasicrystals existed because it altered their basic understanding of what a crystal is.
Like the scientists refusing to believe there could be a different kind of crystal, the world we face can’t, or won’t, comprehend that the patterns of our lives no longer fit a regular plan. We are expected, after a brief mourning period, to return to the life we lived before; doing jobs, maintaining connections, fulfilling responsibilities. Friends, family and co-workers don’t understand that although we still look like a crystal we have become quasicrystals— unable to be the reliable, predictable, symmetrical souls we were before our children died. Even so a quasicrystal can be a beautiful thing. There’s a Nobel prize that says so.
- Editor
(Taken from the national Newsletter of BP/USA - A JOURNEY TOGETHER. Website: www.bereavedparentsusa.org)
Peanut, I've had your face, your smile, your forehead bumps stuck in my head all day today. I think of you, see your image, and I smile through the bitterness of this loss. <sigh> Oh, how I miss you... Sending you love across the light years of eternity.
Eyn Chaya Kazo!
Bereaved parents are strange creatures. We are different, in some fundamental way, from people who have not shared our experience. Although we appear normal, perform the daily tasks expected of us, and seem to fit in the society in which we live we know it is a sham. We know the design of our lives no longer fits a regular pattern. Others do not understand and do not believe that the changes to our core selves are real and that this new type of creature we feel we have become actually exists.
In October [2011] Israeli scientist Daniel Shectman won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He had revealed that certain crystals do not link up in the symmetrical pattern that nature demanded. Quasicrystals, he called them, line up in a non-repeating fashion that was previously thought impossible. “Eyn chaya kazo!” he exclaimed, in his native Hebrew, upon first seeing this phenomenon, “There can be no such creature!” For many years the scientific community refused to believe quasicrystals existed because it altered their basic understanding of what a crystal is.
Like the scientists refusing to believe there could be a different kind of crystal, the world we face can’t, or won’t, comprehend that the patterns of our lives no longer fit a regular plan. We are expected, after a brief mourning period, to return to the life we lived before; doing jobs, maintaining connections, fulfilling responsibilities. Friends, family and co-workers don’t understand that although we still look like a crystal we have become quasicrystals— unable to be the reliable, predictable, symmetrical souls we were before our children died. Even so a quasicrystal can be a beautiful thing. There’s a Nobel prize that says so.
- Editor
(Taken from the national Newsletter of BP/USA - A JOURNEY TOGETHER. Website: www.bereavedparentsusa.org)
Peanut, I've had your face, your smile, your forehead bumps stuck in my head all day today. I think of you, see your image, and I smile through the bitterness of this loss. <sigh> Oh, how I miss you... Sending you love across the light years of eternity.
- Momma
