Tonight's picture was taken in January of 2005 (Mattie was almost three years old). Mattie was invited to a birthday party and as you can see in front of him was a vanilla birthday cake. Mattie was thrilled! Mattie despised chocolate, and he would always get upset when someone served a chocolate birthday cake. Which from his perspective happened far too often! I loved watching him evolve. He went from a child who would make a big fuss when he saw a chocolate birthday cake, to a kid who was able to hold his tongue and be happy that it was a friend's birthday! Even if that friend served chocolate cake. Mattie learned that the party wasn't about the CAKE! Quite a valuable life lesson received at an early age.
Quote of the day: That’s the only thing that could help me at times, someone to help me cry. Just shut up and sit and be quiet while I cry. This thing called grief is a strange thing indeed. ~ Maggie Zarcufsky
Tonight's quote in a way has me laughing. Laughing because there is no way we can dictate how someone will respond to us while we are crying. To expect a person to "just shut up and sit and be quiet" is unrealistic. Perhaps if you are a trained grief counselor, you will be doing this, but chances are the average person will respond in some way when seeing a friend or family member crying. It is a natural instinct in a way, when we see pain in others, most of us want to help. We perceive that we are helping when we say something. Typically that is true, words are NECESSARY for communication, otherwise it is impossible to know how one is truly feeling. When someone is crying, our gut response is to find out why or to say everything will be okay. However, bombarding someone with questions or commentary while crying isn't helpful. It may stop the crying, but to whose benefit is that? Certainly not the person crying. We all cry for a reason, and though it is hard to watch and hear, it serves a purpose. Therefore interrupting the process from my perspective interrupts the healing process. So in essence I believe this is where tonight's quote is coming from. The author feels it is important to be able to cry in silence, yet as she so aptly tells us, we really don't want to cry alone. We want someone there with us to help us along and to share in our pain.
I continue to feel sick and am quite congested today. I went out for a little bit and along my journey bought several pounds of bird seed. We have kept our Mattie tradition going, by feeding the birds each winter. As I look at the bird feeder each morning, I can vividly recall the excitement and commentary I used to hear from Mattie as he would get a kick out of watching the birds peck at each other to get a turn on the feeder. You can learn a lot about birds by watching how they interact with each other and feed. We are visited daily by red headed finches, sparrows, starlings, and unfortunately now pigeons. Thankfully our feeder only accommodates small birds, and the pigeons are not graceful enough to balance on each perch and eat. My neighbor upstairs happens to be a birdwatcher and he stopped Peter and I on Sunday to thank us for feeding the birds. We have birds on our feeder ALL day long during the winter. Therefore, we go through seed like it is going out of style.
I received the following paragraph below today from my mom. Apparently the paragraph was part of a speech given by Congressman Pence from Indiana. The speech intrigued me because I did not know Calvin Coolidge's son died while he was a sitting president. In Coolidge's own words, you can hear the guilt he felt over his son's death and you can even hear how this death profoundly changed his attitude about being president and the remainder of his life. I struggle with the same feelings that President Coolidge elaborated on, and in a way, reading his words helped me understand even further that the issue doesn't lie with me, the issue (Mattie's death) is in the problem itself. An issue that is unsolvable, unble to be fixed, and which leaves a parent mortally wounded. It is very hard to pick up the pieces of your life, when it has been shattered. When you have seen the worst life has to offer, and when you have seen your child die in your arms and there is nothing you can possibly do to stop it from happening. This is life's greatest reality lesson. A bitter lesson, which I try to understand and write about each day on this blog.
Mike Pence, Congressman from Indiana, made a speech about The Presidency and The Constitution. In it, he spoke about the humility expressed by President Calvin Coolidge, who like Abraham Lincoln, lost a child while he was President. Young Calvin, the son who died, was very much admired by his father. The boy contracted blood poisoning from some activity that took place on the South Lawn of the White House. Coolidge wrote, "What might have happened to him under other circumstances, I do not know, but if I had not been president..." revealing his remorse that he was President and that was what triggered the event of his son's death. If he had not been President, he intimates, his son might not have been on the South Lawn. He also wrote, "In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him." How profound and deeply moving are these words of a President whose grief for the loss of his son made him question the importance of the Presidency in his life in the aftermath of the untimely death of his son. It should give pause to all about the passion we bring to the quest for wealth, power and fame for in the blink of an eye, their relevance to our lives may become meaningless by an unforeseen tragedy!
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