Friday, July 27, 2012

Friday, July 27, 2012

Tonight's picture was taken on July 27 of 2008. Which makes it four years ago today, and also five days after Mattie was diagnosed with cancer. Mattie was outside on our deck, sitting inside the cover of his sandbox. Looking at this picture you would think that Mattie always loved sitting and playing in the sand. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. Mattie despised sandboxes until he entered preschool. By age four, Mattie was in one with the sand, and he loved his frog sandbox. The sandbox now sits outside our deck door, and several children in our complex come play in it. I can hear them playing through my windows and it reminds me of my days outside on the deck with Mattie.

Quote of the day: There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot. ~ Plato

I wore this cardio-monitor all day today, and I have to say, I can't stand it. It is not physically uncomfortable, but it is hearing the beeps and noises that puts me on edge. I find that what the machine is unconsciously doing is conditioning me NOT to press the record button so that I can avoid hearing the sounds. Which of course defeats the purpose of wearing the monitor in the first place. Two weeks of this seems beyond difficult!

As I mentioned previously on the blog, I have become connected electronically to a mom who lost a three year old child ten years ago. Ironically this mom contacted me originally not because of our common losses or because of the Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation. She contacted me about a professional licensure board question. When I responded to her, she saw in my automatic electronic signature at the bottom of my emails, Mattie's blog address. After reading parts of the blog, she wrote back to me and acknowledged my loss as well as hers. This mom is much further along in the grief process than I am, but the point is, she is still grieving, and confirms to me that losing a child, even if you have other children as she does, is a lifetime endeavor. Many of the moms I know who are grieving are in parallel with me, meaning we all lost our children around the same time. Hearing insights from someone ten years into this is insightful and it is my hope in time to get this mom's permission to post some of her reflections on this blog. It is insightful because it confirms some of my feelings about grief and loss. For example, over time I have felt that some people expect me just to bounce back and to have gotten over the loss. This mom expressed the same frustration and told me some of her struggles four years into her grieving process. Needless to say, it helped me see that I am not alone, that those of us out there who are living this nightmare can relate to each other and we are speaking the same language. This knowledge is of great comfort to me, and it helps to make a very difficult situation seem a bit more normal. Because I have to admit it is hard to be different and at times feel misunderstood, or even worse looked upon as something being wrong with me because I am not over Mattie's death! Grief is not like a cold or the flu, there are no quick fixes or cures!

The highlight of my day was reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I am saddened to know that the author who wrote this book died and that this was her only novel. Yet what a magnificent piece to memorialize her gift as a writer. I feel like I am getting an appreciation for Guernsey, a Channel Island, and how difficult living in an occupied Country during World War II must have been like. Yet what captures my attention is despite great adversities the passion and hope of the human spirit shines through in amazing human connections. In addition, I also find it inspiring how friends can be made through the establishment of a book club, and how reading books for each of the club's members was actually therapeutic! It makes you want to go out and start a book club, however, to me a book club is a lot like a support group. In order for it to work well, the right mixture and dynamics between people must exist. Needless to say, the book has a magical way through its diary format of capturing your attention and transporting you back to the 1940s. Which in the midst of dealing with cardio-monitoring is a welcomed escape.