Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Tuesday, October 9, 2012 -- Mattie died 161 weeks ago today.


Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2008. This was before Mattie had any of his surgeries and therefore was able to walk independently. We took Mattie to Baltimore's Inner Harbor that weekend to walk around and have lunch outside. As you can see in Mattie's right hand, he created something while we were at lunch! A LEGO creation! LEGOs were always a part of our lives, Mattie just naturally gravitated to them, and thankfully he did because in the Hospital and battling cancer, creating with LEGOs was very therapeutic for all of us. 


Quote of the day: The part can never be well unless the whole is well. ~ Plato


Plato's quote really intrigues me. It seems to me that this quote can be applied to just about anything.... whether we are talking about a family, a business, a classroom, or even an individual. In many ways, grief is quite a threat on the "whole," and I have seen when all of me isn't doing well, then my "parts" aren't doing particularly well either. Grief is a funny thing though, you can't see it, hear it, taste it, or feel it. But you can certainly sense it. There are times grief can make me absolutely myopic, not on purpose, but I find it is one of my many ways of coping. Things around me become blurry and out of focus, so that I can instead invest the energy within to manage the internal chaos.

The sad part however, is when things do come into focus for me, I am acutely aware of the pain of others around me. We live in a complicated world, a world I sometimes don't understand.... in which children are battered and abused, people are going hungry, families are dysfunctional and unable to provide the proper guidance and insights to their children, in which people feel the need to turn to substances rather than one another, and the list is frankly too long to cover in this posting. It is hard not to become disillusioned when hearing and seeing all of this. So what is the answer? How does one combat all these forces of negativity that can easily consume us? I am not sure I have the answer to this, especially on a cold and grey day! The only immediate thing that comes to mind is meaningful connections. At the end of the day, that is what can get you through even the toughest of days, the key though is learning how to find these meaningful, trustworthy, and solid relationships. To me, these are skills that are just as important to teach a child as math, science, English, or history. These are life skills and what continues to shock me some days is that parents do not want to be parents. I get it, the job is hard, it is all consuming, a complete energy drain, and leaves you floundering to figure out who you are at times. Yet children/teens need our adult EXPECTATIONS! If we give up as parents and just assume that children will experiment with sex and drugs, because that is our society's norm, then guess what.... your children will live up to these expectations. Children/teens need guidelines, limitations, and most of all help establishing their own moral compass. Typically I do not talk about these things on the blog, but I had the opportunity to chat with several moms today, and I can sense the struggle. The struggle is not necessarily finding a moral compass, the struggle is how to help craft this compass in a world in which children and teens are practically rewarded for growing up and experimenting with things before they are ready to do so.

As today marks the 161st week of Mattie's passing, I sit back and realize Mattie would be 10 years old now, a tween (as our current society calls them, between a child and a teenager), and I honestly do not know what kind of challenges we would have had with him as he developed. I was not given that opportunity to find out, and in a way, that is definitely part of the loss and grief we contend with each day. We grieve Mattie's existence and all the stages, mile markers, and seasons that typically come with having a child.