A fresh start

It's Wednesday evening, and I finished my final carepage entry for Katerbug a few hours ago. What a blessing that site was for me and for our friends and family. It provided me with a link to the outside world at a time when I desperately needed a sense of connection and a way to reach many people at once. It's funny, but early on someone said to me that they were following my blog. I said, "What's a blog?" Did they mean blob? I still don't like the name blog. If you look it up on dictionary.com, it has one of the shortest entries I've ever seen; maybe that's due to the fact that the word is so new - it originated in 1998!

I suppose my writings about Kate's hospitalization, about my struggles with faith, about the triumph of her homecoming, the tragedy of her death, and the aftermath of losing her fall under the definition of blogging, but I simply found carepages to be an easier way to "email" everyone updates about my angel baby girl. It was also a safe place to express my raw emotions as I walked the journey because I knew only people who loved us were reading. But to continue writing there meant that I wasn't closing one chapter and opening another.

For the last several months, I have been meeting with a wonderful counselor named Terry Parsons. He, along with a handful of my closest friends, has helped me put the pieces of my soul back together. When I first met Terry, I was at the lowest point imaginable. I didn't want to die, but I didn't know how to live with such a huge burden of grief. My Katerbug was gone, and I couldn't bear the idea of a life without her. All I remember about that time was the unutterable weight of loss and the darkness. Lots of darkness. I remember reading C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed and realizing that Lewis had walked the journey before me and survived. The problem was that I never really felt like he had finished his story. Maybe he ended the book when he did because he simply didn't know what else to say. But I wanted to know if he ever found his way back to God. Did he ever make peace with Him? Did he ever get over longing for his wife? Did he find a way to be happy again? I have this feeling that he could have written forever if it meant feeling connected to Joy, his beloved wife who died.

I say Lewis could have continued writing because I believe that there's really no end to Grief's story. Each new stab of pain triggers a new set of thoughts. Each healing moment brings about a sense of clarity that had been absent only a moment before. There were times when I felt overwhelmed with a need to share the thoughts I was having about God in particular but felt that I had absolutely no basis for my beliefs in that they weren't grounded in Scripture or church teachings. All I had was life and loss and love. Plus, I really didn't have anyone I wanted to share them with in particular - I just wanted to throw some positive feelings out into the world and hope that they helped somebody. That's where the idea of Musings originated.

I don't expect anyone to follow this blog regularly, and I won't be offended if no one reads it. It's really just a place for me to breathe, to work through my thoughts, to continue to clarify my feelings. I named it Musings of a Mourning Mom because that's who I am now and that's what I'm doing. I search daily for ways to be happy (some days are easier than others), but I am always, at some level, in mourning for Kate. All it takes is a picture, a comment, a memory to trigger that tight chest-clenching sick realization that she's gone and not coming back. So here I will work through the sorrow, share the joy, sketch out my beliefs so that Will will know his mom in a way he might not otherwise. And if someone who has lost a loved one chances across this site and finds comfort or solace in knowing that I walked the journey before them and survived, then I will feel that I am living God's dream for my life.

Blessings to you.