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| photo by Jean Ann Williams |
“For everything there is a season, and a time
for every matter under heaven.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
What I learned
after Joshua died? The loss of my son became a physical reaction.
Each night as I
lay in my bed and hoped for sleep, I squeezed my eyes shut. Tormented, I felt
as though my heart and soul were being shredded. My love for Joshua
intensified, but no love flowed back from son to mother. During the worst
nights, I prayed for God to stop my beating heart.
My husband
reluctantly returned to work, and life without Joshua’s presence left me lonely
and hollow. I tried listening to music a few times, but the songs reminded me
of Joshua. The songs were either his favorites or what he wished I would turn
off. To fill the air with noise, I began talking out loud to myself.
Never in my life
had I known such isolation. Raised the eldest sibling of a large family, I was
surrounded by people. When my husband and I first married, and for many years after, he came home from work for lunch.
Now my husband
worked in another city more than half an hour away.
Days stretched in front of
me as I wandered the house. My skin pricked as I walked past Joshua’s closed
bedroom door in the hall. Sometimes I entered his room.
I would stand there and
blink—he was not there. I would search through Joshua’s possessions, hoping to
find a note he may have left for his dad and me. Other times, I hurried down the
hall and past his room, wishing Joshua’s bedroom would disappear.
I forgot the
people I could have phoned for comfort during the worst sorrowful moments. Too
deep in the pit of grief, it was God and me—alone, but not alone.
My Lord, my God, whom I want I cannot have,
so I want nothing except to sleep. Please be merciful to me through the valley
of the shadow. In Jesus’s holy name. Amen.
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