Up In Heaven

  Have you lost a child? The pain that comes with that loss hurts so deeply that sometimes you can't breathe. Sometimes you just have to rock back and forth trying to catch that elusive breathe. You can feel your heart pounding but everything slows and you think maybe this is it and you are done. Somehow though you keep on. I feel like a part of your heart is ripped away and no matter what you do that part will be gone. When the ripping away happens you have this gaping wound and as time goes on it slowly heals. The process takes such a long time and in the end there is a scar that will never not be there and you feel that ache.
  I have not lost a child that I knew. I have lost children to miscarriage and they were before I could feel the baby move inside. I don't know what it would be like to lose a child that you nursed, you named, that you had looked into their eyes, glimpsed their soul. My loss is loss, your loss is loss, but every loss is its own.
  It leaves us wondering, this loss does. It leaves us looking around wishing for comfort. We look for  connection. We wonder where have they gone? Are they waiting for us somewhere? Do they know who we are? Do they feel our love and our grief where they are?
  I find myself praying that my grandmothers are holding my babies, snuggling them for me, that they will be singing them the lullabies I couldn't. I hope that up in heaven my babies know their names, and that they are loved, and that they are waiting for me. I hope to see them again some day.
  I feel like this earth is a practice run for what is to come. I feel like we are these physical beings but we have this life in us ~ our spirit ~ that transcends much deeper than just the physical and that we have a soul that makes us who we are. We have opportunity to learn and to grow ~ to give and to heal ~ to look about us to really see what we have been given and what has been taken away. We make choices here. We fill ourselves with what we choose.
  Loss gives us this certain kind of pause. Grief excavates us. We are given yet another chance, a significant chance, to grow and change and see more clearly all the gifts we do have.
  The other day I drove up a mountain by myself. I parked on the side of the road by a meadow and just got out and walked along the road. All around me the neighboring mountains rose majestic and snow capped. Trees held hands and the fields were alive with color and bird song and so I just sat down and listened for a while.
  It helped somehow and I felt like after a while I could go back down to my life and responsibilities. Going up the mountain, being closer to the sky ~ I felt like it wasn't all so far away ~ Heaven that is.