Realness

Realness is an actual word. I know this because I Googled it just to make sure I hadn’t titled this post with a figment of my imagination. 🙂

Realness is something that our world uses sparingly, and only in certain contexts. It is easy to be real when the reality feels good and looks good. It is not easy to be real when the reality is raw and sometimes biting. But we’ve chosen that here. We have chosen to be honest and vulnerable and very open about this journey we are on.

When Kamri was alive, we shared update after update of her status, things to pray for, and how we were holding up throughout the process. As we always say, we will not sugar coat things. There is power for God to work in authenticity and there is power for Christ to change lives (both ours and others) when we choose to be open, choose to be vulnerable. And so we have chosen to do so.

Grief is a journey with many facets. It’s like a big ball of string, with a thousand little pieces, all tangled up (to borrow the illustration of someone much smarter than me). If we imagine it as such, the process of healing from grief is like taking that ball of so many strings and slowly starting to pull them apart, recognizing each piece for what it is. Some of those strings are what we could classify as “negatives” and others could be named “positives”. Heavier things and lighter things. Expected aspects and unexpected aspects. We have found that our personal journey is a melting pot of all of these.

We have committed ourselves to documenting the untangling of that tightly wound ball of string, both in personal and public ways. There is a full narrative at work, here. Our lives, Kamri’s life, God’s path for us, it is all a full story; a story filled with a lot of different pieces, a lot of different facets, a lot of different strings. Some of which, you have read about here on the blog. Some of which, you will read about as we continue to post. There is a range to this story… one that stretches to the darkest depths, as well as to the brightest hopes. I think by now, you have seen us begin to pull at this ball, string by string.

We are slowly working through each piece and you’ve seen some of that here… so far, we’ve talked about Anger. We’ve talked about Trust. We’ve talked about Hurt.

In all of this, there are glimmers of healing, but there are also daggers of the jaggedness of this road. It wasn’t until my aunt, one of my mom’s sisters, called up my mom after one of the posts in deep concern, that I gained some insight about this space. The words we write are raw and filled with truth and she read them and felt the need to check in, not just with the usual “how are they doing?”, but more so with “do we need to be seriously worried?”. It reminded us that this invisible community that we write to is an actual real-life family. You read our words, our deepest thoughts, and you care about them. They mean something to you.

You love Kamri and you love us. Deeply.

We are blessed by that. We are blessed by your care.

It is no secret that we have been honest in the strings we have pulled out and reflected on here. But I want to be honest about the context for these strings, these reflections. As this journey is a full story and we will continue to share the full story as it unfolds, I want to open a window for you to see some of the practical pieces of our journey. I want you to understand the context in which we are processing and walking through our grief. After all, it’s part of our story too.

From day one, Mitch and I recognized that this story of ours is uniquely traumatic and uniquely tragic. The loss of a child is a pain unlike any other. It is crippling and it is confusing. It turns the world upside down and calls into question everything we thought we once knew, or were once so sure of. We’ve known from the beginning that we want to heal, we want to find joy in life again, and we want to experience the hope that Christ offers, even here on Earth. It is our deepest desire to heal and we know it is what Kamri wants for us too. For that reason, we have been very intentional about setting ourselves up with the best possible context to do so. We take our physical, emotional, mental, relational, and spiritual health very seriously, as we know that attention to each of those is the only way we will be able to heal.

Physically… let’s just say, we both have our ways of engaging in this type of healing. We now own a punching bag, bought week one, in our basement. That was for Mitch, although there are a certain pair of hot pink gloves down there that definitely don’t belong to him. 🙂 Mitch has found that harnessing energy into a boxing workout has been helpful. I mostly just dance around in my Kamri-pink gloves. For me, it’s been house projects (shocker) and a new-found love of gardening. Our kitchen cabinets are now blue (again… shocker) and I’ve successfully dug up A LOT of our yard. I have found that the act of tending to things, caring for things is feeding my soul. Together, we’ve taken up biking. To say we are “bikers” is a gross exaggeration, but what we lack in biking skills and stamina, we make up in unbridled enthusiasm. I have bought us more than one biking accessory off Amazon, which, quite frankly, is just adding fuel to the fire.

Emotionally and mentally… we do this both together and separately. Together, we see a grief counselor every single week. She is remarkable and we have come to recognize that our engagement and dedication to that process is paramount in our healing. We are slowly walking through both our day-to-day experiences, as well as the timeline of Kamri’s life with her. I have continued to see my (long-time) counselor. Counseling in general is such a life-giving and beneficial environment, trauma/tragedy or not. I have more thoughts on this, but we’ll save that for another day. We are committed to caring for our mental health and have been intentional about how we do so from day one.

Relationally… our world is still very small, our circle of interaction is still very tight. And that’s okay. It will slowly grow, it will slowly expand. For now, we have family and close friends that check in on us daily. We get out and meet some of them for dinner, we play board games, we talk about Kamri, we cry to and with them, we engage in retail therapy,  we coerce them into helping us dig up garden beds, and on and on. We continue to practice doing life and sometimes it feels great and sometimes we look around and think, “dang, this would be so much better if Kamri were here”.

Spiritually… this one is hard sometimes. During Kamri’s life, we fought such a spiritual battle every single day that it left us weary. I think that’s normal. It is normal for certain seasons of life to leave you hunched over, with your hands on your knees, panting. That is kind of what it feels like. One thing we are learning is that God doesn’t need our spiritual strength. He FIGHTS for us. We always knew that he was fighting for Kamri, but this season has taught us that He fights for us too. We are learning that God loves us when we feel spiritually strong AND when we feel spiritually spent. So we lean on the work of the Holy Spirit to intercede for us, we rely on the prayer warriors that have never stopped praying for us when we don’t have the words ourselves.

Our life right now is messy and disjointed, but also moving forward and seeking the hope that Christ offers us. We talk a lot about that hope, both in our lives and on this blog. We know that we will see Kamri again. Because Jesus died to pay the price for all that is wrong in this world, we have the opportunity of eternal life with Him. And with Kamri. That is so exciting… it makes my heart soar to think that I get to spend forever with her. That we get to love our sweet girl in person for the rest of eternity. I cannot wait for that day. It will be the most beautiful day to meet my Savior and be with my little girl.

This is where it gets a little tricky and this is where the care and concern comes to play. My heart is torn because part of my heart is now in heaven with Kamri and I will not be complete until I am with Jesus and her there. Because we believe that in the context of eternity, our life (even if we live to be 100 years old) is but a whisper, a short breath in the grand scheme, the day that we will see Kamri again is, in fact, soon. Praise Jesus. If I live to be 100 and then God calls me home to be with Him and my baby, it will the best day of my life. If Jesus wants to come back and bring us all into eternity sooner than that, then BY ALL MEANS… you’d better believe Mitch and I will beat you in a foot race to get to Him first. 🙂

As much as we cannot wait to be with Kamri and our Savior forever, we also recognize that God has a very specific purpose for us here on Earth. He has so many good things in store and we are dedicated to being open to experiencing happiness and joy here again. Although I will never be complete here (none of us will), I will  be whole again. We know that eventually, our life here will be redeemed and there will be good. There is already good. Even though things are dark, and sad, and scary, and infuriating sometimes, there are also bright moments. There is laughter, and dreaming, and hoping. Just as we reflect on the strings of Anger, and Trust, and Hurt, we will reflect on the strings of Joy, and Peace… and whatever else comes our way.

The plan has always been to share vulnerably in this space because we have heard God so clearly telling us that He is using our journey, our experience with grief to heal other people. It has been amazing to watch Him work in that way. Time after time, we hear and receive comments along the lines of “that blog post about anger was word for word what I have been carrying around for years and didn’t know it” or “I found such solace in the fact that you are trusting God in the midst of your story that I was able to turn a portion of my own life over to him”. We live in a world that doesn’t have much capacity for realness and because of that, it can be so isolating to experience the hard emotions and feelings that every single one of us face at different points in our lives. Realness breaks down those barriers and allows us to walk alongside each other through these things. There is a seed that has been planted in my heart to continue to be open to the ways that God is working through that.

Thank you for your hearts for us, for our family, for our daughter. It is a gift to walk this journey with you, and a gift that you would care enough to walk it with us.