Six, Seven, Eight

It’s been some time… four months, to be exact, since we last checked in here. I could tell you that a lot has happened these last four months. I could also tell you that not much has happened at all. Both would be true. That’s the thing about grief- each day, week, month feels both monumental and meaningless all at the same time.

Over the summer, we journeyed through months six, seven, and eight. It could be months six, seven, and eight of Kamri’s life or the sixth, seventh, and eight month after her death. As these two thing are only about a month apart, you can take your pick. We experienced both. In general, the marker for her death has faded from our calendars; we mostly focus on the anniversary of her birth. The 28th of every month brings us both joy, that we are the parents of beautiful little Kamri, and heartbreak, that this is yet another month that we celebrate her without her being here for it.

In general, summer has had both its okay moments and its excruciatingly low ones. One of the hardest parts about grief is that even in the throws of it, life continues on. Things need to get done. People need answers. Our fridge needs groceries, the lawn has to be mowed, and bills need to be paid. We cannot just focus on the grief and forget about life. We also cannot focus on life and forget about the grief. Both need attention, both need our time and energy, and the constant pendulum between the two of them can be exhausting. Because the world continues to turn, we need to be able to function as humans in our society and for the most part, we have been capable of doing so. For the most part, you can look at us on any given day and think, “nothing out of the ordinary has happened to them”, if you didn’t know better. I’ll let you in on a secret… grieving people eventually get really good at faking it.

We have to, to some extent. We have to be able to compartmentalize the intense pain in our hearts and put it in a container to be accessed in particular ways, at particular times. That’s just part of learning how to live again. Faking it is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, sometimes it’s necessary… for daily functioning and for our own peace of mind. So yes, looking at us almost ten months out from Kamri’s birth and nine months from her death, you’d probably think we are managing okay. In some ways, this is true. We are re-learning how to maintain our home, jobs, and daily/weekly duties. In other ways, we are still just as fragile and broken as we were in the first few months.

Months six, seven, and eight put us through the paces, both in life and in grief. I remember Kamri’s six month birthday- June 28th. We’ve gotten in the habit of posting a new picture of her every 28th of the month (usually on Facebook and Instagram); one that we have in our collection, but that has not been shared publicly before. Along with her picture, we try and share a memory or story about Kamri. What a gift it has been to remember her in this way, to document some of the things that only Mitch and I and our family got to see and know about her during her life. I think, come her one year birthday, I will put all of those pictures and stories we’ve written together in a post on the blog, so we have them to look back on.

But Kamri’s six month- June 28th- hit us pretty hard. There is not a whole lot I remember about the day. We posted a video of her… the first day we had seen Kamri with her hat off, the first time we’d seen her with all her hair. We watched it over and over again, drinking in her beauty, soaking in the memory of standing there in person, looking at her sleeping so peacefully.

Throughout the evening, we both spent time in her room, together and separately.  Kamri’s room is not a foreign or off-limits space for us. We go in there frequently… sometimes to say hi, sometimes to look through her baby things, sometimes to read a book or snuggle one of her animals, sometimes to smile, and sometimes to cry. That night, we just mourned over our sweet girl. I remember walking in after tossing and turning in bed, Mitch having already fallen asleep. I just laid on the floor, on her fluffy white rug, wrapped myself in her blanket, and wept. I remember crying out to God, begging Him to give her back to me. My plea turned into “just take me, I just want to be with Kamri. I don’t know how I can keep doing this without her”. From the depths of my soul, I begged Him to just let me come home to be with her. Eventually, my tears turned to “just come back for all of us. please, Jesus. please come back.” I laid there and cried and pleaded until there were no more tears left and then I got back in bed, crawled as close to Mitch as I could get, and fell asleep. With grief, milestones are just a saturated, more intense version of the everyday pain.

Please remember and take heart as you read… grief can be very dark, absolutely. There is no way around it, no way around some of the emotions and thoughts that accompany the pain. However, it is possible to experience all of this within a safe and healthy context. We are both safe and healthy, we are being looked over by family and friends, and we are being cared for and guided by professionals in grief and trauma through all of this. The reason we choose to be open and honest about some of the harsher moments is because we know we are not the only ones who have or are experiencing this kind of pain. There are two sides to the story of this world and this life and it is important to understand and talk about both. On one side, we live in a very broken world where these experiences, emotions, and thoughts are a reality. On the other side, God is still very much at work in this broken world and there is not one step any of us take that He is not with us. We remain assured that God is good, God loves us, and God has a plan for both ours and Kamri’s life here on Earth.

The days go on and although the waves of grief crash in, they also recede. It’s not always the same level of pain. It’s not always Kamri’s six month birthday. The question we get asked the most (and probably one of the more hurtful ones) is “Is it getting any easier?” We understand the nature of this question and the place of care that it comes from. I will tell you this in response… it will never get any easier to not have Kamri here. No amount of months or years will ever result in that reality being easier. The best word we can find to replace “easier” might be “familiar”. As we continue on this road, the grief is becoming more familiar, like a family member that we’ve had to make room for in our home, in our routines, in our hearts. We are learning its tendencies, patterns, and symptoms. In the very beginning months, a close friend who experienced deep loss early in life described it as an extra limb that she had to get used to carrying around all the time. I think she’s right. We know that grief will be a part of our life and a part of our story in some capacity for as long as we live. So familiar, yes… easier, no.

In the realm of other summer happenings, there are a few updates. No, we have not been bike riding in awhile. It’s been too blooming hot and quite frankly, when your willpower has already been weakened by life, it doesn’t take much to choose Netflix in the air conditioning over dripping sweat on a less-than-comfortable bike seat. Wait, scratch that… we did take the bikes to the shore back in September and rode them on the boardwalk one morning. Go ahead and reinstate our pro biker status. 🙂 Speaking of blooming, the garden (probably our second most-asked question) produced many beautiful (PINK!) flowers over the course of the summer. It also produced many less-than-beautiful weeds. And no, I could not be bothered to go out and pull them up. One of the few perks of grief… sometimes you get to call the shots and choose not to feel guilty about them. Maybe when it finally starts to feel like fall without all of this leftover summer heat, we’ll get out there and save our garden. Maybe not.

In a previous post, I said that everything in our lives has taken a hit, nothing has been left unscathed. Grief is like that… it’s a wrecking ball that leaves nothing untouched. The phenomenon, we are learning, is that although our lives have been upturned so quickly, it will take us years to put all the pieces back together. Even then, some will never fit like they did before. Friendships, relationships, work, how we identify ourselves, our faith… it has all been scrambled up and we now have the task of learning how to navigate this new world we live in.

As of the end of December, I will no longer be employed at the church I have served with for the last five years. After a long summer of prayer, discussion, and thinking from all parties involved, we have come to the mutual decision that my time serving as Youth Director there will come to an end. Mitch and I have known for several months that I need to step away from my previous, full-time commitment. I am not in a season of life where I can give the same energy and time to full-time ministry work. The church has made the decision (and I agree), that the Youth Ministry needs at least the dedication of a full-time employee. While this job was offered to me, Mitch and I have decided that I am no longer the person for that role. I am incredibly sad to be leaving, as I love my job and the students I work with. It is the right season, however, to step away. I know that God has big plans for a wonderful future for the program and we have been blessed by the opportunity to serve there as long as we did. I will be working part-time through the end of December to help with the transition, and will be officially leaving at the end of the year.

The change in job status is just one example of the layers and layers of fall-out that we experience everyday. There are so many sides, so many angles, so many facets to this story of ours. We have learned to remember that not one single person will ever understand the full picture. Some only see us when we’re functioning at work, others encounter us in our roles as family members, some on good days when we’re smiling or joking around, and still others only through online presence. Even those closest to us cannot comprehend each of the layers that we encounter and have to interact with everyday. In fact, I don’t know the extent of all of Mitch’s experience as a dad who lost his baby girl and he doesn’t know the extent of my experience as a mom who lost hers. Knowing this has reminded us that we, also, will never know anyone else’s full story. We will never know all of the different layers of life that any person we come into contact with might be experiencing. There is a important lesson to glean there… never assume you know the full picture. For all of us, God is the only one with enough bandwidth, enough care, enough power, and enough love to understand the full story, for both the individual person and humanity as a whole. He was there even before the story started, sees the extent of where it is, and knows where its going. After all, the story is His. A tale of a people that He loves so much, experiencing a broken world, and His plan to bring us into an eternity where all is right again, all is as He designed it to be.

One day, that time will come. For now, we continue on into the next chapter of our lives here. Summer was hard, filled with many activities and circumstances we’d experienced last year as we waited excitedly for Kamri and this year as we fiercely missed her presence. There was quite a bit of unexpected pain. This season coming up, though? This is pain we are expecting. We know that the next couple of months may be the hardest we’ve had since she first died. As hard as it is to believe, soon it will be a full year since Kamri was born and our lives changed forever. One year. It feels like a tidal wave, brewing in the distance. We know it’s coming, but we don’t know exactly what it will be like when it gets here. We are scared, anxious about the depth of emotion and heartache we know is on the horizon. I guess it makes sense to ask… for all of you that have prayed for us all this time, thank you. Please continue to do so. From here, we’ll just continue to take this journey one step at a time.