Well

It feels foreign, and yet familiar. Putting my fingers on the keys and typing letters, forming words, creating sentences in the hope of capturing the thoughts that are swirling around in my mind, that take up residency in the essence of who I am. It has been a long time since I put the grief and our journey through it into words here and my heart is both beating quickly because of the emotional investment I know this will take, but also very much at peace because this has always been one of the fullest ways I process and communicate our experience. It’s nerve wracking and comfortable all at the same time.

It is almost 9:30 in the morning. Holden is still sleeping (one of his honed skills that we are most excited about), but I’m sure that it’s not long before he slowly wakes up for the day and begins chatting to himself in his crib until I go in and get him. Holden will be one soon… February 7th. Um, what?! Kamri turned two last month… December 28th. Time is an amazing thing. Sometimes confusing, sometimes needed, but always on the move.

I’m trying to think of the right word to describe this season of life for us… I struggle with this a lot and my heart starts racing whenever someone asks the normal question that humans ask each other: “How are you?” I can never come up with an answer that feels fitting, that feels inclusive enough to tell the full story. My fear is that if I say “good”, it will diminish all of the hard feelings we’ve encountered to get to “good”. And if I say “bad”, it will diminish all of the wonderful moments we’ve encountered in addition to “bad”. I guess that’s how we’ve always been as humans… holding both good and bad experiences, but for some reason, I never cared so much about honoring both sides as I do now that the range between our personal “goods” and “bads” feels like the highest mountaintops to the deepest depths of seas. For some reason, I fear that answering with one will give permission to the asker to negate the other in his or her mind. And maybe that is actually my greatest fear. That my “goods” will be unseen and my “bads” will be forgotten. It makes me anxious just to write it.

But back to the task: I’m trying to think of the right word to describe this season of life for us…

Maybe the best word is “well”. I say that because the word seems to be one of the few that can hold both the bright and the dark, the good and the bad. We are doing well. We are feeling well. We are well. There is a poignant old hymn called “It Is Well With My Soul”, written by Horatio Spafford. He wrote it in commemoration of his four children, who died when the ship, “Ville de Havre”, sank on its way from France to America. His writing holds both the reality of deep, deep sorrow and the truth of the only thing that has a hope of piercing that type of darkness… the light of Christ. We are well. We are both, and.

I’ve mentioned before that we have taken our grief journey, mental health, and process of healing very seriously. We have spent a lot of time, money, and emotional intention on healing so that we can continue to live purposefully here on earth until we are called home. Make no mistake, we long for that day (for everyone) because it will be BRILLIANT to finally be with Jesus and eternity will be the perfection of even the best things in this world. BUT, we’ve also come to terms with the fact that there is purpose and reason for us to live and be present here until that day.

We love our life. I don’t say that lightly… we worked really hard to get to this place. We worked really hard, but more than that, God was unwaveringly faithful in walking with us (whether we felt it at every turn or not).

I also don’t say that to indicate that we are in good spirits or even “okay” all the time. We are most certainly not. I don’t ever anticipate us being “okay” with Kamri not being here. There are deeply sad moments and seasons that my hate for what happened is bigger and stronger than all the peace and healing and progress. I still miss her so much that my body physically aches and my soul seizes up in agony when I slow down enough to process it. We have spent time sitting in the darkest facets of this grief, letting it wash over us in whatever way it is going to. The valley of the shadow of death is an actual place and it is lonely and confusing and so very sad. It can also be a very tempting place to stay.

I remember my aunt saying something about this soon after Kamri died. She gave the message at her funeral and during the week of planning beforehand, I remember her telling me that the most important word in Psalm 23 is “through“.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Through. We were never intended to stay, to take up residency, to remain. We were intended to pass through. To enter only to exit. At the time, when she told me this, I couldn’t even hear it. Days before, I had held my daughter as she died and it was all I could do just to pull in enough air for another breath, let alone put one foot in front of the other and continue to walk. Let alone “pass through”. Thankfully, her words were not a charge or an expectation or a sickening positive sentiment… just a quiet assurance to cling to and tuck in the back of my head for the day that I was ready to understand them.

Over the last two years, we have experienced what the process of “passing through” feels like. To pass through, you have to enter and spend time in… that’s part of the nature of the word. As I said, we’ve spent time in the dark corners of this grief. You’ve seen some of the reflections of that time here, in the posts. Others, we’ve done privately, and many of them, we’ve done in the counseling environment. The experience of leaning into the darkest places is excruciating, but without that part of the process, I wouldn’t even be writing this post. You see, allowing ourselves to enter into the depth of pain has freed us to experience a height of joy that we never expected and for that reason, we are “well”… a merging of two of the most complicated, seemingly opposite, but amazingly parallel experiences of this life. We are both pain and joy. We are well.

This looks like a lot of things in our everyday life and our normal routines…

Every morning we say good morning to both Holden and Kamri. Holden has learned how to take her pink angel ornament off of the shelf in our room and give her kisses. We celebrated (and got a little teary) when Holden got his first two teeth… he is getting to be so big! One of our favorite places to play is in Kamri’s room… it’s on the front of the house and the sunlight just streams in at all hours of the day. Mitch is gearing up for another summer of sports camps. I am finding my rhythm in a new routine and joined my first Bible Study back in September. “Country Roads” is still our favorite song and we listened to it as we drove Holden home from the hospital. We cheered on the Eagles in the Superbowl last year (still not ready to talk about this year). Holden was baptized in May… the last time we stood in the front of that church in honor of one of our children, it was to choke through our reflections at Kamri’s funeral. We dressed up as Toy Story for Halloween this year: Woody (Mitch), Jessie (Leslie), Bullseye (Holden), and Bo Peep (Kam). We are knee-deep in a full out, no mercy Marie Kondo-ing of our basement. We managed to get most of our Christmas cards out on time this year. Our kids got Christmas stockings on Christmas morning and we navigated how it felt to watch Holden to open both. Two years later, we sat as a family on the couch at 7:00pm on January 20th and cried and celebrated our way through the last 25 minutes of Kamri’s life on earth. Holden turns one in two weeks and we’re waiting with baited breath to see if he’ll take his first steps before then.

You see? It’s the brightest, the darkest, and all of the in between. We are well.

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,

The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;

The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,

‘Even so’-it is well with my soul.”

-Horacio G. Spafford

We are also, as always, willing to share more in detail about the practical things we do and experience as a family in our particular situation, if that would be a helpful insight or resource to those who have followed our story. Things often cross my mind in this way… perhaps posts on “how we parent our kids when one is here and one is not”, “what it looks like for us to include Kamri in our day to day life”, “how it feels to be a parent of two, but experiencing a lot of parenting firsts with our second”, “what our counseling experience has been like”, “how it felt to go back to CHOP for the first time”, “what not to say to someone who is grieving”, “and what could be a more helpful alternative”, “what do we do when we’re feeling sad”, “what are our plans for Kamri’s room”, and “what does it look like to help Holden get to know his sister”… the list could go on and on. Maybe I’ll slowly write them.

But Holden is awake now (it’s almost 10:30, which feels like a record, even for him) and his chatting has taken a turn toward what I’ll describe as “less than patient”, so I’ve got to run. After all, I’ve got a world to be well in. 🙂

PS. If you’re looking for our other posts on the grief process you can find them here: How Are We Doing?, Anger, Trust, Hurt, Realness, Six/Seven/Eight, Pregnant with Holden, Coping with Christmas, “Kam-uary”, Fear, Disbelief