Another grey day

It's another grey day in Denver today. Outside my door and inside my heart.

However, if I am honest, it's not just the cloud cover causing a gloominess. I've been feeling it everyday since the help left (both lovely parents and my sister! came to bring comfort, and helping hands).

The greying of my day happens at about the same times. Morning and night.

Dropping off my oldest two kids at school triggers the grief to well up in my chest and tears stream slowly down my cheeks as I drive away. It's just so quiet. And, the quiet is what kills me. Instead of my usual busyness...

My thoughts wander and...

I feel listless and lost. 

I start thinking.

I start feeling the loss. Then, the sadness and guilt and pain swirl all together in a mess of grief. 

It also happens at night. My mind flashes back to remember scenes that I both want to move on from and never forget. It's the quiet, the stillness that brings me to remember...

The spots on the cold tile where I fainted from blood loss after the baby was born.

Gazing at him after I rescued him from the commode where he first encountered life outside my womb.

The cold, dark ground dug out for his earthly home. It feels so wrong for him to be in the cold ground instead of my warm arms.

And questions plague my mind.

How can a mother bury a child? 

What if I breathed in an essential oil that sent me into preterm labor?

What if he couldn't get enough oxygen because I was too high in the sky on my way to and from Europe?

How can so much grief come from knowing so short a life? 

What if I had taken prenatal pills?

And, then, it all falls to pieces as I remember that every single, tiny, invisible hair on his nickel sized head was numbered. 

None of the loss, or the trauma happened outside the providence of good God who loves me. His love is not a saccharin coated pill where life becomes all butterflies in green, blooming fields. It's a love wrought in pain, and manifesting beauty. Beauty that a way has been made for man to know God. And the knowing Him in His sufferings results in conforming to His image for His glory and man's good. 

And, my little man is already experiencing the glories of God in a way I haven't. He has no tears, no pain, and no imperfections. He is not in the ground. He's in the best arms there are--the Everlasting ones.