Day 516- No Joy

I don’t know if this dream has meaning. There isn’t much to it, but when I woke from it, it felt like it did.

I was at a concert with a couple of friends. Sitting next to me was a blonde woman wearing a print dress. She was petite. She also had a full beard. Sometime during the concert she took my hand and just held it. She didn’t say anything and neither did I.

During a break in the music, she turned to me and said that she had noticed I have a very handsome face, but it looked like all of the joy had been drained out of it. She could tell just by looking at me that I was struggling in spite of the appearance I tried to show to the world. As we spoke, I tried not to stare at her beard. She was so kind to me. She said that I looked like I had lost someone very close to me and that my life had just stopped at that point. I told her that she was right on both counts. I had lost someone very close. Internally, I was thinking that I was trying to keep up appearances and wondering how she could tell, sitting next to me at a concert. She asked me for a hug. We hugged. And I woke up.

This morning when I came downstairs a friend had sent an article to me about how when we lose someone very close to us, especially when it happens suddenly, that the urge to want to be with them is natural. This is something that is known and accepted in other cultures. It’s not in ours. I could have written that article. I remember a year ago listening to a grieving mother in an interview. She had written a book. The thing that stood out to me was she said that after her son had passed, she felt the urge to be with him so strongly that she had the thought of stepping in front of a bus. Wow. So, it’s not just me, I thought. I had to buy that book.

It’s not so much that we wish to be dead. It’s not just that we want the pain to stop. It’s certainly not that other relationships are any less meaningful. It’s that God awful choice of having to choose your child versus everything else. Imagine if someone told you they were going to kill one of your children. Or, imagine if they told you they were going to kill your child or your spouse? Could you choose? When a child passes, every day we have to choose to be here which means every day we choose not to be with her. It’s excruciating. It’s exhausting. There is no joy in it. We just endure.