I’ve learned about the grief process on several different occasions, and I know denial is part of it. But I guess I’ve never paid close enough attention to the different forms denial takes. I’ve always thought denial would look like, “This can’t be happening. My loved one isn’t really gone. I refuse to accept it.” But I think Suzanne and I have been experiencing denial in the form of, “This doesn’t seem real, but I know it is. I accept it, but it seems too vague and distant to wrap my mind around.”
Just yesterday as I was getting in bed, I looked at some pictures of our time with Abram. It hit me... we really had a baby just over a week ago, and he really died. My son died. It’s still weird to write. I think I’ve been a little in denial about being in denial. It seems so illogical that I could think that it didn’t seem real, but honestly I don’t think it seemed real until a few days ago.
Well, I need to qualify that. I think it seemed real immediately after Abram passed, but after two days everything became blurry... like waking from a dream where the dream felt so real, but it couldn’t have been, could it?
This is a bit of a shift in the analogy, but in my mind, I equate pain to audio frequencies. Some pain is high-pitched, intensely sharp and quick and shattering. Other pain is low-pitched, dull and rumbling and shaking. I think I felt the pain immediately following Abram’s birth and death as high-pitched. Then I think it shifted to a low-pitched pain, with the volume just barely perceptible. But it’s been building. The volume has been rising and it’s unmistakably real. There’s a hollow feeling in my stomach. My heart is broken and there’s no denying it now...
...as my thoughts have formed around this whole idea in the minutes since I began writing, I think the appropriate and healthy response is to take that low, slow sound of sorrow and embrace it. Allow God to work through it. To quote Romans 5:3-5, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Amen.