Maybe it is cliche, but:
Have you ever stopped and thought about broken glass on a floor?
Of course, immediately after we think of cleaning every part of the floor, ensuring broken pieces are in a dust pan, and that no one walks in as you clean up.
Maybe after you feel the loss of a sentimental piece. Maybe you question: Did I get all the glass? Perhaps you looked at the broken piece, and shrugged your shoulders about it.
Most people familiar with grief know it will never go away. The stages, anger and sadness will take years. Just as you know there is still glass somewhere on the floor, grief breaks everything.
I wanted to disappear into a cabin after Corrie earned her wings. I wanted to sink in the sand. I wanted to find a place where I could disappear into and be forgotten.
But that was not my role. That was not what I was meant to do.
As Gandalf said to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings:
“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
As a former student reminded me in his email in the spring, my time as a teacher was not done. I was—and am—still a mother to a boy on the verge of adolescence.
As I thought about my son, I thought about the road ahead, and knew it would not be easy. The broken glass was still on the floor. How in the world are John and I going to successfully guide my son, who is grieving in a different way, through his teen years when I know he will carry the weight of his sister’s death?
Hayes heard a Pink song, and repeated the line or something similar.
“A broken happily ever after,” he said. “That is what I have.”
In his dream, he told me that he came in the house. Everything was scattered this time by a hurricane, Corrie’s portrait was on the floor broken, and John was gone.
I observed his therapy, and without going into too much of his personal therapy, his therapist showed me how he reveals his feelings of anger through play. He expressed a brokenness. He, like his father, had struggled with stating his exact feelings about his sister to others.
“He often speaks in metaphors,” she said.
“Like me,” I said.
Hayes is also stronger and kinder than I’ve given him credit for. When other kids have teased him in the same way they had teased me as a kid, he usually lets it slide. I would cry, carry it, or write the cruel children into villains.
As a boy who is caught between childhood with a developmental delay and sometimes adolescent feelings, Hayes plays outside as a knight in battle with a sword and shield. He often says, “I’m at war.”
I understand.
Something precious is lost to us, and we cannot get it back. We cannot reason away as to why.
What can we save?
Somehow, together, the three of us will save him.
We have a son who looked at Baby Edith’s grave, and said, “Mommy, give me the roses. She would want her parents to have rose petals around their graves, too.”
I looked up and thought Wow because sometimes he is, understandably, in a hurry to leave the cemetery. It is not a place where a boy wants to be.
“Do you think her parents can see us from heaven?”
I don’t know because honestly I have some issues with God right now.
“I am sure, son.”
Then he went Thomas Houser and Baby Ann’s graves; the ones on the edge of the small road. He returned and said:
“There was grass on their graves, Mom, and I cleaned them off before you got there, so you would not see it.”
The children’s graves I care for are not all close together, and I looked up. He had memorized my path from the back entrance of the cemetery where I start at Lula’s grave across from “Babyland“ to Corrie’s grave.
He told me some kids had been calling him creepy, and I said, “Son, they don’t know you, and they don’t understand someone different than them.”
This week a woman I’ve known for a while said, “You don’t seem like you were ever from this area.”
I said, “I never really felt like I was from here or any place, and I never felt like I belonged in any place. I am okay with that.”
To me, my son has been stronger than people ever realized. He is smarter than people ever realized. Corrie could always bring people around, and she had a natural way with people. Neither he nor I have that skill.
But we survive after the glass shatters.
I stopped in the cemetery and realized …
I wasn’t saving Hayes.
He was saving me.
Corrie's Season 