inner me (part 1)

it felt like someone was knocking on my chest…

for months I was waking up in the middle of the night gut-punched…shipwrecked.

lol. I’m using colorful words that may seem a bit dramatic now…but at the time it wasn’t…I was devastated.

night couldn’t come fast enough for sleep and the sunrise couldn’t come fast enough to escape the shadows in darkness.

The ghost of deferred dreams, the terror that surrounded me mid-night, most nights for some time.

I know now what David said in Psalm 42, when he said “my tears have been my meat day and night…”

I remember when my father died. I held it together by keeping busy. Busy being pregnant, working, and getting things done for the arriving family and helping with arrangements.

The night before the funeral, the funeral director called and said that someone needed to come view the body to make sure everything was perfect.

I went, my to-do list was dwindling and I felt that it would have been another task I was completing to get things in order.

I arrived to the funeral home and entered the empty, quiet room where my father laid.

I looked him over, up and down. His hair was in tact, makeup perfectly applied, suit “casket sharp”, literally. He looked as if he was sleeping, peaceful.

I patted the lapel on his suit and said, “Looking good dad, they did good.”

I thanked the funeral director and said goodbye. And as I walked out of the funeral home, I collapsed.

Grief knocked me back like a too big truck going through a tiny underpass. I was shipwrecked. The helplessness, that knot in my chest, the well of tears…the agony.

So, feeling this grief again, was familiar. A death of sorts.

A death to what was. Death to dreams deferred. A burial of something that once lived.

The healing of the inner me commenced.