Piercings

I've been wanting to post something to the blog.  Over the last several weeks I've started three different posts but nothing is coming together.  I'm wanting to share about my experience reading my story in the OKC Listen To Your Mother show and also about Dad's memorial service and what it meant to me.  I'm getting stuck and discouragement is setting in.  So I'm just going to post some things I've written lately in my journal.

~*~

Trying to make sense of the massive tornadoes (if that is even possible) and the immense destruction in my adopted home state of Oklahoma along with the reality of losing my parents over these last three months.  This is like nothing I've experienced before, though I'm coming to realize that sorrow and sadness live beside the normal living.  Intertwining much like a labyrinth.  Two paths sometimes very close and sometimes very far away.  If I were to blog I would write how grief pierces.

It pains...
It hurts...

Sometimes unexpectedly like realizing  Mom and Dad wouldn't be calling on Monday after the tornado to see if we were okay.  No more check-ins with Mom and Dad.

Sorrow pierces deeply...

As the number of days grows since they breathed their last, the grief is stronger and deeper.  Maybe this will change at some point.  I don't know.  I just know that today with all of this destruction in my adopted state with people loosing all their possessions and in some cases their beloveds...the grief pierces.

I feel out of control.  No that is not right.  With Mom and Dad gone and the fragility of life before my eyes, I feel unmoored like a ship at sea maybe even a little bit lost.  The thing is I don't have some of my grounding voices.  I feel vulnerable in a way I've never experienced before.

~ * ~ 

"My heart is big and sore"...  Brad spoke these words to me in the early days of my Dad's death...a Patty Griffin lyric.  It captures my experience.  With tears in my eyes and snot running out my nose, I wonder and feel like I can't do this.  Why did they have to go now?  Why both within three months of each other?  Don't we still need our parents?  Don't we still need to have someone coach us, guide us and let us know we will be okay and that it will be okay?

I miss them a lot today.  I'm going to cherish this missing and embrace it today.  Quite unexpectedly sweet memories came back to me the other night triggered by couples dancing at a benefit concert for the tornado recovery.  I remember their smiles.  Their connection.  Their faces.  How they placed their hands in each others while they danced.  They were so cute.  I remember Dad's feet, his cowboy boots...gracefully sliding across the floor leading and guiding.  Mom's feet following, lightly sliding across the floor with beauty.  Her beautiful frilly orange square dance dress.

My first day back at work two days after Dad's service, I heard his voice of encouragement in my heart...the importance of getting back to a regular routine.  I remembered him and felt like he was with me that first day back to work.

From my Dad's co-workers
(click to see details)

Last Monday when driving home from work after the tornado, I again felt his words of encouragement.  On an unfamiliar road I could hear his voice to keep going.  I knew where I'd traveled from my starting point and although I was on an obscure tiny road, I still knew where I needed to end up.  I knew how to keep track while driving.  When I was a little girl while taking trips I'd ask Dad if we were traveling east, west, south, north, etc.  He prepared me.  He gave me tools.  I knew how to get home from an unfamiliar place.

So today this is my encouragement.  This is an unfamiliar place and scary at times, but I have tools.  I have preparation.

Also, I don't have to do this alone.  I have community around me.  We all do and it is okay to lean on that in these times.  So today in my sorrow and sadness I will remember I can get through this.  Strength sometimes looks like weakness and fear, and sometimes strength comes out of weakness and fear.

And that is OK.  Blessings to my sweet state of Oklahoma.