Missing Him Looks Different Over Time

It’s been a while. So long, in fact, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to even remember how to sign into my own blog.

It’s also been a while since June 5, 2013 - the day Noah was born.

A decade. I can’t even wrap my head around it. 

...I've been feeling a little disoriented lately. 

John and I are raising babies who are growing into big kids - with big feelings. (Miles is ten days away from turning 9 and Levi is 7.) 

I’ve become completely disillusioned with the Church - a place that has been home to me my entire life. 

I left my church ministry profession, where I had spent almost my entire career. 

I stepped into a new position at a children’s hospital* where I am wildly out of my comfort zone. 

I dream of starting my own side business, but don't have one single entrepreneurial bone in my body.

And approaching this ten-year milestone has left me spiraling - not knowing what to do with myself. 

Which led me right back here. To Rainbows for Noah. My old friend. 

One of the reasons I started writing about Noah, and my experience of losing him, in the first place is because I felt helpless - like there wasn’t anything else I could do. I needed somewhere to let everything out that was roaring inside me. I needed to do something, but I didn’t know what. So, I’d write. 

And it’s why I’m writing now. 

How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive? How do you write like you need it to survive?

Missing Noah looks different over time. 

I remember in the early days after losing Noah it quite literally felt like an entire section of my body had disappeared. The loss was physical, tangible, heavy. Yet, I felt completely disconnected to my body, like I was a shell of a being. Void and vacant.

Ten years later, the ache of missing has turned more into a fondness of remembering. It's subtle, but the feeling is less like a weight and more like water running through my fingers. Hard to grasp, but surprisingly refreshing at times, and dare I say, enjoyable. For example, on a day like today, having two little boys who love a birthday party helps make for a sweet little celebration.

Without the heavy void, I've been forced these last few years to redefine what missing Noah looks like. 

I don’t miss the crushing, near-unsurvivable pain of the early years, but sometimes I do miss the tangible, raw connection with Noah and others that this intense grief brought. 

I miss the crystal clarity of my priorities and the way I protected my time during those early years.

I miss the friends who were with me in it then but aren’t with me in it now. 

I miss the way I clung to my faith like I couldn’t survive without it. 

I miss knowing exactly just what I was missing.

What does loss look like from here? It’s complicated. 

During that early time after losing Noah, I read (and reread) Dr. Jerry Sittser’s A Grace Disguised and he shared this parable regarding his catastrophic losses: 

“The sorrow I feel has not disappeared, but it has been integrated into my life as a painful part of a healthy whole. Initially, my loss was so overwhelming to me that it was the dominant emotion—sometimes the only emotion—I had. I felt like I was staring at the stump of a huge tree that had just been cut down in my backyard. That stump, which sat all alone, kept reminding me of the beloved tree that I had lost. I could think of nothing but that tree. Every time I looked out the window, all I could see was that stump. Eventually, however, I decided to do something about it. I landscaped my backyard, reclaiming it once again as my own. I decided to keep the stump there, since it was both too big and too precious to remove. Instead of getting rid of it, I worked around it. I planted shrubs, trees, flowers, and grass. I laid out a brick pathway and built two benches. Then I watched everything grow. Now, three years later, the stump remains, still reminding me of the beloved tree I lost. But the stump is surrounded by a beautiful garden of blooming flowers and growing trees and lush grass. Likewise, the sorrow I feel remains, but I have tried to create a landscape around the loss so that what was once ugly is now an integral part of a larger, lovely whole.”

I vividly remember reading this mere weeks/months after losing Noah and yearning desperately to be in that landscape of a "larger, lovely whole" someday. I could see its possibility.

It gave me hope.

So here I am, ten years later, living within that hope. A garden has grown, and continues to grow, around our stump. And not a stark stump anymore, but a stump that is green with life - a sparkling centerpiece that, when it catches your eye, you have to pause and smile. 

Our garden is less void and more promise.

Vegetable plants in varies stages of growth and maturity. Wildflowers in greens and purples and yellows and reds and oranges. Footprints of other children. Maybe some overgrowth where we've been too lazy to keep it pruned. Stones marking milestones from along the way...as well as other smaller stumps representing this decade's losses and heartbreaks.

It’s a messy, wild-beauty of a garden. 

And taking a moment today, on what would have been his tenth birthday, to rest on his stump (let’s call it Noah’s Sitting Place) - I look around this garden in awe and wonder and pride and gratitude…

But oh how I wish I could’ve seen the tree grow. 

*The hospital I am currently working at just happens to be Seattle Children’s Hospital - the place Noah spent the majority of his earthly life. I knew I’d find myself there one day.