How did we get here? How did the landscape before me become a vast pit of smoking ash, broken shards, and confusion? I don’t recognize the path laid out before me; it is none I was ever going to be called to walk. Yet here I am. Here we are. We are strangers and aliens in a land that no longer is home, looking toward heaven – the only hope for our pain – and yet continuing to wake up, breathing, day after day with no end in sight. We miss our Wyatt. We are here and he is not. How can this be? I ask myself that question every single day.
All of us parents can think of a million things we would
rather walk through than to walk through this.
I was one of you – once. Now, I
am a mother who has lived the worst of every nightmare I have ever had in all
of life, multiplied and crammed into one horrific day that spills it’s awful
poison out onto the rest of our days. I
have buried my heart in the ground. It
is every bit as terrible as you would imagine.
Squeeze out of your heart every last drop of grief and terror you can
imagine at the thought of losing your child, roll it and savor it as you would
the last drop of water in a never-ending desert and then multiply that by
itself. That is the length and breadth
of sorrow upon sorrow we feel every day…missing our Wyatt. I often say that there are no words to explain
this ache, and there are not. Nor should
there be. I don’t long for anyone to
feel this unspeakable loss. It is beyond
comprehension.
Every day we get up and breathe. Every day we walk forward, trudging through
the deepest swamp with only light for our next step. I go through the daily tasks. I take care of my family. I fold my boys laundry and long to touch
Wyatt’s clothing, and see it come through the wash… but it is put away in his
dresser and sits alone in his closet. I
long for him to show signs of life in our house, so that I can pour my mommy heart
into taking care of him. I have heard it
said that grief is just love that has nowhere to go. No way to reach out and
connect. Open arms, empty.
His one wheel sits at the door like it always has. It gets cobwebs underneath it that I
consistently clear, but the one wheel never moves from its place. It is abandoned, along with his shoes beside
it. His helmet sits on a bench above,
untouched. All I have now are remnants
of my child, but never my child. Not on
this earth. The emptiness is greater than
any loss I could ever imagine. Like the
deepest darkest pit that stretches on into forever, there is nothing that
really fills it.
I take four plates out of the cabinet at mealtimes…not
five. I buy a little less food. I never realized how much he ate until the
day came that there were so many leftovers from dinners that I had to realign
my expectations of food consumption. And
appetites. Maybe we are eating less too. I could never keep enough ketchup in the
house. He put it on everything and ate
copious amounts of it with burgers, any meat we had for dinner and mid-day
leftovers. But now, every time I open
the fridge, the Costco size ketchup sits as a constant reminder that it is
still there. And Wyatt is not.
The middle seat in the car is a foe that stares me in the
face. I can’t seem to escape it. Five is such a full number…four is…not. Our very home radiates the ache of emptiness,
not because the four in this home are not enough for each other, but because the
one who is not here would complete us.
We are a family of five and always will be. The one that is missing is forever in our
every heartbeat, but not by our side in this life. The one who was goofy, made us laugh,
antagonized us all and was truly the fuel to our flame. The very dynamic of our home has changed
without him here. We all stumble along,
dazed and living on autopilot, still shocked months later that this is
reality. We can’t quite grasp onto this
existence.
People have asked me how we are doing. We are hanging in there. We truly are.
We are fighting to go on. We
choose to keep breathing and moving forward, but our hearts have not quite left
the spot where we saw him last. We have post-traumatic
stress disorder and flashbacks of a day more terrible than visions of what I
would imagine hell itself. The day we fought
our hardest to keep him here, while heaven welcomed him. My mommy heart knows what my eyes saw…he was
with the Lord from the moment it happened.
But the problem is, we weren’t.
While the Lord carried him in peace, we breathed and lived through his
last day, his last minutes, his last seconds and we have trauma and grief all
tangled into an ugly wave that crashes into us at moments we expect it least as
well as moments we know are coming like a hurricane gale we can’t control.
So many things are different in our lives now. Most television and movies have too many visuals
that instantly trigger a horrible memory.
Sleep is an enemy to conquer every night. Living daily requires more energy than a
years’ worth of trouble used to take, and the Lord is asking that our faith be
stronger than it ever has been before.
This is what the valley of the shadow of death looks like.
I choose not to sugar coat my words, because that would not
be truth. Being a believer in Jesus
Christ and having the FULL ASSURANCE of heaven for eternity does not take away
the sting of loss on this earth. Last
week I was reading in 1 Corinthians 15:36, where it states that the last enemy
to be destroyed is death. Yes, to be
apart from the body is to be present with Christ. YES! I
agree and amen! But that does not excuse
our weary souls from walking through the pain and destruction that death causes
ON THIS EARTH. So that is where we are –
sojourners clinging to the truth that has not changed in Jesus Christ yet
hurting so deeply. This requires
faith. We believe that we know a God who
is good while trusting Him when things on this earth are the opposite of good. We know that He has the final say – that He
has the ultimate victory. We are standing
upon the truth that death will be conquered forever and is in fact an enemy
that was never supposed to be on this earth; we contend with it because we are
a fallen human race living in a fallen world.
Do I believe that God took my child from me on this earth? No. I
believe the enemy did that – he caused Wyatt to be taken from our arms. But I know with every breath unto my last
that it was Jesus who picked him up and carried him to safety, and Him alone
who can make good out of all the enemy planned as evil.
There are no cherry-picked answers here – deep is calling
unto deep in this broken heart of mine, as I long for my Wyatt, cry open
mouthed, breathless, and ugly, weeping for my boy. There are no easy answers when you walk a
broken road, clinging to faith when there are so many shadows and blinding pain
that fills every step. There were no cherry-picked
answers for Martha and Mary when they grieved their dear brother, Lazarus who was
in the tomb. Do we ever stop to wonder
why Jesus cried with them, even though he knew the end of the story? He, above all others, knew Lazarus would be
raised to live on this earth again, yet Jesus also knew a deeper hope than any
we have on this earth. He knew all about
heaven. Why did he cry? I think I may have a greater understanding now. Because the last enemy is death. Death is sad, death is ugly, and our souls
were not really made for death. There
was no death in the garden that God created long ago.
The death that came to a garden at the beginning of time was
contended with in another garden. Jesus
knew the end of the story when he prayed through the night in the garden of
Gethsemane. His blood that poured out
through sweat wet the robes of the Son of God.
Jesus knew the end of the story when he prayed that night. He chose to suffer for us. He chose to walk this earth, a man acquainted
with sorrow, so that he could minister to us in our sorrow. He walked every painful step ahead of us, so
that in our deepest, darkest, and most lonely valley, we would never truly be
alone or without hope. Whether we walk
it because our own sin put us there or whether we walk it due to the sin that
lives in this world, our own deepest valley in the shadow of death need not be
the end of us. And the physical shadow of death was not the
end of my Wyatt. I know fully where he
is…and I know who my God is. The God I
don’t understand – the God I prayed to who seems to have not answered my
prayers. The God who is allowing my family to ache and suffer through this
pain. That God. That is the One who still loves us, who still
sees us and who holds my Wyatt even now.
I don’t understand. I
don’t think I ever will. I have been more
than heartbroken and confused. This
accident should not have happened. We
are careful parents. Our kids wear
helmets, have speed limits, bedtime curfew, boundaries, and rules. Wyatt was so careful with guns and obeyed gun
safety in every way he was taught. He
did nothing wrong. The gun discharged
without the trigger being pulled. If Wyatt
would have been one half inch to the right, it would not have been tragic. It was a freak accident. There are layers to that statement. It feels targeted. It feels so unfair. It feels so lonely and beyond belief. Where is my hope when the night hours stretch
on and panic is so deep in my chest that it overcomes my human ability to
contain it? Where is my hope when I
kneel at my sons grave, broken…so very…broken? Where do I look when my heart can’t seem to
stand up yet, so it sits right there with Wyatt- on the mountain, on the ground
where I last held him in my arms…
I look to Jesus. I
don’t have answers, but I know my God.
The enemy will take his shots – and he did. He aimed so incredibly well and laid bare our
hearts. We are bent down in the dirt;
all else that could be sifted and shaken has fallen away. The only thing left is our hope in Jesus, our
only anchor in the storm. There is no
more mirage of what life can offer – no amount of fun, money, vacations,
fulfilled wish lists, laughter or social engagements will ever take away the
ache and emptiness in our hearts. The
fluff in our lives has been burned on the altar of pain, and all that is left
is all that will remain for eternity.
Life has become vividly clear and yet shadows of gray all at the same
time. There is nothing – NOTHING- here on this earth that will ever bring my
Wyatt back.
But if you ask me to, I will tell you all day long about the
reason why we yet have hope.
HEAVEN. Only because of
JESUS. He reaches out to ALL HUMANITY
-every color, race, and culture- and pulls us up from the depths. He paid the price for all our sin and made a
way for us to be forgiven before the God of heaven and earth. He lovingly clothes us in robes of
righteousness not our own. He bridged
the chasm for Wyatt to be carried in the Saviors arms, straight to wholeness
and safety. And if asked, He will do the
same for you – for me.
Our lives are a vapor, and we never know when it will waft up and be done. Wyatt’s last day was not any different than the day previous…we just didn’t know what was ahead of us. I have heard that we never really do before tragedy hits. I can attest to it. I pray that all my days, I will cling to Christ and not give an inch to the enemy. I pray that my boys and my husband will follow Jesus fiercely and that the plan set against us for evil would blow back tenfold into the enemies’ face and that we would be a tool used for God’s good. I pray that we would be quietly strong in the Lord and that though evil come against us, that we would stand. Not in our own strength, for that has already passed us by, but in the sturdy truth founded on God’s Word alone. I pray that we would not believe everything we see, when we live in a wasteland of suffering and there seems to be no hope in sight…but that, like saints of old, we would live for a promise and a land not yet given to us. A land where my precious Wyatt is living now.
