The Empty Side of the Bed

Tag: family

  • Grief is Messy

    One thing I’ve learned through this journey is that grief is messy! No matter the circumstances surrounding your grief or how put together your life is. It’s going to be messy.

    Grief has it’s own timeline and rhythm that doesn’t go along with our neat little lives. If you’re anything like me, you had your life all planned out. At this point, you may have even recalculated and readjusted and have it all planned out again. But grief…..

    You see, it doesn’t work that way. You have a plan, a timeline, things to do but grief smacks you in the face. You think you’re doing just fine and BAM! I can’t even count the number of times this has happened to me. I’m going along just fine and then out of nowhere the strangest thing will knock me off the horse.

    I’m learning that there are no stages to grief. Okay, there may be “stages” that people can go through or experience but they don’t happen in any order or at any certain time. You may even experience the same stage over and over again. No matter what anyone ever tells you. Even if someone had the exact same scenario as you. It won’t be the same.

    What do we do about this? We choose to live in it. We trust that God is in control because He is. No matter how much we want that control. It’s not ours. He is good and he’s trustworthy. We trust the wild unknown that we are facing and we do the best we can everyday. We help each other along the way too. That’s all we can do.

  • The Moment that Completely Changed My Life

    Looking back, I don’t even know how we got to this moment. It all happened so fast. My husband had been sick for about four weeks and spent almost two of those weeks hospitalized. He had just come home on Friday and was feeling better. Then came Monday morning. I woke to him coughing around 4:30 a.m. I rushed to the bathroom to see what I could do and helped him back to bed. He was having difficulty breathing and wanted his inhaler. I retrieved it for him and realized right away that it wasn’t helping. We called the paramedics because something was seriously wrong.

    The fire department showed up first, but they didn’t have any equipment and couldn’t do much. We live in a small town and know these men, so it felt comforting. Next, the paramedics finally showed up, and it felt like hours before they got oxygen to him. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but you know how time feels in moments like that. He started to calm down and get some relief, so they needed him to get up and onto the gurney. In the process, he went unconscious. They rushed to get him into the ambulance while we looked on in fear. One of the firefighters finally came over to let me know that he had a pulse, but he wasn’t breathing on his own.

    My son and I followed the ambulance to the hospital, and about halfway there, I noticed they had started doing compressions. That image will forever be ingrained in my mind. At that point, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.

    We finally arrived at the hospital and immediately checked in. They wouldn’t give us any information. I paced the hall, praying repeatedly for God to do something—anything. I knew He was ultimately in control, and I needed Him to do something big in that moment. A nurse came out and let us know the doctor would speak with us in a few moments. That, to me, was another sign that things weren’t good.

    They finally took us into a private room and told us they had done everything they could, but they couldn’t save him. How could this be? A flood of thoughts ran through my mind. We were supposed to grow old together. How do I do life without him? He was only 43. Our son is only 14. How is he supposed to go through high school and life without his dad?

    That was the moment that completely changed my life…