His Birthday Weekend

His birthday weekend has passed. I think what I can say about this hard milestone weekends, his birthday, baby girl’s birthday without him, is that I moved forward. I didn’t just get through them. I moved forward. I got just a bit stronger and healed just a bit more.

The fact that I’m still so far from being healed or finished mourning, is due to the fact that losing him was such a big loss, not that I’m staying in the same place.

If I had to sum up the learning themes of this weekend they would be:

Life will not always be this hard. The good part of life is not over. Spoken to me directly by a very wise woman and as demonstrated by an afternoon with a friend that was full of dreams for the future and glimpses of hope for this world, not only the next.
Rest is necessary. It took three days of rest to get to a place where I could imagine a light at the end of a tunnel. The first day I planned to spend all my time at the cemetery reading, writing, resting, praying, thinking, and crying. The heat drove me away but even before then I realized that was not how he or He wanted me to spend my weekend. Friday I was really too tired to move. Saturday was full of willful celebrating and then a night of the most precious gifts of people telling me their memories of Shah and reminding me how much he loved us. Sunday was laid back fun spent with a friend cooking, doing nails, and squirting Zoya with a hose, filled with conversations about the bad in the world and the good that we could have.
Shah loved me and that changed my life.

It’s so hard to reconcile one and three in my mind. How do you lose something so valuable and have hope for more good days in the future?

It has to be taken on faith at this point, because I don’t actually see the light at the end of this dark, hard tunnel. I only barely understand that there can be a light at the end of this tunnel. And only by faith can I believe that there IS a light at the end of this tunnel.

But this is what I need to learn. Right now, I drive past retirement homes and I long for the day I am old enough to check myself in. I’m tired, overwhelmed, life is so hard. My husband was killed, and I have to run a house and an organization on my own. Cooking, cleaning, raising money, raising a daughter, leading an organization, book keeping, event planning, yard work.

Yes, I’m grateful for the help I’ve had, but even if I didn’t miss him so much I had to remind myself to breathe, these are very hard days.

So I’m clinging to hope that it will not always be this way, that I will heal and will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.