When you’ve experienced the death of your father, grandfather, cousin, mentor, and multiple friends within a five year span, strength feels like a metaphorical concept that doesn’t really exist. When people point out how strong they think I am, or how strong I must have been at any given time, my first instinct is to refute their claim. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) has become an overused platitude that I hear all the time and I’ve come to resent.
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I saw a comment on my “Grief is Not a Season” on Too Damn Young from an 11-year-old girl named Cliona who had recently lost her dog, Peppy. Cliona said that I might be thinking “it’s just a stupid dog and she’ll get over it.” I wasn’t thinking that at all.
Read more at Too Damn Young: The intentions are good! Saying that we’re “going through a season” is supposed to be a reminder that there is a time for
everything in life, good and bad, and everything we go through is a part of God’s plan. That’s fine. The best of intentions, however, don’t always have great implications. Let’s think about our perception of seasons. If you live in an area where there is seasonal climate change, you understand that seasons are fleeting, lasting no more than a few months. They come, you experience them briefly, and they leave. You move on. Saying we’re “just going through a season” implies that whatever we’re experiencing will be over soon. That in a few months or less, we’ll have moved on, the past will be the past, and everything will be fine. Read more at Too Damn Young: For my birthday this year, my grandmother sent me a small index card with very familiar handwriting scrawled across the front and the back.
It was a letter (or more likely, the draft of a letter) that her late husband, my Paw Paw, had never sent to me. It was really an incredible gift that she was able to find it. Read more at Too Damn Young: I began at a local community college, and just as I started my second semester of my second year, my dad’s battle with cancer went downhill. I dropped out of school, we put him on hospice, and he passed away shortly thereafter.
Along came Carrie. Read more at Too Damn Young: It’s a strange feeling, losing someone who wasn’t really a part of your life, but who was still a definite part of your life. It’s a loss that doesn’t feel like it should be a loss; it is, but it isn’t.
I wasn’t able to go to Aaron’s visitation or funeral, but I wish I could have. I think that would have made it feel more real. Right now it doesn’t feel like anyone I grew up with could possibly be dead. We all have so much more life left to live. Read more at Too Damn Young: ...summer is wedding season. This means that right now I’m not only in the process of planning weddings, but I’m in the process of going to weddings. There are wedding photos all over Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Seeing weddings play out, whether in real life or online, has become a very bittersweet experience for me.
Read more at Too Damn Young: The month of June is not a great friend of mine.
My dad passed away in February 2012, and the way the dates lined up that following June was a bit cruel for my family. In 2012, Father’s Day landed on Sunday, June 17th. Dad’s birthday was Monday, June 18th. My parents’ wedding anniversary was 5 days later. Read more at Too Damn Young: I don’t keep up with Christian music nearly as much as most people I know, so I hadn’t actually heard of Jason until this past spring when I heard him perform live at a local venue. After doing his traditional “peppy worship set,” he stopped to do an acoustic set that was a little more somber in tone. (As he said, “because everyone goes to Christian concerts to be depressed, right?”)
Read more at Too Damn Young: Since publishing my first piece here, I accidentally realized that more than a few people in my life had no idea about some pretty significant moments of my life. I sort of “came out” to those (many of whom consider themselves to be close with me) who had no idea about my experiences with loss, specifically the loss of my dad.
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