Usually when I write a blog I have thought about what I want to say days in advance.  Tonight is oddly different.  I am a jumbled mess of emotions and can’t really understand why.  It is not just me.  Troy and Keely seem to be experiencing the same thing.  Maybe it was seeing everyone’s back to school pictures on Facebook.  Maybe it was the 9th month anniversary of the accident.  Or maybe it is because I just want him back.

A small white cross stands in the field where Dalton had his accident.  I deliberately walk by it everyday because it is easier for me to visit that site than it is the cemetery.  I hate the cemetery.  I hate him being in the ground.  My faith tells me it is just a place where his physical parts remain, but the mother in me wants to shield it with my own body every time it rains.  Visiting it is a debilitating experience for me and it takes hours to recover.  So I choose to visit the cross on our property instead.  However, in the last few days I haven’t been able to walk by without seeing him laying there.  As I had arrived there that November day, I remember thinking the paramedics were making him lay still because that’s what they do when they think someone has a broken bone or something.  I had no idea at the time that my child had been cut out of a seatbelt to free him from the Polaris Ranger so he could take one final deep breath and close his eyes forever.

Last week I watched my daughter as she was posing for her senior pictures.  She looked so grown up.  I felt proud to be her mom.  Though she is pretty to me on the outside, the best part of her can’t be seen with a camera.  Keely is strong and full of integrity.  Her dedication to her brother seems to intensify with time instead of dissipating.  She is always coming up with ways to honor his memory.  For her senior pictures, we took DD’s baseball memorabilia to the Collegiate baseball field and set it up as a back drop.  He couldn’t wait to play on that field, yet he never got to pitch one single game.  Keely positioned Dalton’s cleats upon the pitcher’s mound, placed his cap upon her head, and flashed her beautiful smile for the photographer.  I knew what that smile concealed.  Behind that radiant grin was a mixture of pain, love, and pride.  She has walked the path no sibling should ever have to walk, yet she has done it with a grandeur of dignity.

I started following the blogs of other mothers suffering from the loss of a child.  What I found in several made me uneasy.  Many of these blogs felt so hopeless in their current lives and angry with God.  Others are in a deep depression and see no light at the end of the tunnel.  I told myself to stop reading them.  I don’t want that to be me.  One of the most important things I have learned about grief is that you have to be active in experiencing it.  A person has to fight the urge to succumb to the despair.  There is no way to keep a little of the darkness from creeping in time to time, but I snap out of it easier these days.  I don’t know if that is good or bad.  I just know it is part of the bereaved mother survivor skills I have acquired.  At the same time, I find I have to be active in hope.  It is more than just optimism.  I am working on trusting in God’s plan and not my own.  I won’t understand why Dalton died until I get to heaven myself and it is all revealed.  I know that day will come, but I don’t want it to come any sooner than when God is ready for me.

In the bible, Jeremiah is so consumed by his own pain in Lamentations 3:19-26.  His devastation can be heard in the passage where he says, “The thought of my pain and my homelessness is bitter poison.  I think of it constantly and my spirit is depressed.”  He is hurting and slipping into despair.  Except in the next verse, Jeremiah appears to have a change in his thinking process.  He says, “Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing:  The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue, fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.  The Lord is all I have, so in him I put my hope.”

• Though I am feeling a multitude of emotions tonight, one idea is always on the forefront of my mind:  You don’t know God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.  I pray none of you ever have to face the loss of a child.  And If there was any advice I could give other parents with young children,  it would be to allow your children to experience Christ.  It is the most important thing you will ever do for them.  You too!  It is never too late to know Jesus.  He is always waiting on you.