Recently Ted and I were watching a tv show where a daughter was being particularly hard on her mother. Her mother’s friend said to the girl, “Be kind. Don’t you think she’s suffered enough for one lifetime?”
Effortlessly tears began to fall as suffering has become a close friend of mine. But in reality, suffering is a friend to us all. We all suffer something.
I’ve been thinking on the concept of suffering lately and my heart keeps replaying something a pastor said to me once. I don’t remember if it was related to suffering specifically but the notion was that we’re all in need of a savior. In the context of our conversation, he was referring to Jesus.
My yoga practice encourages a lot of self reflection. I first met my mat as a very broken person two months after losing Sam. It’s taught me that healing can also begin within me. I’ve always known I needed savior but slowly I’m learning I am equipped to save myself as I am enough.
At Landon’s Legacy Retreat last year I sat on a dock with other Mamas overlooking a lake in the Whiteshell Provincial Park of Manitoba, Canada. Together we each wrote one statement about ourselves at the top of our individual papers and shared our statements with each other, writing them down if we felt so moved.
When I think about my friends, some of my now very best friends, who also live without their babies, I think of love coupled with suffering. A relentless suffering that grows in the absence of our children. But I know now that we’re not broken. Are we ever really whole? Or do we just learn to breathe in the present and breathe out the things we cannot change.
I was driving to yoga tonight and listening to an old CD. A cover of Bob Dylan’s Hard Times by Eastmountainsouth sang from my radio.
“While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, there are frail ones fainting at the door. Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say oh, hard times come again no more.”
Oh hard times, come again no more.
Thinking of Sam 