Escape

I said in a post I wouldn't write many more posts about grief, but I must have lied. Or maybe I anticipated. There's that. 

Crawling out of a grave sounds like a good thing. Overall, I think it is. But you don't know what you're crawling toward. And that darkness — it follows you.

Something happens when you try and get out of a grave. It's the stuff of horror movies, actually. Things have wrapped around you, grown over you, tangled in your hair and limbs. 

It's a terrifying endeavor. 

You can get out, but the struggle reaches a point you question whether you actually want to get out, or whether it's safer and warmer, and easier just to give up. But it's so horribly dark. 

Last night I shared with a friend a scripture that I carried with me for years after Jerry died. It was the only thing that seemed to anchor me. On my worst days I'd find that scripture and read it over and over. Lamentations 3:21-24. You'll probably be familiar with it. Hopeful, if not helpful. It is a verse of comfort in a dark place. 

Later, when I was going to bed, I remembered something. I used to read the whole chapter. I had a vague idea of the contents. Jeremiah is in a dungeon. Last night I tried to read it again. 

It is not a chapter to read in dark places. It is a chapter to tell you someone else has been in that place. That someone else probably understands. Once you read it, when you read it, and you will, you may relive the darkest moments in your life. But for a minute you won't be alone there.  

I cried all the way through that chapter last night. And many nights before. I think that will happen every time I read it in the future. Because once you've been in dark places, it follows you. You'll always wear the marks of the battle to crawl out and it will always follow you. 

That's when you read Lamentations 3. 

In the last few weeks, I attempted to step out of the dark. The light was blinding. And the pain of crawling out is excruciating. There is a point where I had to decide to leave parts of myself there, in that box. My God, it hurts. Never would I have imagined how painful it is to leave a grave, not once but twice. 

The first thing you notice is you can't breathe. You're chest is tight. You're throat closes, and your nose gets stopped up. Then things start to hurt. First it's just that tight chest but then you have pain across your back and neck. Vision is a challenge. You head hurts. 

It's a kind of dying.

It is the Lord's mercies ... it doesn't feel merciful. It is painful. But you keep crawling. 

We are not consumed. But it feels as if you are. The box has devoured you. It isn't locked but it saps all your strength. It is easier to just rest. 

But it isn't rest. It's death.

I'm not writing this to make you feel better or to make me feel better. I'm writing it to tell you that staying there is death. Crawling out feels like death. They're not the same. 

I went to bed in tears. Again. 

Don't assume there is anything to crawl toward. I woke up this morning to a kind of goodbye text. I cried again. 

It's sun up. I can't see. But I know it's up there. 

I'll just hope in Him.

Light

 Tuesday arrived quickly. December 2nd. I can't believe we're here. 

Today is another good day. I can't tell you why. It has just been one of those days that roll in and surprise you with things you didn't think you deserved. 

We had a bit of snow overnight. I went to lunch at Firehouse, my new favorite place. One sandwich and I'm done for the day. And it is so good. The girls behind the counter have become pals. It's nice to go to a place and have a person smile at you and you know they're glad to see you. They told me I was their favorite customer, recently. They're my favorite sandwich girls.

A friend called me and talked for a while, and that was a lovely respite from what would have been a boring day.

No writing today, well — that's not actually true. I wrote something on the writing blog and this, of course. You'll have to go see it if you're interested. 

I blog little about grief here anymore, except at this time of year. I think I posted something recently. I will not do that this year. At least, I'm going to try not to do that. I have several years of grief post from January 30th, 2009, through maybe the next six years. There are random posts throughout the blog for more years. 

This year, I want to end it. I want it to stop. I had a difficult week in mid-November. It was as if it had happened yesterday and I couldn't cope with it. I literally fell apart several times. 

 In the last couple of weeks, I realized I want that to end. I want to stop feeling the hurt. I want to stop hearing that ring rake along the headboard. I don't want to see his eyes anymore. I don't want to experience a silence so great that it feels like I'm dead. 

At some point during this last month, I figured out I want life. And I've not been living life for 17 years. I stopped laughing. I stopped singing. I stopped seeing the world around me. In November, the walls closed in, and I was suffocating. It made me lose myself again in the dark.

Then, someone made me laugh, genuine laughter. And a light came on.  

A Good Day

  Today has been a good day. I post this here to mark it down. I never know, nor do you, whether a day will be a good day. At least not in the sense of nothing going wrong. 

Since Jerry died, any day above ground was "good". But let's face it, if you read any of these blogs, you'll find that no day is that good. And grief often turns days into nightmares . 

But today was a day the Lord made indeed. I woke rested, with no pain, and fairly energetic. I dressed and put my hair up and had half-hour to spare. So good indeed.

I have not been doing much at home but writing. Hours a day but I have lost 12 lbs because I forget to eat. Trying to remember to drink water. Food has become less appealing. This is just bizarre to me. It would appear that writing is an appetite suppressant.

 I should have known this. One thing that I did before Jerry died was write, a lot. Afterward, I wrote a lot just to keep my mind off death. But RA and fibro got worse from the trauma and I couldn't write.  The writing came back in a dump truck. The story was pouring into me at a rate I couldn't believe. Thrity thousand words in a week. 

It feels good, and today was a day of clarity. I felt like my brain woke up overnight. Still don't know what I'm doing, but I'll just ride this road for as long as I can.

Happy Endings

Another holiday finished for a year. What a month it was, too. If you've read this blog long, you know that November through February is a difficult time. In the last few years, it hasn't been terrible, but this year, that mess just blew up in my face.

Starting November 12th, 2025, I began working on a new novel. That wasn't the plan. I have a story I've been working on for a long time and suddenly wanted to write the backstory of those characters to see if it would help me. What happened is confusing and surprising to me.  

As of today, I'm at 35,991 words. That's 2249 words a day, and there were a couple of days I didn't write at all. For non-writers, that's a lot of words.

What was confusing was the emotional turmoil I experienced for the first five days. I cried every day. Every time I wrote and after stopping for any reason. I was just wrecked. It took five days to figure out why. 

My husband died 17 yrs ago this coming January 29th. It was the greatest trauma I've ever experienced. While writing the new story, around the third day, I realized that many of the character traits of the main character reminded me of my husband when we first married. The way he treated the female love interest, the attitudes, and his actions were all my husband. Even the initial meeting of the characters was a reflection of meeting my husband. With that realization, any control I had disappeared. And from that point on, there were moments I had to stop writing at all. I even fell apart in front of my son. 

I don't actually know what would have happened if I had continued without talking to a friend. They gave me the freedom to talk and to let me cry. I felt like a fool and was embarrassed, but it gave me a way to find some control, albeit shaky at best. 

Now, sixteen days in, the story is still flowing like water. I don't know whether anyone will ever read it. I don't care. Though the experience was and is traumatic, the beautiful memory of being loved and cherished is mine to keep. Jerry was the only person who ever wanted me. Maybe we find that only once. I would not like to believe that, but I do. I don't know what he saw in me. I doubt there are many men who can see at that deep. 

I still have to get through finishing this story. Then I have to do an edit or two. Every time I go back to check something or read a passage, it breaks me again. How do you survive that?

I don't care. Just this once, I'll finish the story. There will be a happy ending. Something I never got. And maybe that's why this story came to me. Everyone deserves that much.

Falling into Cactus

 What does it mean when everything you touch becomes painful? Like falling into a cactus. And each spine you pull out, hurts again. By the time you're done, you're a holey, bleeding mess. And everything is gushing out through all those holes.

I'm bleeding out. 

I started the Rendered Praise blog because I wanted to be more positive, to focus on something other than the dark I was living in. Or at the least, find light in the dark. I've begun to think I'm the dark because no amount of light I shine on it matters. Dark is dark, and it can't comprehend light. 

I'm a researcher. I've always known where to find the answers. People ask me about something, I find the answer and tell them. But I can't find the answers to my own questions. I know where to look. I know what I'm asking. 

Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions; maybe I'm looking in the wrong places; maybe my questions just aren't important.

I'm a little old to be asking about the meaning of life. I thought I had figured that out. The whole duty of man is — 

Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13.

 He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? Micah 6:8.

Not hard at all. Right? I thought I was doing all of that well. At least, to the best of my ability. Now, I admit, I don't know. And this time, I don't know where to find the answer. 

I had three different sources tell me this last week I "live in my head too much". I don't know how to live anywhere else. When your world shrinks, where do you go? And what does it even mean? I researched it. It depends. And that is no answer at all.

If I find something to stop the bleeding, maybe I'll find it. 

Right now, tonight, I'm tired of searching. I don't think there are answers.