Remind Me.

There's been some hard moments in this house the last 24 hours and the heartbreak hasn't stopped or gotten easier or more understandable.
Last night after writing about the Hard Decision I sat outside for a long time pacing and listening to a few songs, just trying to find my way. I am so confused and so sad and so disappointed. I feel all your prayers, I read all your amazing messages but I still don't feel like a strong person or a great mom or any of those things. I just feel lost. Like I've just been dropped in the ocean and told to swim, knowing there's no way I can make it from one end of the it to the other. The feelings are that vast, that deep, that lonely.
I'm so desperate to know what the future looks like because the right now hurts too much. Melody and I were talking about it last night , we just want to see what life looks like 6 months, 8 months, a year from now. Will there be more joy than sorrow? Lord, I hope so. I want to know that I will have a purpose defined for me. Who I am suppose to be now?

And then this song keeps popping in my head, I heard it for the first time the day after the world changed.....

(click the title)

Remind Me Who I Am

Hard Decisions.

I've been trying to write this for days but haven't had the courage. This isn't going to be pretty, some people might be awfully upset with me for this, but I can't help that at this point. My hope is that most of you would understand that I have been in a hard place not just the last 4 weeks but the last 5 months. A place most people can't understand. And that was before I become a 32 year old widow/adoptive mom with 4 small children. Hopefully you'll understand that there's nothing more painful than losing your spouse and having to make decisions you'd otherwise never would have had to make.

At 3am on Dec 13 alot of things ran through my mind when those men informed me that Frank was dead. But before they had even crossed my threshold to come into my house I thought "How am I ever going to keep Hunter NOW?" Because for the month before his death I had been grappling with the new information we had about his medical needs and it was scary. It wasn't very hopeful and it had us reassessing what our future was going to look like because we knew Hunter was never going to be out on his own, he'd probably never talk or potty train or any of that. We grieved. But.... We would do it together. Frank was naively optimistic about Hunter's diagnosis, it sometimes really annoyed me. But that was Frank. He loved Hunter wholeheartedly since the second we saw his picture. He loved him fiercely and fought for him to be in our family. He brought levelheadedness and that pesky optimism to me time and time again when I would freak out about if adopting him was really the right thing to do. I've made no secret about this.....if it weren't for Frank, we would never had adopted him. I never felt completely right about it, but I trusted God and I trusted my husband and I did it for God and my husband. I had been saying for months that I wanted to do hard things for Jesus and boy did I get the experience I was praying for, just not the one I thought I was gonna get. I had asked Frank once WHY, WHY this little boy? And he told me that while he was in Afghanistan he saw some terrible things that had been done to women and children and he couldn't do anything to help them, he wanted to be able to help someone and he felt very sure that adopting Hunter was the right thing to do. I knew some of those terrible things he spoke of, and I knew that adopting Hunter was part of Frank's healing from seeing those horrible things. I loved him so much, I wanted to give him the world. So I said yes even though most of my brain and heart screamed "NO!".
It's also been no secret that attaching to an adopted child can be very hard and I struggled from the very beginning. The severity of his special needs shocked,frightened and overwhelmed me. But I pushed on. I didn't fall in love with him, I didn't love him like I loved my other kids but I felt very protective of him, I loved him in my own way and I took damn good care of him. Hunter needed an advocate mom and ,boy, did he get one. He had a daddy who loved him to pieces and we would spend our evenings snuggling with him, playing with him and talking about what else we could do to help him. We were a team. Hunter needs a team.
All the while I struggled with attaching and I have never prayed for anything more in my whole life. I would fall on my face on the floor crying out to God to help me love him and help me be the mom he deserved.I prayed for my heart to be filled with love for him. I'll tell you right now, my prayers were not answered in time. And now my heart is shattered.
Losing Frank has been the worst thing I can imagine. There just aren't the right words to describe it. But to add to the pain is this realization that 12 days prior to his death we finalized the adoption and Hunter became legally ours. I just can't understand the timing of this tragedy. This fatherless little boy needed a mom and a dad and he gets orphaned right after getting them??? WHAT?! I'm trying to desperately to understand The Plan in all this mess. How does any of our struggle, any of our work, any of our faith makes any sense when we adopted this child and I now have to give him up because there's no way I can care for him now???? God, where are You in this????
So that's it. Frank is dead. My children have no father.I have no way of continuing the extensive care of Hunter while also trying to raise my other 3 kids.It's just not possible. In a year my heart hopefully won't be as broken. But Hunter will still be Hunter and he will only be harder to take care of. SO Hunter will be adopted by a great family who can give him everything he needs and handle those severe special needs. My heart is completely shattered. I feel ashamed, awful and like a complete failure. But I have peace knowing that this is the best thing we can do in our situation. It's best for Hunter and it's best for my other kids and myself. But it's one more devastating blow and I sometimes wonder how much more I can take.
My whole life the last 5 years has been about taking care of my family and trying to adopt and advocate for orphans. In one split second my whole purpose is being redefined. Our life should have been adopting more kids, needing a 10 passenger van later this year and working hard to bring awareness to HIV orphans worldwide. I look at his new family's pictures and it just kills me because that should have been OUR life too.8 kids. Lots of smiles. Something just a little extra-ordinary. Doing hard things but those things being worth it because we had each other and we were living the life we felt called to.

Now what? Where do I go from here? I feel like my heart's been busted into so many pieces there will be no picking them up again.

This is why I keep saying "Surely this isn't the way the story was suppose to end!" Jesus, please come fix this.

And that's my hard decision. To let Hunter go because it's the best thing for him. I can't be everything he needs anymore. I did what I could for 5 months and he's come so far from where he is. I KNOW he will be well loved and well taken care of with his new family, who will hopefully be his TRUE forever family.

I would appreciate that if you had any negative views about this, that you honestly just keep them to yourself. I can promise you have nothing to say that I haven't already beaten myself up about a million times already and will continue to do. This was not easy and I'm dying inside even more from it. So just hold your tongues. You haven't walked in my shoes.

Full Moon.

At night it gets really quiet here, which is a good and bad thing. Good because those loud,awful children are finally in bed sleeping and I can breathe a sigh of relief. Bad because the quiet lets me think. And it lets me walk around this house aimlessly looking at pictures, or his coffee mugs or his running shoes. I cry. I walk away. I look at a picture, I cry some more. Sometimes I stand there and quietly yell "WHY?!?! HOW?!?!" but mainly "Why?! Oh God, please just tell me WHY?" Then I'll shake my head and move along. I'll look at mundane pointless things on the internet ( cuz I don't watch TV), I'll make a sad attempt at doing some housework. I'll cry some more. Usually by 10pm I know all kids are out cold and I go outside.
And here's what you would you see: Me standing out on the porch bundled in a hoodie sweatshirt,a plastic cup of rum and coke in one hand, a cigarette in the other( and I didn't drink or smoke before this), iphone playing Mumford & Sons "After the Storm" on constant repeat, my silent partner in this grief -Frank's sweet,faithful dog Ella sitting beside me. I fixate on a star that is right above the houses across the street. And it's freezing here but I don't care. Because I think about that night and how cold it was. And I think about those last few minutes and what it might have been like for them. I hope they didn't see it coming. I've been told Frank went instantly. I think about how after the helicopters fell and how maybe there was just silence afterwards. How they were just out there in the cold together, but gone. I feel like I NEED to be cold to the bone. That somehow if I think about these things and get cold enough that the disbelief will go away and I'll begin to really truly believe this. Every night I sit out there for a long time and never make any sense of it at all.
I ask God alot of questions. I don't expect answers. I ask Him to take away some of this pain. I ask Him to shield my kids. I ask Him to turn back time. Because surely this, THIS is not how the story was suppose to end. Surely not for Frank or Annie or Luke or Shan. Surely not,God.

I've been watching the moon slowly turn full the past week. Tonight it finally is. Just one more agonizing reminder of our new reality. The full moon.

When Frank left for his 1 year unaccompanied tour in Korea in Sept 2000, I was 20 weeks pregnant with Zoe. And for a year I stood and looked at each full moon, knowing I only had X many more until he was home again. Through year long deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan I counted those full moons. Through 3-4 month training times when he'd be away, I counted those full moons. The full moon made me sad but hopeful. Only 10 more. 7 more. 3 more. 1 more until he's home. Now each moon will take me further away from his last moments with us and it's hard to imagine someday when there will be 3,7,10, 50, 200 moons without him. Just an endless amount of pain and longing.
Tonight I came inside and sat here to write this. Stopped halfway through because Liam, our 3 year old, threw up in his bed. As I was cleaning him off in the bathroom he was crying for his Daddy. "I need him. I need a mommy & a daddy. I need to get a daddy."
God, how is this possible? Why so much pain? Why so much gut wrenching pain? WHY? Surely this is not the story.




The sun,the moon
they have all been blown out
you've left me in the dark
No dawn. No day
I'm always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart.


Cosmic Love, Florence & the Machine

Damn Pears.

I'm learning that grief touches everything. EVERYTHING. And it can leave you alone for a few minutes and then stab you right in the guy with something very small.

Today was a rough day for me. I didn't get any sleep last night thanks to a certain baby, the big kids went back to school, I had a meeting with our landlord and then needed to go to the bank and the commissary. I knew the commissary was going to be emotionally trying. Frank was a foodie and an excellent cook. He loved coming with me to the commissary.
So after an upsetting phone call in the parking lot of the bank, followed by being even more upset in the bank ( hey, money is not fun if it comes because of something like this, I would burn it all in a pile and live like a pauper if it brought back my husband), drove onpost and held my breath waiting to see Kiowas flying. Today was the first day since the accident that they've been back up, I knew it would be hard.
I get into the commissary and stick my iPod in my ears to block out other people and start in the produce section.
And it hits me.
Don't buy those brussel sprouts. He was the one that could make them decently.
Don't buy the cauliflower, he's the only one that would eat it.

But it's when I got to the pears that I felt the life drain out of me. I stood there holding a freaking danjou pear and just cried.

A few weeks before he died he PERFECTED his pear torte. We bought like 10 lbs of pears from the Olympia Farmer's Market and he kept making these amazing tortes. Each one more awesome than the previous.

I'm wondering how to get on living when everything I see is a reminder that I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want this world without him in it. I know I have these beautiful children but they are a constant agonizing reminder of what we've just lost. Their pain kills me. And my pain envelopes it all. The quiet of this house in the evening is more than I can stand.

And tonight the sound of helicopters all around our little town is taunting me.
He's never coming back. He's never coming back.
And everytime I see a pear, or hear a helicopter or any one of a million tiny things I will remember what I've lost and what life looks like for me now. Lonely. Broken. Desperate for Heaven.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H.Aulden