I cannot begin to articulate the places I have been the last six months. The entire time I have stressed and assured those around me that I was really OK, I was so far from it. I was lost. Destroyed and really teetering on the verge of insanity in so many ways.
I can hardly begin the labour of putting it into words. I will try...I'm still not entirely sure why. If for no other reason just because putting it into words helps me to reflect and to see where I am and where I have been, and hopefully, give me some indicators of where I am headed.
Since I don't know how or where to start, or exactly what to say, I'll just start from the beginning, as best as I am able. First let me say, I have never, besides our children, loved anything or anyone the way I love Christina. I say love, because I am still deeply in love with her, and although I realize no one knows what the future holds, I always WILL love her. Just like with my children, Christina holds an unfathomably deep place in my heart. Her absence from this Earth can't change that. I am fond of that place. When she died, and people would tell me it gets easier with time, that would anger me and frustrate me so badly. I guess what I understood them to really be saying is that I would forget what she means to me, or that I would love her less, and sometimes think whistfully about her occasionally.
In a way, it is more than that we were two people that met and fell in love; I know it sounds so cliche', but I always really felt that God brought us together. In fact, in spite of it all, I still do. Never would I have thought it possible for two people to mesh so completely with each other from the moment they met. I know some have to role their eyes, for Christina's sake if nothing else, and some must think, "Oh, what pitiful stuff" and I know the melancholy sounds as from the remembrances of some slipping old man. But the simple fact is, for those that REALLY knew us, we were always madly in love with each other, and the desire of our hearts were for each others company above all else. If one was close to God, the other would strive to be there; and one would fall away, the other would grow colder, not by design, but simply because we were kindred, and the sin of one was inextricable from the other. If you could never understand how Adam could take that proferred fruit from Eve, I could. As much as he feared God, he was tied to Eve so much more closely. God was what he feared and did not understand; Eve, though...He knew her smell. He buried his nose in her hair, and when she held him, he could feel his rib calling to knit within him once again. One flesh they were, and as one flesh they would fall.
Except that, even though it HAD been that way between us, it was becoming not that way, the last year of our marriage. I was on the road SO much, and my faith was cooling, to say the least. Christina's constant miscarriages, and the fact that I had spent two years imploring God to find me an income and insurance so that I could be with my family again had taken it's toll. The dark holes of lime kilns and the cold and impenetrable passes of boilers became cozy and familiar to me, and laying in bed trying to wrestle a few hours of sleep from the daylight before I had to enter back into that myopic and surreal world had done little to help me to see the spiritual side of things. God's answer never came through. The only answer I got were a few more soul crushing miscarriages and the bravest woman I knew try to keep her sanity and faith through it all. And she never broke.
Then October happened. Its a previous post, and I will not revisit that, the darkest of times I have had. Needless to say, my grip on reality, or at least my metaphysical grip, was beginning to slip. (OK for perspective, I traveled across much of the Southeast with our dead frozen Son. I would work all day, like nothing was wrong, then at night I would pull him from the hotel freezer and bawl for hours.) And then, as a result of that last fateful miscarriage, my beautiful,most precious wife, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, was torn from my arms and this Earth with no warning or ceremony whatsoever.
All the things that happened in that hospital I don't know if I'll ever be able to revisit, at least not out loud. I CAN say there was a spiritual battle there. And I am not entirely sure, or at least at the time, wasn't entirely sure who won it.
But it is not what happened there that broke me. It's what didn't happen.
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