Heavy Days

Heavy Days

I hate the heavy days
When everything converges.
I hold so much and it piles up.
Sometimes, I buckle underneath it.

Tetris as a game is fun to play
But Tetris as a way of life is no fun,
And exhausting.

Sometimes grief gets me,
Sometimes sadness,
Sometimes I remember what I had
And what I’ve lost.
Now, I am moving forward and trying to live again.
But that too can pile on.
Living again adds new things to hold.
New joy and excitement touch the places old joy once resided
And that alone is bizarre and something to process.

I know the goal is to hold all of life’s heaviness and not stuff or escape it,
To absorb it and expand.
But the holding and absorbing are not always easy
And not without their overwhelming realities.

Some days I’m flattened,
Flattened by responsibility,
Flattened by emotion,
Flattened by newness,
But often just flattened by the weight of holding them all.

And in the midst of the heaviness,
I’m tempted to lose hope
And believe I can know nothing good again.

I long for knowing good again,
Knowing life.
But the path to that is daunting and seems so overwhelming,
Almost impossible some days.

And yet, I press on
Because optimism is in there too,
A future is in there,
A life for the boys and me again
Is in there.

But the heaviest things to carry are those tied to the future Lindsey won’t have,
For her,
For me,
For the boys,
For her family,
For my family,
For our community.

Surely those things come with me,
They’re here
And they inform my days,
All of our days.

But acceptance that she’s gone must happen
And life must go on.
So, it does.
And I march forward begging God to work,
To be a Way Maker,
To pour out His grace on me and the boys,
On our extended family and community,
And on our future.

This was written Wednesday, September 20 (day 281). I was exhausted and it’s often in exhaustion that these musings come out. They’re cathartic to write and get out. It’s in the exhaustion that I feel the convergence of heavy, of all that’s on me.