Shattered

For quite some time now, I've had this nursery rhyme running through my head, over and over.  When one loses a loved one, people often talk about "before" and "after" and how one experiences a new "normal".  This is my re-imagining of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme after losing Tiffany...

I am Humpty Dumpty, sitting on the wall – fat, dumb and happy. Along comes the Grim Reaper to knock me off my wall.  I have a great fall and I am shattered into a million little pieces, stunned beyond belief, numb to what has happened, no longer in my own body.  My family and friends, the King’s Horses and the King’s Men, search among the shards of myself to put together a semblance of me to get through the coming days.  To do the things no parent should have to do – putting photos together of their child’s life, writing the obituary, deciding on a coffin, planning the the ceremonies, “hosting” the wake, attending the funeral, burying their child…

Afterwards, this shadow self of me sits among the remains of my shattered life and I wonder how I will go on, surrounded by this living, breathing, physical pain of grief and suffering.  This pain owns me.  It lives in me and with me.  I don’t know what to do as I lay there with the pieces of myself scattered around.  I cry for what was, for what is now and for what should have been.  I want the “before”.  And now all I want to do is to be left alone with my grief, lie on my child’s grave in the grass and sink down, along with all the fragments of me, into the ground with my loved one.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

But somehow, the human spirit is indomitable.  One morning, sometime “after”, I wake up and I’ve discovered that, although still numb and in a surreal state, somehow, somewhere, I’ve picked up some scrap of who I was and I’ve pieced it back into that semblance of the person I was just after I was broken.  I do this, unwillingly, heart-brokenly, each morning and sometimes I can’t find where the pieces belong.  The fragments don’t go back to where they were originally.  They don’t fit into who I am now so I have to create a new me.  I don’t want a new me.  I want the world I had, with my child in it, before it was blown to smithereens.  Still, every day I keep picking up the pieces as best I can until I’ve become someone else entirely.  I’m a stranger unto myself and to others.

I don’t know about this new normal, this new me.  Some pieces have been left behind, never to be found, and many were buried with my child.  The rest have been forged by fire into this new shape which, although filled with cracks, is made stronger by the steel and strength and power of pure love and sheer courage.  The love of my lost child, my sweet daughter, and the courage to go on for my beloved son and grandson, for the living.

I live in two worlds now – a shadow world and the real world.  I no longer sit up high on the wall.  I’m not Humpty Dumpty anymore.  I’m a Grieving Mother.