Capture Your Grief 2015, Day 1 "Sunrise"

Every October (which is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month), CarlyMarie over at Project Heal does a "Capture Your Grief" photo challenge.  I can't say I will do them all.  But I will do the ones that speak to me.

Since the mornings are getting later, I am usually able to watch the sun rise as I take my older kids to school.  This morning, I okayed an update on my phone, which took a lot longer than I realized it would, so I didn't have my phone to get a picture until after I got home.  I wasn't feeling well, so I drove my Bigs the whole block to the school, watching the sunrise, listening to my four loud rainbows in the back of my minivan.  Many mornings I am irritable.  Mornings and I are not friends.  But this particular morning, watching the bright ornagey-pink sky get ever louder, listening to laughter, I was struck with a profound gratitude.  The gratitude that only comes after losing something precious.  I looked at my kids in my mirror, and I imagined one more.  There is one more seat belt back there, she would fit.  But there is an empty space, and the pain of that simultaneously takes my breath away and heightens the ecstatic joy of the four spaces filled with little, ever-growing bodies.  My life is blessed.

I took a picture once I got home.

PS, I find it funny that today is "intention" when I totally intended to post this yesterday.

Is this what acceptance really is?

I've discussed the stages of grief before, this isn't really what this post is about.

Anyway, I finished reading the book Allegiant by Veronica Roth last night (Spoilers if you haven't read it already!!)

I made a post on Facebook about how it didn't end the way I expected it to.  How I *expected* it to end was that Tris and Tobias would lose a lot of friends, but still end up being together.  Although part of me suspected that Tobias might die or have his memory accidentally wiped.

I didn't expect Tris to die.

And the read of the aftermath was very hard in the moment because his grief was so fresh and she was making his processing of his loss so real.

But I didn't hate the end.  I actually do think that the series ended decently.  Even hopefully.

But I had SO MANY of my friends comment on my post about how it was a terrible ending and that they hated it.  And many of these same friends haven't minded other deaths in other things.  So I had to stop about what made this particular death so much worse.

And I realized that it was the grief.  It's the grief, more than the death, that people are having such a visceral reaction to.  Why else would a series be able to continuously kill off main characters and still have people think it's great, but this one kills off one and it's terrible?

Don't get me wrong, I sobbed through all of the last chapters.  I've been there.  I've felt all that before; the numbness, the need to just forget everything, the clawing ache.  I, more than most of the people I know, feel like I have a right to hate that ending.

But I don't.  I'm actually glad to know that many of the things I feel are at least normal enough that an author can describe it and have it be the same range of emotions.  But since I have felt it, and am surviving it, I am not afraid of it.  I am comfortable in my grief.  Not that it doesn't hurt as badly sometimes as the day the doctor told me Cora had died, but more that I have accepted it as a normal, regular experience.  The same as being sad when a friend moves away, or disappointed when you don't get something you want badly, or being angry when someone says something mean.  I don't fear anger, or disappointment; I don't fear grief.

I have accepted it.


"Saying her name still gives me a little twinge of pain, a pinch that lets me know her memory is still dear to me." ~Tobias, "Allegiant"