by jphilo | Dec 1, 2011 | Different Dream, Grief, Spiritual Support
5 Tools to Overcome Special Needs Grief
Laurie Wallin is at DifferentDream.com today. She’s sharing from her heart about the special needs grief she’s experiencing this holiday season. She also shares five strategies to help her (and you) ride the waves of grief that accompany this season of joy.
5 Tools to Overcome Special Needs Grief
Holidays have a different feel for us as special needs parents. There’s always a hint of grief, whether simply in the fact that our child can’t stand unassisted to place that ornament on the tree, or their mood disorder prevents participation in the school holiday show.
Or, sometimes, it’s acute. Something that’s dug a hole through our sense of joy and wonder this season. Grief can sneak up on us when we least expect it.
Do You Have Any Pictures of Your Kids?
This happened to me the other day, suddenly. In the middle of a meeting where we discussed things that seemed safe—topics seemingly unrelated to the tender place in my heart. A friend asks an innocent question: “Do you have any pictures of your kids?”
“Of course I do!” I reply, pulling my phone out and scrolling through snapshots filled with grins and antics that animate life in a family of six.
Except in the photos it’s only… five.
Screen after screen I scroll through faces. Dozens of images… and she’s not there. Has it really been that long?
And the tears ambush me. Hot and bitter. I curl over, laboring to breathe through grief that blurs images in my hand. Where is she?
Where is my little redhead?
She’s in a center for children who hurt deeper than their families, doctors, and specialists can manage to heal. She’s in a place that’s not home. As we unpack decorations and bake pies this holiday season, she will miss more photos. She’s already missed so many. She’s missing our life… and we’re missing hers.
Your Grief May Surprise You, Too
As holidays unfold this year, your grief may surprise you like that, too. In the middle of a mall. In a meeting at work. Driving down the street past a favorite place. A reminder that the pain isn’t really gone. It’s just waiting for a little air to breathe. One small crack of a window and it floods in again. In those ambushed moments, we can still see good this holiday. We can fight the despair with powerful tools that strengthen grieving hearts.
5 Tools to Overcome Special Needs Grief
- Get a grief buddy. Take a friend to coffee and ask if they’d be your “I feel like crap today” friend. Someone you can email or text or just call and know they’ll listen and won’t need you to smile and have it all together. And someone who loves you enough to tell you it’s time to get up, give the Kleenex a break, and let the good in too.
- Find a comforting book, CD, or Scripture passage for this season. Read it every morning as you awake, allowing yourself permission to cry, question, and sometimes just feel numb. Choose to trust that resource to inspire and strengthen you… to fill in the gaps the tears leave behind.
- Go for a walk. Plan some time each day to get your heart pumping, whether it’s a walk around the block, vigorous house cleaning, or popping in that exercise video for 20 minutes. Endorphines released in your body will lift your mood and allow you a healthy way to expend the grief energy that sometimes feels overwhelming.
- Invest in others who are struggling. Give an evening to a battered women’s shelter, collect shoe boxes filled with personal care items for poor kids abroad, write letters to service men and women deployed across the world. Others are grieving this holiday, too. As we reach out, we remember we’re not alone.
- Plan quiet moments in your holiday busyness. The grief will surge, so give yourself space to let it. Make a 6-week calendar and plan events through the end of the year with your family, making sure there are days—even stretches of days—that are unplanned. Just allowing space in your schedule keeps away the stress that exacerbates a broken heart.
This season may feel different for me, my little girl, our family. It may be different than normal for your family too. But the joy that marks it can still be ours—real, deep joy and peace—when we let ourselves do what we need to care for our hearts.
In comfort,
Laurie
How Do You Ride the Waves of Special Needs Grief?
Is grief part of your holiday season this year? What tools help you cope? This is a safe place to share your grief and the strategies that give you strength to go on. Laurie and I would love to hear from you.
Do you like what you see at DifferentDream.com? You can receive more great content by subscribing to the quarterly Different Dream newsletter and signing up for the daily RSS feed delivered to your email inbox. You can sign up for the first in the pop up box and the second at the bottom of this page.
Laurie is the mom of four daughters–two adopted with developmental delays, mood disorders, and ADHD. A former junior high teacher turned speaker and life coach, she loves to learn, laugh until their sides hurt, and help women be courageous in life.
Subscribe for Updates from Jolene
by jphilo | Jan 11, 2011 | Family
One look at this entry from December 31, 2009, and I knew it had to be the recycled post of the week. A little over a year ago, Anne and her fiance were on the road in a snowstorm, while I lay warm in my bed. This year, Anne and her fiance are snug and warm while I’m braving winter weather. Though the tables have been turned from then to now, one thing remains true. None of us, even in the midst of snowstorms and uncertainty, have reason to waste God’s wonderful grace.
Don’t Waste His Grace
Last week’s winter storm made the Wednesday evening before Christmas a rather trying one at our house. Anne and her fiancee thought they could outrun the storm bearing down on northwest Iowa by leaving for Wisconsin early in the afternoon. For the first few hours, they made good progress. But as darkness fell and traffic slowed the storm caught up with them.
Anne called around 6:30 PM to say they had pulled into a rest stop on I-90, not far from Rochester, Minnesota. “We’ll spend the night in the car,” she said. “The visibility’s so bad we can’t even get to the next town.” After reassuring me they had plenty of blankets, food, water and gasoline, she hung up.
If the call had come two or three years ago, the thought of my daughter marooned at a rest stop in a blizzard would have kept me awake most of the night. But in the last few years, I have seen God so powerfully at work in our lives, I was able to fall asleep, confident that He would watch over my daughter and the man she’s going to marry.
The same night Anne slept in the car, the cold woke Hiram and I woke in the middle of the night. An ice storm had knocked out our electricity, but instead of fretting about when it would come on and how our daughter was faring, I piled extra blankets on the bed and thought about something I’d recently read in John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life.
“We simply take life and breath and health and friends and everything for granted. We think it is ours by right. But the fact is that it is not ours by right.” Piper goes on to remind us that we are sinful, we’re the ones who rebelled against our Creator. “Therefore, every breath we take, every time our heart beats, every day that the sun rises, every moment we see with our eyes or hear with our ears or speak with our mouths or walk with our legs is, for now,a free and undeserved gift to sinners who deserve only judgement…for those who see the merciful hand of God in every breath they take and give credit where it is due, Jesus Christ will be seen and savored…Every heartbeat will be received as a gift from his hand.”
I lay, waiting for the extra blankets to warm us, and thought about my daughter’s life in a new way. The years we’ve had with her are an undeserved gift. So is electricity and a warm house and Christmas and a husband who loves me. If I accept these good gifts from God, then I can trust him, even when what he gives is not what I think I need. Then, I fell asleep asking him to prepare me for whatever news came in the morning.
When we woke, the electricity was on. The house was warm. An hour or two later, Anne called to say the snow had stopped, and they were on their way. By noon she called to say they had arrived. Once again, God’s grace was poured out upon our family. I thanked him for the undeserved gift of our travelers’ safety. I asked him to make me mindful of his grace.
Please God, I pray again whenever I feel my heart beat, continue to make me grateful. Don’t let me waste your grace.
by jphilo | Jan 5, 2011 | Different Dream, Grief, Spiritual Support
The Christmas season may be over, but Scott Newport’s latest guest post will put you in the holiday spirit again. This story about an old school atmosphere at a Home Depot big box store is a winner!
Ol’ School
It’s not too many times you walk to the checkout line in a big box store that a clerk blurts out, “Hey! Wait, I’ll take care of that.” But that’s just what happened to me yesterday. This clerk hurried up to the sliding window of the heated booth in the garden section and waved us on.
Christmas Eve Magic
I know it was Christmas Eve and all but to have the assistant store manager do the same thing as we were about to check out was like a scene out of a well written ol’ school Christmas story. He didn’t say anything; he just lifted his hand and waved for me to put away my wallet. The young cashier winked back.
As my son Noah and I walked out of the store with a small Christmas tree and a stocking big enough to hold a handful of fruit and a couple of toys fit for a child’s pocket, I wondered whether anyone would get in trouble for not charging us.
Pretty Cool
I said. “That was pretty cool, eh Noah?”
He nodded as we got into my 1995 Ford work van and headed for the cemetery.
“Hey Dad, I know where Evan is buried because of the big tree over there.”
As I looked around I saw a row of towering, leafless maple trees lining the meandering road and wondered why Noah thought one was different than the others. I soon forgot as I spotted my landmark, the faded, orange- painted stake marking a new grave. Even with four inches of snow, it still stood out.
Home Depot Family
You see my other son Evan died just over a year ago, on the day after Thanksgiving. He was seven years old and had struggled with a terminal condition from birth. Over the years the guys and girls at my local Home Depot have followed my family’s story. They have cried with me on many occasions. They celebrated when they heard the University of Michigan named an award after Evan. Many of them came to the funeral and viewing.
I know the corporate part of Home Depot has a tendency to promote lowest prices and specials for the professional guys. But at the Home Depot I go to, it has another part. Remember the old time hardware stores where you and your dad would walk across creaking wood floors. Occasionally you would request an item and the owner would crawl up into an attic to retrieve it. Or at the local coffee shop where price didn’t matter, the laughter was priceless. That is what my store is like.
I just wanted you to know the impact Bill, the assistant manager, and Bonnie, one of the paint ladies, had on my family on Christmas Eve of this year. But I also want to thank all the familiar faces including; Dave, Steve, Curtis, Berry, John, Jay and his wife, Brian, Yang, Kirk, Pat, Mike, Kathy, Cindy, Dave, Kevin, Greg, Rae, John, Jeremy, Ralph, Paul, Bob, Brian, Ben, John Scott Hank, Frank, Bob, Dean, Frazier, Dan, Nick, Ann, Laurie, Scott, Doug, Chris and Terry, Vivian, Deb, Sandy, Bob, and of course the Big Cheese, Marty.
(By the way I saw Marty actually hoisting Christmas trees into peoples’ cars a couple of weeks back in the freezing cold. When I told one lady he was the head honcho she thought I meant head parking lot guy. Just another fun story told while drinking coffee at the Troy Home Depot Pro desk.)
One Step Further
Scott took his story one step further and mailed it to Home Depot’s Customer Care department. They told Scott they’re sending it on to the corporate offices. Amazing how one kind deed leads to another, isn’t it?
If you have a story about unexpected generosity toward your family, would you share it in the comment box? If you can, take it one step further, like Scott did, and pass it on to the powers that be. Maybe it will inspire someone else to further kindness, too.
Do you like what you see at DifferentDream.com? You can receive more great content by subscribing to the quarterly Different Dream newsletter and signing up for the daily RSS feed delivered to your email inbox. You can sign up for the first in the pop up box and the second at the bottom of this page.
by jphilo | Nov 16, 2010 | Daily Life
Philo Christmas gifts have become depressingly predictable in recent years. Three years ago, the furnace made a fuss in December. Last year, the range bit the dust in November. Now, the refrigerator’s belching rudely before, during, and after meals.
“The compressor’s going out,” HIram announced yesterday. “Better start shopping for a new fridge.”
“But, but, but…” I sputtered as visions of impractical presents flew out of my head.
Hiram interrupted. “Or would you rather have it go out completely and lose the food in it?”
Who can argue with that kind of logic?
“Guess what the money you’re giving us for Christmas goes to this year?” I asked Mom when we went out for breakfast this morning. “A new refrigerator!” I put a brave face on it. “I not surprised. The kitchen appliances were new in the early 90s when we remodeled the kitchen. They’re wearing out, one by one.”
Mom’s eyes twinkled. “My old refrigerator still works. John keeps it in the garage.” With a smirk she asked. “When did I buy it?”
“1965 or so.”
“Never had a day’s trouble with it.”
Gloat, gloat, gloat.
I almost told my smug, Methodist, teetotaler of a mother that her son John stores B-E-E-R in her old refrigerator. But I held my tongue. No need to upset her so close to her annual writing of the Christmas checks. Not when the washer and dryer are shaking and shimmying with an alarming lack of rhythm every laundry day.
Our appliances are dropping like flies, which means extra cash flow could be the only thing between the Philos and empty stockings this holiday season.
Merry Christmas!
