I remember very little from my grandfather's funeral. Mostly the silence and the tears. I remember sitting on my grand mother's lap and asking her if it was alright if I cried now. I seem to have been asking that question ever since.

Grief is such a personal thing, but still people try to quantify it, put it into little boxes saying that here it is here are your steps get through these "phases" and you'll be alright. Very little attention is given to the individual in this process, how each of us as human beings deal with the miasma of grieving. My grandfather's death was the first death I'd ever dealt with on a personal level and it didn't hurt me at all, I remember my mother coming home from the hospital after he died in tears. This was big stuff because my mother NEVER cried (I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen it none of them pretty). Then the funeral, then nothing as if to say "there" it's all over he died and we go on. I can't remember a discussion or another tear being shed. Not that they weren't, my mother adored her father, but in my child's heart I learned that death was nothing.

I could not have been more wrong.

I was fourteen the next time I dealt with death and it opened a flood gate of loss that I'll never forget and still cringe to remember. Teenagers are a notoriously sensitive lot, to have so much grief superimposed over already raging hormones was a challenge to survive. I'd moved from my childhood home to Texas and left everything I knew behind for what I thought would be a grand adventure. I kept in contact with my friends before e-mail which was trying for my parents and the phone bill, but it kept us connected. Then in about October of the year we moved my best friend called me with the news that another one of our friends and her brother had been killed in an automobile accident on the way to school .

I was stunned, flabbergasted, how could this happen to someone so young? My friend was fourteen years old, just like me. Her brother had been a friend of my sister's. It seemed so surreal that they would be gone, that they could be gone. They were so young. For the first time in my life I began the process of grief. I was so angry, so very angry with God for allowing these two precious people to be killed. Living in Texas I could not get back for the funeral and had no closure to my grief. I could not see them I could not be comforted by my other friends and share in that comfort of others who knew how I felt. I cried and I wore black for a good month until my mother told me it was time to put away my mourning. I'm sure she was just worried about me, these deaths hit me so hard. I put up my black and tried to be normal again, however my highschool years, all four of them, play like Greek tragedy.

I had about three good months before the next death.

Another friend had gone swimming at the lake with a church group and drowned. I was still fourteen and this was another blow to the solar plexus. I didn't wear black for a month but I did wear a mourning band, which got me strange looks from a lot of people. ( 3)

Fifteen was a busy year.

Another one of my friends in a fit of rage over a boy beat another one to death with a baseball bat. I was starting to get numb or go crazy I don't know which. Then one of my friend's brother's died of cancer, and another friend committed suicide. (3)

Sixteen.

A friend died of anaphylactic shock, he'd just turned ninteen. I was overwhelmed and by now crying seemed obsolete. I started acting out, lying, sneaking out, starving myself. I didn't have the skills to deal with this. (1)

Seventeen was perhaps the hardest year for me to actually live through.

My grand mother had a stroke. She survived the stroke but never recovered, for me it was if she died that day even though she was still living. As we were dealing with that strain my aunt lost her battle with stomach cancer. She had been my favorite, my god mother, and again I couldn't go to the funeral.

Then the worst blow.

My father died. I remember that so clearly the inglorious ache of seeing my uncle who looked so much like my father coming out of my house and me running to him thinking that he was my father. I thought at that moment, "Daddy I had the most horrible dream." the he lifted his head and I knew without a doubt that I wasn't dreaming. I could tell this was my uncle and the stab of pain in my chest knocked me to my knees. Grief doesn't seem strong enough a word, then exactly one year almost to the day later my grandmother died. (3)

By this time I was a basket case.

I had not gone one year without a death in my life since I was fourteen years old and in most of those cases I had no closure. I buried ten people in my life over the course of four years and my senior year of highschool was a nightmare. I skipped school, I lied, I cheated, I told outrageous stories and generally got into as much trouble as I could screaming for some kind attention this overwhelming grief. This anguish in my soul that I did not have the words to express. It was crushing me, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think. I gave up on everything I wanted and fell into a depression so serious I considered taking my own life to escape from it.

It's here where other's would say that the Lord came into their lives and soothed their aching souls. That wasn't true for me. In my despair I turned my back utterly on the One to who would have understood my pain. Raised in the church and a faithful attendee I stopped going. I felt as if God had abandonned me. Left me to struggle through all of this death alone. From seventeen to thirty I didn't attend a church with any regularity. I did't trust God with my heart, because it was so badly crushed. Over the next few years more firends and family members died, I attended more funerals and sank further and further away from God into a darkness so black it seemed as if light could not pierce it.

Then a light did peirce that crushign darkness, or rather a two by four. I almost died. I should have died the fact that I am here at my computer writing this is a miracle and in that moment a sliver of light came back into my world. It has been a long slow journey out of the grief that almost swallowed me whole. A light bulb went off for me and fortunately it's still burning.

I know that "Jesus wept.", He felt and feels our pain, our grief and our agony. I was never ever alone in those moments when it seemed as if drawing my next breath would take more energy than I had. God didn't just carry me, He pushed and pulled and proded me. He gave me breath, and woke me up, He renewed my passions and comforted my soul. He gave me a child who needed a whole mother, not one who was as full of holes as swiss cheese. So I began to give it away, the pain and the hurt the distrust of a Lord who would give me so much to deal with.

I often say to people that I know the Lord doesn't give us more than we can handle, I just wish He didn't think so highly of ME!   It's good to laugh at yourself. 

If you are dealing with this kind of grief, I understand it and I know that other people don't.  Get into a support group if you can face it.  Don't isolate yourself.  Loss is never easy to deal with, but it can get easier if there are people who aren't afraid of your emotions who you can let loose with.  

If your children are facing this kind of trauma.  VALIDATE THEIR SORROW!!  The worst thing you can do to your child is to tell him or her that death happens.  Children and teenagers need to be able to vent their emotions.  Their anger, their joy and their grief.  If your child is not comfortable talking to you, get them someone with whom they can talk.  If your child acts out try to understand they don't have the words to tell you that their hearts are breaking and that they no longer live in the world they thought they did.  These experiences are so overwhelming for the young, don't ignore them.  There is a belief that children can over come anything; do you really want to be the parent who finds out your kid can't take it?  Don't take that chance be proactive.  Their lives may depend on it and certainly their spritual lives do. 

It is in the darkest times that we need the Lord the most and when he seems the farthest away.   Don't lose yourself or your children to grief.  In everything God has a plan, although I'll admit I don't know what His plan has been for me and this grief.  Perhaps it is the experience, to be able to tell someone else you CAN live though this anguish. 

I live each day with the ache of each of these losses, like a throb in my heart when I see pictures or look at the grand children my father never got to know.  However, it no longer consumes me and each day I continue to Live, through and with my grief.