Widow life. Grief life. Loss life. 

These words are hard to place in the same sentence. Living a life with loss threaded through each breath takes intentional effort to process. Some days my grief kindly takes a back seat and I live and breathe and move in new life and the greatness of what the Lord has done. Other days, grief knocks down my door just as my eyes begin to open. The familiar knot takes residence in my gut and I breathelssly remember that he is gone. 

I often find myself living in a chasm of timelessness where I don’t know the difference between 2012 and 2022. 

October 30th marks ten years since Benji went into the hospital for the first time. I remember he was in and out of doctor's appointments with pain in his abdomen. He had suffered from Crohns Disease since he was 19 but something was different. The doctor thought he may have a hernia. The boys and I often met him for lunch on his break.  One sunny, fall day we sat at a burger shop on his lunch break discussing the other possibilities and praying for answers. The innocence of the boys minds focused only on who had the biggest fry and if they could get refills of lemonade. We pulled apart the details, deathly afraid of what may happen. 

Days later, the day before halloween the pain was too much to bear and we made our trek to the University of Utah emergency room. After a scan the doctor shuffled into the curtain lined room and described that Benji’s abdomen was filled with pockets of infection. The words bounced off of our ears as we stared blankly at the doctor in confusion. They placed drains throughout his abdomen to minimize the fluid and a day later we were sent home. We were sent home confused and wrapped in uncertainty. We didn’t understand where they came from and we didn’t understand if they would ever go away. Five short weeks later we were back in the hospital only this time it was worse.

This devastating event was only the beginning of the nightmare. I listened to “Need  you Now.” by Plumb in the car as I drove back and forth between the hospital and the normalcy of our life only a few minutes away….

Now here I sit a decade later. Processing these events but with a vast stretch of time and experience between then and now. As a professional griever I can see past the boundaries of time into the eternal life that God has for us on the other side. Time only limits humans. The loss has given me a front row seat to the vastness of God and His loving hand on all that we experience. 

I am thankful that Benji is beyond this existence and is relishing in perfection. However, I am still here on earth. Left to manage my grief and figure out where to set it day by day. I anticipate a difficult year ahead. 

When Benji died, I could not see past the perfectly manicured lawns surrounding his grave. I urged my heavy feet to move past the pain and today I have a decade of grief behind me, a perfect vision of what God has done. 

I yearned for this perspective ten years ago facedown on the cold, lifeless headstone.

I will remember the goodness that has come from this loss. I will try to wrap my head around why I have this new goodness but I could have had the goodness of his healing and raising my boys with him. I may never know but I trust in the one who does! 

Thank you Jesus for Benji. Thank you Jesus for what I gained from this loss and I will choose to live in your never ending goodness every day of the decade marking year.