Tidal Wave

I know I have spoken of grief before, but for the first time, as I speak of it, the familiarity I thought that brought understanding has left me. I am in unchartered waters.

As it is a truth I am not unfamiliar with, a tenet of life that I have known well, I think the hardest part of grief is the way it morphs. Loss or the prospect of loss one day, the next anger, the next feeling as though grief has now become an appendage that is apart of you.

Some of the greatest trauma I have ever incurred in my life, I have spent the last years speaking of with ease. Off the cuff I have mentioned this emotional atrocity as though I were speaking of the weather. At times it was even spoken of it with the desire to justify the weight of pain I should be allowed to bear, even if I had yet to wade into the waters of that pain. I know that may not make sense, but the fact is, I never dealt with it. Instead, every once in a while I would point it out to someone, or more aptly myself, as though it were this strange anomaly to marvel at. Another link in the chain of what was a life to be survived. 

Tonight, that appendage, that anomaly became real. So real and so tangible and so deep and so scary and so big, it felt as though it had the power to drown me. These waters that I had stared at every once in a while, and analyzed from a distance became a tidal wave that swept me away, and I was powerless to it. 

And as the tidal wave of crashed, what had been a comfortable reality that I lived with at a distance, all of the sudden was so horribly apart of my present. And all that had accompanied it, that I had left in the safe place of deeply, solidly away from the chnscienceness of my heart, the ugliness of the side effects can no longer be ignored. 

Never more have I needed a Savior and never more have I been scared of His reality invading mine. More than ever grace is needed and never more has it been harder to receive. And the only thing I can ask, and the only thing that brings a moment of peace long enough to take me from panic and the wracking sobs that come in succession more rapidly than my longs can take is "Tell me I will be okay. Tell me at the end of this, I will be okay."  In the lieu of audible words, I hear the ticking clock, and for the moment, it is enough and the ticking lulls me to sleep. Tomorrow, tomorrow is enough.