January 2 I sit here in church service. Right away they start by singing. The tears start to well up and I have to leave. I still have a hard time just being able to sing in church. It is so hard for me. Somehow it just makes me miss Mari all the more. She would always love the singing portion of church service. She would sing in her own special way. She would sometimes flap her arms in excitement. She truly loved the singing. I think I just truly miss that with her not here … [Read more...]
Justin Bieber
December 22 Today ended up starting as a good day. I felt good about it. I went to work like I normally do. I was putting away my freight and I had these Justin Bieber backpacks I was putting out. As I am putting them out I start to think of my dearest friend Shelly’s daughter Lexi. Shelly tells me how much Lexi loves Justin Bieber. Then I got to thinking about how Mari would be the same age as Lexi. Not that Mari would have ever gotten into Just Bieber or anything. It’s just the … [Read more...]
Missing the imporant moments
December 13, 2010 I am driving in my car this morning and the roads are kind of nasty from the snow we got yesterday. I finally plug in my iPhone so I can listen to my iPod. Last night on the way home from work I decided to play Steven Curtis Chapman’s CD “Beauty Will Rise.” This CD was written and created after the tragic death of his youngest daughter Maria. Maria passed away on May 21, 2008, only a little less than 2 months before Mari did. His CD is one of the ways he dealt with … [Read more...]
Missing her…
December 6, 2010 Missing Mari, what does that really mean anyway? It means you think about her. For me it means all the time. I don’t know if I’ve had a day without thinking about her at least once. Of course as we get closer to her 11th birthday, it seems more and more often. Thinking about her leads to missing her. Missing her leads to the ache I feel in my heart. In the end, this leads to wishing she was here. Everyone says she is in a better place. Even Keith thinks this as … [Read more...]
“Out of these ashes beauty will rise”
Steven Curtis Chapman has a song that talks about “Out of these ashes beauty will rise.” The ashes represent the tragedy his family endured the day their daughter Maria died. The “beauty [that] will rise” is representative of God’s grace and love that even though something as terrible as losing a child, God is still there through it all. He is seeing you through. I can say I do love this song and the hope it brings. However, my life doesn’t seem to have found the Beauty of it all. I … [Read more...]
Harder to write these days…
These days it seems harder to write yet I miss Mari more and more. I have been having a really hard time as of late just really, desperately missing her wishing so badly that she was still here. Yet at the same time, if she was, I would be dreading the years to come as puberty would be approaching. To be a parent of a child with autism, it is like no other. A child with special needs is so different than parenting a child without. Your life is all consuming around this child. She was all … [Read more...]
Unchoices
When life gets hard, what should you do? Everyone is different and everyone handles their problems in different ways. For the most part, our lives involve different paths and the choices we make to get there. Some choices come by easily and others are difficult to almost impossible to have to make. And then there are the things that happen in our lives that can be called the unchoices. So what exactly is an unchoice you might be asking? Well, this is when something either happens to you … [Read more...]
The struggles of life…
The struggles of life, there always seem to be a never ending supply of them. Some of them seem simple and easy to overcome. Some seem out of the ordinary but we learn to deal with them anyway. Then some are simply unbearable and hard to imagine what the light at the end of the tunnel even looks like. That last one is the one that can describe, or at least try to, as to what it’s like for a parent to have lost a child. When it happens, the second it happens, there is no light. It feels … [Read more...]
A Day in the Life of a Grieving Mommy
She is just a simple mom who’s world was turned upside down in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Her world already had many obstacles and hardships to overcome. Some people said she was brave. Yet others would said how strong or patient she was. She could not imagine her world getting any harder than it already was. Yet God had different plans for her life. Plans she never thought possible. Plans that somehow seem cruel and how could God do this to anyone let alone this simple … [Read more...]
Tangible Things
The only thing tangible left are pictures (and a couple of videos) taken of Mari from the time she was born until the day she died (literally). We have them of her while she was in the hospital when she was first born and we have them of her in the hospital when she was dying. It’s almost like it represents the cycle of life everyone goes through. We all are born and we all must die someday when our time is up on this earth. But with Mari, her time just seemed so short. It seems like that … [Read more...]
