Recently things have been good. I have not been overly sad. I mean, I miss Mari but I am doing good. I sit here in church again. I am glad we have started going to church on a regular basis. It is important for the two of us and our marriage. My hope is it only makes us stronger and helps us to get through the loss of Mari. I know through God anything can happen. I know some people might say, “How could you believe in a God who would do this?” My response is God knows more than I … [Read more...]
Singing…
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...]
The magic of love
December 14, 2010 Love. Love has its own special magic. When all else fails, you still have love. There are some people who have not been lucky enough to truly experience the love you receive from your life partner. I feel like I am one of the lucky ones. I met Keith when I was only 19 years old. Our first impression of one another was, let’s just say, not that great. So it wasn’t love at first sight. Personally, I have never experienced that but sometimes you just don’t need … [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...]
Marriage
What do you do when you see something falling apart and you can’t seem to do anything about it? Do you do nothing? Do you try to fix it? If you try to fix it, how long should you go before you give up or do you give up at all? When is enough “enough”? There are so many things in this life that you either give up on so easily or we “try” to fix it but when it just gets too hard or takes too long we just stop. We give up. This is how many marriages fall apart today because, to put it … [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...]
