The Portal: Portal-ity Thoughts

Hey, it's been a minute. I've had a lot of thoughts on Hope since we started a new Bible study  by Jennifer Rothschild entitled   Heaven .  I highly recommend it for everyone.  It's a deep dive into a lot of questions about heaven, what it'll be like, what we will be like, misconceptions and a whole lot of truth. It gives hope.   Hope:  Certainty about the future because God is faithful.   In Hebrew:  a cord, something you're tied to; expectation with tension but security.   In Greek:  confident anticipation, not uncertainty.     In layman's terms: I expect this to happen because God said it would.   Why it matters:   Hope keeps faith from collapsing under grief , it gives endurance when answers don't come, and it fixes your eyes forward without ignoring reality.  (Thanks, ChatGPT) When you believe in Jesus, you can be confident in this hope. This promise God makes to us that upon our death, we will be with Him i...

I wrote this post a few months ago thinking I would submit it.  I didn't.  Today I found it, read it, started tweaking it, and now I'm not so sure I should post it at all.  Hopefully, it will speak to someone who has lost a child or was disappointed by life. John died overnight.  One moment we were a mostly happy family, and the next morning he was dead.  He was 24 years old, tall, dark and handsome.  He was funny and outgoing, and he genuinely cared about people, He was also an addict.  I hate that term, but I’ll use it here, so you understand.  I would normally refer to it as substance use disorder, or that he died from fentanyl poisoning, but the fact remained that John was very addicted to opioids.  Which turned into a heroin addiction and then to fentanyl poisoning.  The drug of the season.  The mass murderer of our children.   He was in the Army, 3,250 miles away from home, and was ...

 Dear John, I've wanted to let these words out for a while now, they've been burning inside my head, and at 1:38 a.m., they need to be set free.  I haven't been sleeping well.  Obviously.  The audible books and medication can't keep out the thoughts lately, and it seems that the window of 2:00 - 5:00 a.m. has become my nemesis.  I think the culmination of triggers lately has pushed my brain into a frenzied state and it's going wild at night.  The sadness, guilt, and frustration are at their peak in the wee hours and I am subject to their mercy. The current trigger, in addition to Grandpa's death, was being told I was "handling it well".  Handling the death of my father WELL??  Indeed, how does one handle death well?  Do you have any idea what that day was like?  Read on. I am assuming what was meant was I am handling it with a startling lack of emotion.  If they only knew.  Yes, outwardly I am going through the motions and ever...

Dear John, 1599 days have passed since we lost you.  I miss you.  I can't put into words how much I miss you.  It's a ripping, a tearing, a knife through the heart kind of missing you.  I dreamt about you last night.  Somehow, a bag of your things showed up and there were two shirts in the bag that smelled like you, still.  I gave one to Dad and told him to smell it.  I was busy pressing my face into the other one.  I might even miss your smelly feet . . . I was holding your nephew over the weekend, and I was looking deep into his eyes.  Your sister and I have been wondering if he's going to have his Daddy's brown eyes, or have hazel eyes like you did. On Sunday, as I held him, they were mostly green.  And his eye lashes - wow.  I asked him if I could have them and he said "yes, Grandma".  As we sat there and I tickled his baby flesh, I was so reminded of you.  I opened my mouth to tell him that Grandma used to have a litt...

Dear John, Year 4. November 4. I miss you. That part doesn't change with days or months or years.  It's still a horrific hole in my heart.  I want to preface this post by saying these are my thoughts, what's been on my mind.  I'm not looking to argue or debate, I'm just sharing how I feel . . . The thoughts in my head have finally gotten to the place where they are keeping me up at night, and I miss sleeping. If I've been good at anything, it's sleeping. So this morning, I'm up before the sun to get these words out of my head, at least for a while. I always go back and read the "anniversary" posts so I remember what those years looked like. Year One:  Devastation.  Court. Utter sadness and disbelief.  Trying to understand and learn about addiction - Substance Use Disorder.  I shared your story hoping to educate others.  Well, the war on opioids is still raging, and it's worse. CoVid had not helped. The isolation has not helped. The dr...

An article I wrote for Her View From Home To the Grieving Mother: You Did Everything You Could Dear Mama  – I understand how hard this is for you, as much as one bereaved mother can relate to another. I know your walls are up and your heart is broken.  You’re doing your best to get through each day when you’d really just like to just lay down on their grave or crawl into the casket and die too.  The pain is unbelievable, unbearable, beyond description. This type of loss is a little different. You’ve lost a child, but you’ve lost him or her to a darkness that’s spreading across our land at an alarming rate. It’s consuming our children.  It’s a war.  An epidemic.  A plague. You’re living part of a horrible history in our country and frankly, you cannot believe this is your life.  You’ve asked why a thousand times.  You’ve gone over every detail trying to figure out if you coul...

John - JRTC at FT Polk Words and more words.  I can't tell you how many posts I've written lately and haven't published, or I deleted them altogether.   I submitted a couple to grief sites, just because I'm drowning in them. Usually writing helps me process, but life has been unusually dark lately and nothing that's coming off the keyboard feels quite right.   Don't worry, I didn't send in the super sarcastic ones, with titles such as:  Leper, Snarky Grief, and I Wish I Couldn't Imagine, they are still in the draft file. They are TMI and word vomit.  I read one to my husband the other day -  he cautioned me not to share it.  😳There are too many words and at the same time not enough words.  Not enough of the right words.  No words to take the pain of losing John away. I found this picture of him in his iCloud.  Unfortunately, when the police released his phone, it wouldn't work anymore.  I had gone through it previously, ...