So close and yet so far.

This isn't the post that I sat down to write. I was going to tell you about my frustrations over Peyton's grave. I was going to tell you how guilty I feel that her spot has gone neglected these last few months. How I lie up at night sometimes, thinking about it.

I tried to go up there to fix it up yesterday, but I had two fussy babies on my hands and by the time I got there it was too buggy to get out of the car.

I was going to talk about how it makes me feel to think of Peyton looking down from Heaven and watching me leave the cemetery without even exiting the car because circumstances didn't allow for it. How I was so close to her grave, yet a world away from her (hence the title of this post) that it hurt my heart and I worry she might feel as though she has somehow been replaced.

I wish that I could get the message to her that replacing her - our first child - our brave little warrior - is impossible.

That is what I was going to write about, but as I started writing this is what came out instead.

Yesterday I ran into G, an elderly man that I have come to know during my visits to Peyton's hill. I drove into the cemetery and when our eyes connected, I could see a familiar sadness in his. We exchanged hellos and G proceeded to tell me how down in the dumps he has been feeling lately which came as no surprise since every conversation we have ever had has involved G telling me that he is feeling down in the dumps. I've almost come to expect it. 

G doesn't seem to want or to permit even the smallest bits of joy to creep into his life and to see him on one of his visits feels more like bearing witness to an act of penance as he leans for three hours a day, day in and day out regardless of the elements, against the cold stillness of his wife's stone. There is nothing cathartic or healing for him in his routine. 

The sad truth is that G has given up. He had already given up by the time I first met him, and it is something that has always struck me about him. Even during my darkest days on the hill I found it difficult to understand the level to which G had let go of allowing himself to find any measure of joy in what life he has left. Don't get me wrong. There were days, months, that first year really where I found little joy or humor in anything, but if a smile crept through, or a laugh, I welcomed the change. G does not and this has always struck me as especially ironic as I would peer into the young face in Peyton's picture at her grave, and note that while my daughter was allotted so few days on this earth, G has wasted so many.

He is in good health. He is living independently despite his age. He has family and friends (us included) who frequently invite him to dinner, or over for holidays, but he declines all invitations because to accept one might mean accepting happiness, and G sees this somehow as a betrayal to his lost love. 

I see G's story as a cautionary tale for all of us. It demonstrates what can happen when we, as the grieving, fall into a pattern of belief that to love those we have lost is dependent upon punishing ourselves.

Finding it difficult to find joy or to even want to find joy is a normal reaction to loss. There were days in my grief, many days, when I would let the phone go unanswered. Days when I thought the sky was black like pavement, because I didn't look up to see the sun. Days where I believed my smile might be lost forever... but not every day. Not every minute of every day.

I think it is important to remember that regardless of what stage you are at in your grief, if there are times when the sun pokes through the clouds and you feel joy, even if that joy lasts only the briefest of moments before another reminder of all that you have lost,  it is okay to embrace it. Punishing ourselves to the point of never experiencing joy benefits no one.

Not our families.
Not our friends.
Not the loved ones we have lost. 

G's wife died more than two years before Peyton - which means that this pattern, this slow march towards death, this refusal to enjoy one single moment of life, has gone on for nearly five years.

Five years where new connections could have been made, lessons could have been learned, experiences could have been had.
Five years where even if the overwhelming majority of his time had been spent grieving, G may have felt his suffering ease for a few brief moments here or there.
Five years of moments that would never and could never have replaced his wife or cheapened his love and commitment to her.
Five years of a death sentence that G could have spent living.

When I look at G leaning against his wife's stone, I see so much tragedy in the fact that with her death, so died his willingness to ever again allow himself to live.

Loving those we have lost should not carry with it this kind of a death sentence.
Love is not a punishment.

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This Sunday is International Babylost Mother's Day. I am wishing for you all a day of beauty, peace, and if possible - joy.

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Exhale Magazine is hosting its first ever visual arts contest with the theme SEEING WITHIN. There are great prizes available. The deadline to enter is this Sunday. Check out the details here.