All posts filed under: Writing

On Death

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I have been talking a lot about death this week. And to me, that is natural now. I do not talk about death in a morbid and obsessive way, as some might think. Death pops up in my conversations. In my blog posts. On my Facebook. And since my son is dead, I do not mind talking about the subject. It is my way of keeping my son alive, paradoxical as it may sound. This week, Lexi, another beautiful bereaved mummy, agreed to publish Georgie’s story on her baby loss blog. Of course, death was part of the story, as it is part of every baby loss story on her website. This week, I had lunch with an amazing woman who had spent some of her youth nursing abandoned Romanian AIDS babies not back to health, as she would have wished but onto death. And of course, we talked about pain and death and the great privilege of looking after precious souls so close to their passing into eternity hour and the love we feel …

How Heaven will be like…

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Thoughts of Heaven have been filling my head lately. Following Georgie’s death, I deconstructed everything that I was told to believe in. Slowly, slowly, a new perception and world view have emerged. I have reconstructed the world through the prism of our loss. The world needs to make sense to me as it stands now, a world where loss and pain are very real. There is a word we have in Romanian, “dor”. A word very hard to translate. It is more than missing. It is more than yearning for someone. It is that deep, deep longing in one’s heart that can never be satisfied once someone you love passes away. I miss my son. I yearn for his presence. I long to be with him. My being is at times struck down, literally, with the burden of loss. So Heaven as it was portrayed to me in church, as I was growing up, does not make sense anymore. We were created unique and savagely independent and in need of expression. So you know what …

“Dear Parent…”

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“Dear parent of a gravely ill child, Or a perfectly healthy little one. This letter is for you. And you. You worry about their fate. You want the best for them, of course you do. Your love is deep and wide and reached to the very heart of God. If only love was enough… You trust your God to protect them out of harm’s way. No matter what your God is. Whether it is Allah or Buddha or Yahveh. Or karma. Or the Virgin Mary. Or Mother Earth. We all need to trust in something bigger than ourselves. I trust in God. I trusted in God with my baby boy. I am sure parents of any denomination, faith, affiliation, belief or lack of will tell you all the same thing: they trusted too. They trusted in the universe to do what our most innate instinct tells us it is the right thing. The innocent, the pure, the beautiful. The vulnerable. They certainly will be spared the pain. They will certainly be protected from the worst. …

Seven months on as a bereaved parent

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It has been seven months since Georgie died. Seven long and extremely taxing months. Taxing on our emotions, our mental health, our relationships, our bodies and souls. Looking back, here are the ten things I have learned from the past seven months: 1. Grief is like a sneaky thief, it shows up uninvited and robs you of any remnant of joy and hope. There are no rules in the grieving game, grief doesn’t stick to any rules. It strikes whenever it pleases and the pain can last for weeks and weeks. 2. Grief affects EVERY aspect of your life. There is no area that has been left untouched by grief. My body has been affected, I have put on weight because to me, food is a comfort now. My mind has been severely affected, I have become very forgetful and I have trouble focusing on and staying on plan. My sleep patterns have been altered as well, there is hardly any night I don’t wake up to think and process what has happened to my …

Reality check

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We have been living a lie, as a community of “believers.” We have become lazy in challenging the beliefs that are being shoved into us. We have trusted trends of Christianity and have put miles between us and the Truth. If we go back in history, church didn’t start from the need of a social club. From the need to “have a group to identify with.” To meet up once or twice a week and be nice to each other over a cup of tea and a lukewarm sermon. Church started out of pain. Pain of Jesus on the cross. Pain of children losing their families to persecution and lions. Pain of losing social status over following Jesus. Pain was always in the plan. This has been my revelation this weekend. Only the church grew out of pain. At some point, it actually started causing pain. Crusades and such. It never stopped after that. It took different shapes and it was called different names. And then, pain and death become associated with punishment, since it …