Great book for dealing with the loss of a child

My friend, Kim, came by this morning and went to the cemetery with me. It's still hard to go, but I still feel like I need to. Greg and I have been talking more about his grave marker and I checked out a couple of places here today, but they didn't have what we were looking for. I put in an email to one of the companies I listed in an earlier post (one that does custom work), but I haven't heard from them yet. Maybe I'll be able to talk to them about what we want without crying.

I sat down this evening and read the book Greg read yesterday. It's called, " Tracks of a Fellow Struggler - Living and Growing through Grief" and was written by John R. Claypool. He's a pastor who lost his 10 year-old daughter to leukemia and it's a collection of some sermons he did while going through the different stages - diagnosis and treatment, remission, recurrence, and death. It was a great book and helped both of us out a lot. Thanks, Todd. I would definitely recommend it to anyone going through this. I've read different books on grief, but this is by far my favorite. Basically, it let me know that it's okay to wonder why and to not understand. He did the same thing. By the end of the book, his last sermon is about how life is a gift. We did nothing to deserve it - we did nothing to get the gift of our children, either. We should enjoy each day. Here's an excerpt from a sermon that's toward the end of the book.

"Two things that radically altered Job's situation emerged out of this encounter, and they proved to be the catalyst that enabled Job to move through his grief back to wholeness. One was a new understanding of the past, and the other was a fresh vision of the future. Let us look at them both.
The first thing God did was to call into question the "justice-injustice" approach to the mystery of life. God began by asking Job where he had been when the whole drama of creation had begun. What had he done to create his own life, or to call the universe into being, or to make possible the existence of his possessions or his children or his health? In other words, God was reminding Job that the things he had become so indignant about losing actually did not belong to him in the first place. They were gifts - gifts beyond his deserving, graciously given him by Another, and thus not to be possessed or held onto as if they were his. To be angry because a gift ahas been taken away is to miss the whole point of life. That we ever have the things we cherish is more than we deserve. Gratitude and humility rather than resentment should characterize our handling of the objects of life. This important lesson is one all of us need to learn...."

I liked that he was honest throughout the book in his thoughts and in his sermons. I won't go into any more detail, but I think it's a great book for anyone to read. I really liked how he discussed the questioning of why.

I went to the bedroom to read the book so I could have a little quiet. Chloe came back to join me with her babies. Quiet isn't in her personality. She brought me her babies to watch and told me they had "pwoblems wis deir heawts," but they would be fine and she would be just across the street if I needed her. What an imagination - she keeps us on our toes. They are all such blessings.

Hope you all have a great weekend. Love ya, jc