I sit in this house… It’s just a house (though one I’m thankful for)… It’s not my house. My house is gone! It’s burnt up! WHY??? Why did I have to lose my home? Why is the place where two of my children were born now a pile of burnt wood and ashes? A pile of rubble waiting to be hauled away??
It’s not fair!
I sit here. My youngest children are all asleep. My dog is curled in the corner, settled in for the night. I expect my husband and the older girls home from work soon. Life goes on, just as it always did.
But it’s not the same. It never will be. I will always remember the smell, the fear, the initial indecision. I really wonder how I sleep at night now. I think I’m just so exhausted that sleep over powers me. Or maybe things turned out okay, so I can trust that they will turn out okay again.
It’s very overwhelming to think about your whole life gone… all the memories… all the pictures. If you’ve lived in your house for any length of time, or kept items as you moved from house to house, your memories are stimulated by what you see around you. I don’t have that in this house. It’s just a house. You could ask the owner about this carpet stain or that mark on the wall. She could tell you the stories. To me, they are just marks on the wall.
I guess I have the jammies Rayna wore as we escaped with our lives. Same with the clothes the other children were wearing. Every time I see Kristyn’s runners… she and I were the only ones with footwear… What I can’t do is look at a blanket and say, “this was Matty’s when he was born” or “Wyatt, you used to wear this shirt when you were Matty’s size.” I can’t say, “Look at this book, Kristyn, it says your first word was cat.” Invariably, Marrissa wants to know what her first word was. I can’t remember and I can’t go look it up! I can’t tell her… I can’t tell her! I can’t tell Marrissa that she lost her first tooth on this day or that, because my calendar where I taped each tooth and made a note over the years, is gone! It’s like a piece of their childhood is just gone, wiped away!
I guess the “what ifs” are hitting me tonight. The terror of what could have been, if this or that had been different. What if I’d stopped to grab one more thing or left the children to re-enter the building… What if more of the children had been sleeping… What if… What if, I hadn’t done what I did do, and there had been loss of life…
The grief of losing your home and your belongings is very different that the grief of losing a child. It’s much less intense, but that’s the only thing I can compare. I am not attached to things. I never have been. A thing is just a thing, but to lose ALL THOSE THINGS at once, to have to start over from scratch, to have to repurchase a whole household. It’s just overwhelming!
Tonight, I can’t even look forward to a new house… I just want my old one back!
Striving to learn and live God's purposes,
