Oh, how I love to hear her name. Cindy Hope.....

Have you, too, experienced people avoiding mentioning your child's name? Avoiding talking about your child's death, or even acknowledging his life? Does your grief make them feel uncomfortable? Do friends avoid you now? Isn't that the deepest wound to receive from those you thought you could count on to "be there" for you?

Two years and six months now my Cindy has been gone. I have made it a point that people will know her name and know her. They will remember her name and her story and become more aware. Doing so, in the beginning, probably kept me alive that first month, as I built a website around her and her story. Making sure she had a marker was a part of that, too. I couldn't let her name not be on her grave. I had to let people know that she lived, she was missed, that she was a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend and was LOVED was just too important. She deserved that.

In this world of instant everything, people expect that we, who have lost a child, should "get over it" on their time schedule. Companies will give us three days funeral leave, then expect us to come back and "perform", as usual. But grief has NO time limits. You can't make a schedule for it. You either go through the process of healing or you push it back to only have to deal with it later. I have a friend who wrote a poem about her 15 year old daughter, which starts out "I lost my loved one today". It goes on to say how people ask one another after awhile, "she hasn't gotten over it YET?". It ends with her statement that three years later, she still feels that "I lost my loved one...TODAY".

I have made some progress, though maybe small. I feel that "celebrating" her date of death lets her killer still have power over me. The first two years was awful on that date. I have decided now not to give that date so much importance. Her birthday is most important. That was such a happy date. Mothers Day will be important. We always had such a great time on Mother's Day each year. That she lived, was my companion and friend so much, so long...that she bore four beautiful children cannot be wiped out with one act of a monster, a madman, who made that date such a black day for us.

Sure we had plenty of bad times. But I am not dwelling on those, either. Not ignoring them, because they taught me much. The bad times taught all of us something, actually. And that was not her; she had a disease. But I am becoming even more grateful for the good times, and can even think of them and smile a bit. Yes, we were robbed of more. She was robbed of more. But people will remember Cindy. She won't have died in vain.

I think the connection between mother and child is never broken, not even by mere "death". My grandson would tell me that he "heard" his mother call him or say something to him, and I would only hug him, not really validate his feelings of hearing her voice. After all, I hadn't heard it. But did that make it any less "real"? Then a couple of months ago, he and I were standing in Walmart with a basket full of stuff I didn't need, had not gone in there to buy, but here it all was. All of a sudden I heard Cindy...with that lilt in her voice when she was amused. She said, "Put all that stuff BACK, you Walmart junkie, you!" I jumped back, looked around. Then I started laughing, thinking of how, whenever I was "missing", she would call me on my cellphone and say those very words. When I told my grandson what had happened, I asked if he had heard anything...he looked at me with such a knowing look, such amusement, and said "See?....." I had to chuckle again. It still brings me warm feelings to think of that moment.

Another song for our kiddos.
Angels In Heaven