Places from the Past

I spend a lot of time wondering how I should be acting these days. Should I be tearful and full of sighs every minute of the day? How could I not be, my son is dying? Yet, I feel myself slipping into my 'normal' personality more and more these days. At first, it was a relief to be able to smile again, but now I begin to wonder - do I smile too much? Have I forgotten already? am I just living in denial?

This past weekend, I went back to where I grew up. Driving to Savannah with my uncle, cousins and brother I was at first quiet, but by entering into a trivia game my old personality traits - sarcasm and an onslaught of random comments - quickly bubbled to the surface and stayed. Was it defensive, denial, or just the ingrained patterns of my personality? I don't know - and I don't know if I should fight it or give in.

It wasn't until I broke away by myself and went to an old high school haunt that I was able to cry for Sully again. It is an old chapel in Savannah that once, long ago must have been the main church itself, but multiple new buildings have left it quiet and forgotten on the back of the property with doors that are never locked. A friend found it in high school, and a group of us had a few pretty powerful prayer times there. I have always viewed it as one of the places I have felt closest to God in my life. I knew when I went to Savannah that I had to get back there - I found it the same as I left it ten years ago.

Speaking into the dark - I prayed that Sully would make me become a 'real' person. I have lived an easy life - pretty much free of any taste of suffering. With the news of Sully's condition I have already begun to enter into life in a different way. I used to run from uncomfortable situations - if people had any kind of struggles in their life - but somehow now it doesn't seem to really matter. Always I have been scared of saying the 'wrong' thing, but being here now, I see how much I really don't care when people say the wrong thing. The situations are so much bigger than any words - right or wrong - that I find I have far more grace for people in my current state than I have ever had in the past.

I suppose I will continue to be my 'old' self in large groups - work, church, groups of friends, and the brokeness of the chapel will be reserved for groups of one or none. I think that like Heidi said, Sully has already, without a single diaper or cry, changed our lives more than any of our children - I just wish it didn't hurt so much.