If you didn’t catch part 1 or part 2 of Rickelle’s interview this week, I encourage you to go back and read her tender story of loss and grief and waking up.
When Rickelle first sent me her responses, I couldn’t make it through her story about Lake in one sitting. I had to put it down and come back to it a couple of times. Because it just pierced me. Not only because I love Rickelle, but because I am a parent, too.
As a parent, this is the deep fear lurking around us, hovering. The kind of fear we can’t talk about because it is so grizzly. The fear that your child would be taken from you.
“There really are still no words for the magnitude of that heartbreak,” Rickelle wrote.
That sentence says it all and has stayed with me since I first read it. And yet, throughout Rickelle’s writing, you can see the smallest sliver of hope . . . that we can survive unthinkable grief, that we can believe again, breathe again, get up and face the day again.
In Rickelle’s story, I see a secret. The secret that we all need to be let in on. We must get up and face today . . . taking it step by step, fighting for our hearts, learning to breathe again, SHOWING UP. And then waking up and doing it all over again tomorrow. Even if it means wearing a hoody and listening to reggae, wielding a power tool. Rickelle participated in life even when life was unthinkable.
“The only way across is through,” she wrote. And that is gospel truth. Worthy of taping-to-the-mirror status, if you ask me.
Am I participating in my own life? Showing up in the best way I can today? Living “through” the mess instead of trying to escape it?
Thank you, Rickelle, for opening your heart in the most personal way and sending your story to us with honesty and hope. Please be sure to tell Rickelle—through your comments—how much her words have meant to you. She is so very brave!
May we all be brave enough to wake up . . . write “I believe” on our palms . . . and face the day . . . as Rickelle and Caleb’s story so poignantly invites us to do . . .
Believing,
Leeana
