Broken Strings

"All the strings inside him broke," is how author John Green describes  death through the voice of his character, Margo Roth Spiegelman, in Paper Towns.

I found Green's comparison to be quite striking actually, but I thought it to be more befitting when applied to the broken-hearted rather than those who are already gone. 

If you, like me, believe in eternal life, you know that the suffering is greater on the earth-end than it is for those who have found Christ. 

For those who must go on everyday without someone we have loved and lost, it is a constant pulling and detaching of strings....

......wanting to hug that person who was always there with the warm, tender hug that seemed to fix anything, wanting to call them on the phone to chat, or go shop together, or ask for advice about a situation that no one but that person would understand, or just to sit on the couch and be close to them because they are one of the best things in your life.....

Each of these things becomes a pulled and broken string when your thoughts automatically reach out in anticipation of them.  When you realize that you will never be able to do those things in your whole life again..... it does feel like you are being ripped apart inside. 

You feel like you are an instrument that is malfunctioning  in places  no one can see. You try to keep working and playing and just hope that no one will notice that you are broken and can't make the same music anymore. What else can you do? An instrument or machine does not have another function. People, likewise, are ultimately left with the only options of A. just-keep-on-going or B. give-up-and-die.

In the car this morning, I was thinking about the different ways I have reacted to the pain of my mom's death over the past few months. 
The first thing was screaming, just screaming and crying.
Then the crying, several times a day, almost on the hour.
The crying still happens a lot. The screaming happens less. When I scream I do it in the car. I try to cry in private. I couldn't control that at all before.

Now there is always this deadweight in my stomach, a panicked feeling, and a constant sensation that my heart is being pulled to pieces. This is why I liked the strings analogy. That's what it feels like: what once held you together is being pulled apart, and you are snapping as all the strings inside you are pulled to an extreme tension point until they inevitably break.

Grief is so weird, because everyone seems to think it gets better over time, but  it has hurt more the longer I go without her. The more time passes, the more I miss her as I really start to realize that she won't be there when Dane and I have kids, she won't see this or that happen, we won't take those family trips together. When I run into people at the grocery store that I haven't seen in awhile, I run away because I don't want to have to explain it.

Maybe I seem better, because the crying and screaming are more under control.

But here's what I am thinking:


The tears and external reactions were events outside of my body, physical, observable responses to something horrible. They had not become part of me yet, so my body rejected them...regurgitating the sadness it was forced to swallow.
Now "myself" has given up. I have been saturated by a sorrow that is inside now, doing damage to the strings and breaking many of them totally. The broken aspect of the strings is as much a part of me as the strings themselves.

Before, the pain was something I was experiencing from the outside in. Now it is inside, and it does its damage there, leaving its mark on who I am. It is not a damage that could be confined to an experience, it is a damage that is identity-defining.

So what do we do, us damaged instrument people who try to keep trying to make music?

I am not there yet, but my mind says this: 

Acknowledge that we have suffered damage, and will never be the quite the same. I think we can also hope that our Maker will give us some new strings one day.